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Glitch in Retro CD1 mastering of Ceremony?

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5 posts

8 Sep 2004, 18:33

Not sure if this has been discussed here before but I thought I'd just chuck it in anyway.

I noticed whilst listening to Ceremony on my iPod the other night that the Retro CD1 (the MP3 source) seems to have a dodgy mastering of that particular track on it. At about 1:53 - 1:56 just after Barney's vocal has finished and Hooky's bass is about to restart one of the snare hits "disappears" under a murky sound! :eek: All my MP3s are Lame encoded with Exact Audio Copy so it was unlikely the compression was to blame.

Later I checked the Retro CD1 on my hifi (slow day) and the murky sound was there alright, so I then checked it against my copy of International that naturally would've been remastered around about the same time as Retro. The International version is clear as a whistle and the snare hits plus overall sound is perfect. Did the Retro mastering guy take his eye of the ball briefly? :confused2: Seems a bad error to make for such a "definitive" boxset that New Order fans will often source for the best masterings of their favourite tracks for years to come?

Ally.

8 Sep 2004, 23:55

Good find there! My MP3-ripped copy (off the CDs) has this as well. This is almost like one of the tracks off the multitrack master got zero'ed for a bit...since it's apparently affects only the cymbals.

Ally (or anyone else), can you rip both the Int'l version of Ceremony and the Retro one, and compare the waveforms (I don't have Int'l) using EAC's Tools | Compare WAV's...

Of course, all of this begs why they put the re-recorded version on Retro instead of the original version which still has never been officially mastered to CD.

And don't even attempt to listen to Disc 4 if you're at all picky about how some of the live tracks were edited. This is one time I think Barney was right...they should have just used one gig, even if would have been Reading '93 or something else everybody has...though the choices were very interesting, with my favorite being the Elegia Glastonbury audience tape version (maybe the BBC didn't tape the first track?) The worst travesty is the loss of Hooky's outro solo to Fine Time...and that whoever picked the lot must've been a drunk Scot.

--Sam

9 Sep 2004, 00:04

I thought the glitch in Retro's Ceremony was obvious?! They used that god-awful 'Gillian' version instead of the original 3-piece offering.

What were they thinking?!!!! :nonono:

9 Sep 2004, 00:47

I seem to remember a snare going west on all versions of it, including the original vinyl copies. I always preferred the 3-piece version.

9 Sep 2004, 01:41

Yeah, 'Ceremony' did sound dodgy. Something odd about the left-right balance during the whole thing, I recall. Old master tapes, possibly. It's a bit like 'Blue Monday': it's probably so old, and has been resurrected from the masters so many times that the quality has degraded. You only have to listen to 'Blue Monday' on 'International' and 'Blue Monday 95' (with the first beat missing, dammit!) to hear how poor the quality has become.

Have a listen to 'Confusion' on 'Retro' also: compared to my Technics playing the original vinyl, there's something "squelchy" about the snare drum hits and EQ on one side - possibly another old master? Who knows for sure.

Andy