Worst mastered CD ever!

Motorhead - No remorse 2cd (sanctuary 1998)
The loudest CD ever I think, and terribly damaged in that process.
Listen to Overkill. The digital clipping is evidently.

 

Agreed, the bootlegs of the BBC sessions sound much better and to top it off the bootlegs present the complete performances.

 

The Who BBC sessions are equivalent: Official CD is unlistenable, the bootleg CD quite good.

 

Even more so with the official WHO bbc cd than with the LZ one.

 

Hi all,

Some in the bad CD hall of fame:

Santana: Supernatural (clip city with distortion and shrillness and pain)
The World Of Nat King Cole
Simon & Garfunkel: Greatest Hits (especially early pressings)
any Capitol era Frank Sinatra (Entertainer of the century versions especially bad)
John Denver CD's except for Heartland Music comp and current RCA Legacy discs!
RHCP:Californication (The beginning of the squashed mastering trend)

 

Jon Astley won a Grammy or similar reward for that. You make a great point. One of the biggest mastering sins is to NR something and then jack the high end up...

 

I have the original UK Nimbus pressing and the single layer SACD and both sound pretty good to me. Is it the recording itself that you don't rate?

Again, Definitely Maybe I have the original UK Nimbus pressing, and nothing sounds wrong to me!

 

Nantucket Sleighride by Mountain...another trip to clip city at least on the original cd. Just got a remastered version but haven't had time to listen yet. (Details at home.)

Girlfriend by Matthew Sweet sounds like it was made from a needle drop.

 

Not really the beginning of that trend, which had been going in since around 1995. But Californication is definitely one of the worst offenders! It's so squashed that there's nothing that can be done to make this puppy sound tolerable, except turning the volume down.

 

The Byrds/The Original Singles 1965-1967


Just awful, muddy, out-of-phase mono(meaning the disc was a mono tape mastered on a stereo machine). Blech! One of the few CD's I ever returned in anger.


Evan

 

Yes, that one must be the worst ever, but I don't blame Kelly because he knew about the condition of the tapes and wanted to re-record the whole album before CD-release. Of course, we fans wanted the original versions. Well, WE didn't know the tapes wasTHAT bad, did we?!

At least my CD came with a dedication and autograph so that numbed the pain a bit.

 

CBS in England buggered the Embassy LP mastering of that Byrds Original Singles '65-'67 album. It's all in mono, but it sounds like it was cut from a dbx I tape, undecoded! Hissy and massively compressed.

As for CDs, of the infamous first four by the Fab Four, only PLEASE PLEASE ME was properly mastered in true mono. The other three are what I call stereo masterings of mono tapes. And not 100% on azimuth, either. (WITH THE BEATLES being the worst offender; you can even verify where every edit in the tapes are just by watching the phase relationship in a Lissajous pattern on an oscilloscope!)

 

Columbia's "Fletcher Henderson--A Study In Frustration." I've griped about this elsewhere here. It's a superbly programmed, packaged and annotated boxed set of 64 Henderson recordings.

Tragically, in both the 1961 LP version and the 3-CD set from the 1990's, the engineer dealt with surface noise by piping the tracks through a telephone, and chopping out complete beats and half-beats of the songs. Roughly half the songs have this problem, yet John R.T. Davies' masterings of the some of the same tracks, elsewhere, sound superb and lifelike. Most re-releases of this material use the bad Columbia/Sony versions. It can induce post traumatic stress syndrome.

 

I think "Please Please Me" was also a mono tape played on a stereo playback head....

 

Another contender for the worst ever... "Ginger Baker's Air Force" on Lemon Records CD. Let's imagine the formulation of the decision to reissue this......
Hmmmmm - let's reissue this out of print album. The graphics are great and the artist line up is stellar.
What did you just say - could you speak up - the batteries in the hearing aid are running down.
We could just copy the deleted Polygram CD.....Naaahhh - let's find a really beat up vinyl copy and use that.
OK, but it sounds a bit soft on CD - do you think we could use this digital maximizer here to help things along.
I think a setting of 11 should be just fine.
IT'S THAT BAD!!!

 

I have that first edition of Fall In A Hole. Shocking stuff.

Fall In A Hole + is a much improved edition while there's a third version due out in the next couple of weeks as part of Sanctuary's ongoing Fall reissue programme.

 

Perhaps....however, I recall that on the scope PPM looked pure mono (straight diagonal line), so even if the mono tape had been played on a stereo machine at least the left and right outputs had been properly summed going into the digital mastering apparatus.

 

I had the MFSL of Aja, and then got rid of it after I found a 1980s CD mastering of it. The MCA CD of it that I have sounds great.

 

Kind of an obscure one here - a French EMI reissue of the Pousette-Dart Band "Never Enough." I guess the engineer thought that there could be "never enough" compression when remastering a CD.

This CD is such a joke, I wonder if there was a mastering ERROR - it is almost unlistenable, except for the fact that I love the music. I tried to bring the level down (it was one solid black line at 0db) and fix the EQ a little to make it somewhat bearable, but it was hopeless.

 

Yeah! Didn't Steve give this one the All-Time-Golden-Turkey-Award? What's truly sad is - I had the LP of this for awhile - couldn't stand it and actually purchased the CD with hopes it would be better! This was all before Sundazed blessed us with the double LP that takes care of the issue (thank God!).
----- Chris

 

All Things Must Pass anniversary remaster. The absolute worst remaster I have ever heard. I was VERY disappointed upon hearing the remater because the original CD release was not good to begin with.

Jon Astley really done himself proud on this one. The instruments already drowned in reverb in the wall of sound did not take kindly to the aggressive NR, maximization, and treble boosting. Most of the tracks have a hollow, ghostly "missing midrange" sound to them, coupled with a top end that pierces your eardrums. It is very hard to make out the individual instruments and George's vocals sound like someone threw a blanket over the microphone. Plus, I believe at least one of the songs is an underdub, missing guitars . . . can't remember which one it is right now, though . . . anyone remember which one?

 

I just bought the Beach Boys' Sounds of Summer to get the new stereo mix of "California Girls." That mix is an interesting, but ultimately failed, experiment, and the rest of the disc is pretty awful.

 

The original pressing of Bad Company's 10 from 6 is my biggest loser! Of course, when they remastered the BC catalog, they didn't bother to do this one either!

Dave

 

Greenslade's "S/T" and "Besdside Manners Are Extra" Japanese mini-LP editions are ear-bleedingly horrible...unlistenable and I'd dump 'em tomorrow if not for the cool Roger Dean-artwork LP sleeves. Two of the worst examples of BAD remastering coming out of Japan these days.

 

Original Jethro Tull "Aqualung." Oh my goodness, what a hiss-fest! Barf! If I put on my AKG headpones, I could hear like OCEANS of hiss, in particular on "Locomotive Breath." It's like they overdubbed an extra dozen tracks of empty cassettes on top of the original. This album to me made me believe that something like NoNoise could be a good thing, if not used stupidly.