Yeah - the original reels had been slowly disintegrating in a box for 35 years and, most likely, were never recorded at a top-flight studio to begin with ("Mo Do" doesn't conjure visions of some state-of-the-art spot). I think the album sounds pretty good given that.
yeah, i read it was a hard remaster as well, i guess i was just mad that my favourite track on the album "you don't need me" (which happens to be one of the songs of low quality) was playing while i was typing. given the circumstance of the recordings, im just happy to hear it.
Audio seems to be a larger and larger problem as the reissue world goes deeper. Of course Daptone would have liked to work with pristine source material that was stored in a temperature controlled room, but that wasn't a possibility. We encountered a similar problem recently with Jay Mitchell's "Goombay Bump," in which the source was so poor that we had our engineer go back and remove even more of the the imposing artifacts. What they sent over was cleaner, but it was also missing the high end of the horns, giving the song an over all crisper but less full feel. We ended up going with the original.
B&G could have sounded better had they been willing to start sacrificing parts of the songs. Given that, would you rather hear it as it was meant to sound, or a 21st century lifeless update?
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the OG reels were a tough re-master.. feeling this though. AKO you NEED a 2nd listen for sure..
B&G could have sounded better had they been willing to start sacrificing parts of the songs. Given that, would you rather hear it as it was meant to sound, or a 21st century lifeless update?