That's Original: Levi

[Mark Edmonds]

From: Mark Edmonds
Date: 1999-01-04 11:14

>I can't speak re: the track indexing error, but what's this about the
>transfer?  I haven't diffed the two versions, but the transfer on the
>Levitation disc of the 2-CD set sounds superb.  It's probably the
>cleanest sounding, most balanced mix of any of my CD I ever owned
>prior to the last couple of years (when digital recording technology
>has finally come into its own).  In the bad old days before studio
>engineering techniques caught up with digital technology, I always
>used it as an example of how digital recording *could* be done right.
>Confused,
>Steve
>swann at pplutonia.com

OK, here's what happened:

About 6 or 7 years ago, a friend of mine bought a new-fangled portable CD
player. This machine used the new "bitstream" technology and as my hi-fi
deck was early 2nd generation (straight 16bit with some oversampling), we
decided to run some tests to see how much better the bitstream machine was.
At the time, the only duplicate CD I had was the Bronze/Castle Classics
release of Levitation and the Live 79/Levitation double so we stuck one CD
in each machine, set them running and then switched between the two players
to compare the sound quality. We started off with the Bronze release in my
deck and the double release in the portable. It was immediately apparent
that the sound from the portable was much thinner and weaker than the deck.
Initially we thought that this was due to the inferior quality of the
portable but it just didn't ring true that there should be such a
difference. Therefore, we switched the discs over and low and behold, the
hi-fi deck now sounded weedy. Conclusion: there is a difference between the
CDs which is also born out by the fact that the track marking for
Prelude/Who's Gonna Win The War is wrong on the double release (I think from
memory, it is actually missing one track marker and the Prelude track
"starts" half way through or just at the beginning of WGWTW) but right on
the Bronze/Castle release.

Just to make sure we are talking about the same double release, the one I
had was either branded "2 for 1" or "That's Original" and had a white cover
with small pictures of the album covers on the front Unfortunately, I don't
have this double set any more to re-run the comparison.

Mark