Anyone in the UK bought the Remasters yet?
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johnny james wrote: One thing everyone seems to have forgotten is that the main albums themselves sound great and have no glitches/clicks etc, in other words are in fact remastered and largely improved.
All this moaning is purely about the track selection and sound quality of the extra bonus tracks (State Of The Nation's appearance on Brotherhood excepted).
Just redressing the balance a little.
Fair point.
I think most of the gripes is come from the sheer cheapness of the finished product(s). There doesn't appear to have been any quality control or care put into them; just about everything could have been so much better from the redundant sleevenotes to the now infamous bonus discs. It's not unfair if we're going to fork out the best part of £100 for all five reissues to ask that a quality product is delivered.
I've said it before and I'll say it again.. if you look at Hooky's One True Passion V2.0 reissue and regardless of whether you like Revenge or not; that was the way things should've been done for New Order's back catalogue. But the opportunity has passed and the chance is gone. It's a crying shame James Nice and LTM were not involved.
The only flipside for me is the digipaks look quite smart...
If this has been answered, I've missed it:
Are the sleeves the same?
What was that new Brotherhood art?
Was Saville involved in any redesign?
The sleeves look "sharpened" which can be done in any Photoshop-esque package quite easily but they don't look bad. Saville is credited on the booklet along with Martin Orpen (?) and Howard Wakefield I think.
Regardless of the audio, I quite like the new Brotherhood sleeve 
johnny james wrote: One thing everyone seems to have forgotten is that the main albums themselves sound great and have no glitches/clicks etc, in other words are in fact remastered and largely improved.
All this moaning is purely about the track selection and sound quality of the extra bonus tracks (State Of The Nation's appearance on Brotherhood excepted).
Just redressing the balance a little.
i mentioned it earlier a page back also..
but you're wrong ....
low-life has a problem with sunrise : see the levels drop out here in the right channel,
http://www.neworderonline.com/Forums/MessageList.aspx?ThreadID=43506&PageIndex=2
there are other problems with other tracks too..
later -1
-1 wrote: ...low-life has a problem with sunrise...
later
-1
...yeah, you can hear it between 02:36 to 02:40 mins, and that's absofcukinlutely inacceptable for a remaster and for everything...
cheers,
|cv|
Only one I've received from HMV so far is Low-Life. Can't speak for the other releases yet, but I can confirm that without needing to analyse waveforms:
There is indeed a very noticable drop out of volume during Sunrise, and:
They shouldn't have bothered putting the full Perfect Kiss 12" on there if that's the best they could do - sounds awful: almost like the original master tape had some pops/clicks that they've tried to muffle with a filter.
My vinyl recording made with my Technics 1210 and a £150 preamp sounds miles better than what's on CD!
There's also quite a few similar glitches in the Sub-Culture 12" mix as well - they're just harder to pick out as it's quite a busy mix, but they run the whole way through it!
Maybe the master tapes were simply in a dodgy condition, and this was the best they could do?
Andy
andy,
in other threads, peter hook said they had lost the master tapes to a lot of tracks...
so maybe that's why they sourced them from vinyl...
that sounds likely to me..
later -1
Peter said in that Radio 2 interview that they lost some of the master tapes. He didn't specifically say that any of the tracks on the bonus CDs were from anything other than the master tapes they did have.
Do we know for definite that anything on the bonus CDs are from vinyl? Other from what we suspect from what our ears lead us to believe?
Andy
The problem is not that some tracks are mastered from vinyl, it is some filter that should clean those tracks from crackle and pop but is used so amateurish that they start to sound completely unnatural and faulty. These tracks all sound "swallowed" in places.
It's also possible that some of the tracks were mastered from DAT if somebody was too lazy to get them off the original analogue reels / couldn't be bothered to track them down / didn't know better. Many DAT tapes from the late 80s - early 90s now suffer from drop-outs, and yes, this could be what they've been trying to mask (by "de-noising" them, which is the wrong way to go).
I bought Technique to 'test the water' & mainly for the 'new artwork' before buying the rest.
Nothing outstanding or impressive at all - simply repackaged with bonus tracks we all already have.
Why was time & materials wasted making these?
One refund please...
Is it true that the track listing for each bonus disc is only printed on the CD itself? If so, perhaps the reissues were planned as single disc editions to begin with, so the extra tracks were put together hurriedly.
My God, don't you people get wound up by minutiae? I've finally taken delivery of the new Low-life, and I'm very happy with it. Yes, there's a minor volume dropout on Sunrise, but if Hannett had produced it you'd have all claimed it to be ironic or artistic. Overall the sound quality seems excellent to me.
And as for the bonus disc: TPK is one of my favourite NO tracks, so I'm delighted to get the full length version on CD for the first time; my only other copy is on the limited edition boxed cassette of Low-life (Fact 100c, Fact-fans!), and judging from some of the comments on this forum, I feared the sound quality would be similar to a tape-to-tape copy of that. Well, I have done some technical analysis, and I can confirm that a graph of the Fact 100c version looks like this:
While the new version looks like this:
Conclusive, I'm sure you'll agree.
Also, fair play to them for putting Dub-Vulture on the disc; I hated it when it first came out, but have since got into some of the more 'difficult' NO tracks, and the last minute of D-V rocks.
Finally, I would agree that the packaging is fairly average, but personally I very rarely buy music on the basis of the packaging (with the exception of the limited edition NO boxed cassettes, did I mention?), and let's face it, Peter Saville/Factory was a unique artistic experiment which was wonderful while it lasted, while Rhino are just another record company. What more would you expect?
Yeah, The Perfect Kiss 12" isn't *that* bad - just try listening to Touched By The Hand Of God on the Brotherhood bonus disc - that is cringeworthy (for the first half a minute, anyway)...
And, I'm not of the type to overanalyse sound levels (for instance, I didn't really notice the swapping of the channels in Ceremony on Singles, for instance - still can't) - just notice the obvious glitches.
I've got 4 of the 5 at the moment,just waiting for Movement.
Have listened to Low-life & Technique so far,& they both sound fine to me,altho' I think Sunrise has a problem at the end of the first chorus.
I just feel really disappointed with the whole thing,I mean why put fookin' Dub-vulture on when more or less everyone on here completely derides the Robie mix,mixes of TPK would have been far more appealing,the same for WIM Cabinieri mix(spelt wrong) & 2 mixes of Fine Time,one of which we already have.& what is the point of changing 2 of the sleeves,but not the others,I like the idea of remixing the sleeves(very Factory),but why only 2? & for me personally,I just feel the booklet interviews/insights are not enough,would've liked era pics,details etc.,I know it's not the Factory or New Order type thing to do,but those days have gone,the secrets out,there is no more myth to make,no legend to generate or mass secret to produce,it all just smacks of a real half-arsed attempt & a fookin' insult to us & to the memory of what N.O. should be 
I'll be back to rant on this some more,I'm so fookin' disappointed,but it's time to go home!
On the other hand,TPK 12" & Let's Go sound fookin' amazing
