Re: Which

[janson@stat.Berkeley.EDU (Mike Janson)]

In article <40n4en$o1s@saba.info.ucla.edu>,
Buffalohead <NSRJM@NURSEPO.MEDCTR.UCLA.EDU> wrote:
>dbrockway@aol.com (DBrockway) wrote:
>> Sorry if this is a FAQ question, but which one do I go for, the
>> British or the Japanese?
>I have the Japanese, but from what I hear, there are few differences
>between the various box sets, and those are mostly in packaging. The
>Japanese box has:
>	The Japanese PRICE (!)
>This box set goes for around $200 US, whereas the UK, French and
>Canadian versions are around $130 (?). Of course, Japanese imports are
>said to sound better than any other recordings, but I've no idea why
>this is true (and not having another box, won't comment on that
>possibility myself).

OK, I'll step in.  The reason why Japanese discs (especially reissues) 
sound better is due to the MASTERING.  Mastering is the very last stage
in assembling an album where the songs are brought together and an attempt
is made to make them into a cohesive unit.  In every single mastering
session I've been in, equalization (boosting/cutting of certain frequencies
in the spectrum) is applied to each song to get the album to sound good in the
"absolute" sense with respect to everything else on the market.  Of course,
this absolute is subjective, and is left to the ears of the mastering
engineer.  Mastering engineers are an extremely valuable commodity, and
the best charge over $300/hr. here in the US!

The best reason I can find that Japanese issues sound better than US
releases is because when older material (e.g. much of the stuff on TWW)
is transferred to CD, the Japanese record companies spend more money on and
are more committed to high quality mastering.  An extreme example of this
is the initial CD issue of late 70's early 80's Elvis Costello CDs, where
the US CBS releases sound horrible while the UK and Japanese issues sound
great.

In the case of TWW, I've A/Bd the US and Japanese versions of TKI and
The Dreaming, and noticed that in both cases the Japanese has less hiss
as well as better defined high frequency response.  This is, of course,
to the ears of an industry professional and I'm not sure how much of the
general public would notice.

Mike
janson@stat.berkeley.edu

noticed that