More of the Music of Sting and The Police
Reviews and Commentaries for Ghost in the Machine
One of our good customers had this to say about a record he read about on the blog, the Nautilus pressing of Ghost in the Machine.
Hey Tom,
Did you write something about the Nautilus record… I thought so, but I couldn’t find it.
[This Ghost in the Machine link will take you to it.]
This is one of my favorites from my teenage years and so I decided to do my own little test… Sterling vs. Nautilus vs. half speed abbey road reissue… it feels pretty clear the Sterling is tops with Nautilus close but I am surprised at how muddy the bass sounds on the new one. And just how tamped down the record sounds. Which is I guess your point.
Geoff
Geoff,
You now know a great deal more about this album than most of the audiophiles expressing their opinions on audiophile forums.
You conducted a shootout, something most of them can’t be bothered to do.
You should not be surprised about muddy bass on half-speed mastered records, they all have it.
And tamped down? Tell me about it. Compressed and lifeless are two qualities the audiophile record can be guaranteed to deliver. How these companies get away with producing one shitty remaster after another is beyond me. They’ve been making this junk for more than forty years and they’re apparently haven’t learned a thing in all that time.
Welcome to the upside-down world of the modern audiophile record. The worse they sound, the more audiophiles seem to like them.
Your shootout provided you with a good lesson to learn right from the start. It has set you on a better path.
Try this experiment: Take four or five UK pressings, clean them up and then compare them to any of the ones you played — the sound should be night and day better. And, after doing that shootout, one of the four or five would be a truly Hot Stamper pressing.
Those are what we sell. We save you all that work and expense and give you a better record than you could probably find on your own, but if you want to do your own shootouts, we have lots of advice on this very blog to help you do that.
Thanks for your letter,
Tom
PS
A short review of a remixed record from The Beatles can be found here. It was a doozy. My mind is still reeling from the experience.
