The many Police CD issues

[Andrew T.]

I would like to say that I have been a fan of the Police for quite a while. I've been thinking that, aside from the excellent Message in a Box set and the recent, suspiciously non-hybrid SACD issues, there have been several releases over the years of their catalog on compact disc:

• The original CD issues from the '80s.
• The presumably remastered CDs that bear a 1995 date and the same catalog numbers as the original issues.
• The current "remastered" CDs, released this year in flimsy Digipaks.

So, does anyone have suggestions as to how the many Police CD issues compare in sound quality? Packaging? Are the newest remasters overly compressed? Which is the best route to take if I want to supplant a beat-up copy of SP-4792 (Reggatta de Blanc) with something digital?

 

[daveK]

The only recently remastered title I've heard is "Synchronicity". I honestly didn't think they did such a bang up job. Most new remasters have a louder playback level than it has. I wasn't blown away.

 

[Rudy]

Same here--from what I've heard others say, the most recent remasters aren't all that great. Typical brick-wall compression being the worst culprit. The best sounding CDs to my ears were the Message In The Box versions. I had an original pressing of Synchronicity but IMHO it was mastered at too low of a level. On a fade out like "Tea In The Sahara", you could hear the song fade into distortion.

However, the SACD versions are the best I've heard on disc so far! It's not like there is this huge improvement in sound...it just sounds very smooth and analog-like, the closest I remember to what my LPs sounded like. I had a Nautilus-pressed dbx-encoded version of Zenyatta, and while dbx has other problems, this SACD sounds amazingly like the dbx-encoded disc. It just sounds like good old fashioned analog tape. In comparison to the box set, the box seems to have a very slight hard edge (glare, maybe?) to the high frequencies that's hard to describe.

Normally I wouldn't want to buy an SACD unless it were a hybrid, but since I already had the box set, and had heard the CD layer of the hybrid SACDs weren't all that good, I got these discs. Haven't regretted it yet, and I didn't pay more than $14.99 for any of them. Definitely the best sounding versions on disc, the closest to the LPs I've ever heard.