Originally Posted by
alanh
I've always loved The Four Tops 'Reach Out' album and it's one of my favourite Motown albums. However I've found that CD reissues over the years have revealed a distorted sound quality which wasn't eveident in the 'old days' listening to the LP on sound equipment of the time. I guess it was a result of the recording process and Motown's equipment of that era.
Has anyone bought either this year's Japanese 'Reach Out' reissue CD or the earlier one by Culture Factory? If so, do they provide better sound quality than the many 'standard' CD reissues over the years?
Thanks for your help.
I don't think the issue was with the original recordings. My feeling was the first round of CD releases just sounded brittle and harsh perhaps due to the fact that CDs were new at the time. Motown had a lot of high end/treble to those 60's recordings, and I just felt that it was very hard to accurately translate that sound to a digital format. It wasn't just the "Reach Out" album; Martha & The Vandellas' "Dance Party" was
extremely hard on the ears with a ton of distortion on the higher end. Marvin Gaye's "That Stubborn Kind Of Fellow" was another that had a strange "muted" sound. Again, my thought was that it wasn't with the original tapes, but the limitations of digital mastering at that time.
Digital didn't seem to allow much room for those last nanoseconds of notes, so some things tended to end up with a "clipped", brittle sound. I don't know why other albums seemed to escape the malady. The first CD I bought when Motown started putting their 60's albums out was "The Marvelettes" and the sound was incredible on that one. The majority of Motown's CD releases were good, so the "Reach Out" album was a surprise. I even recall a magazine's review of it mentioned how harsh and distorted the horns sounded on "Walk Away Renee." [[Actually, now that I think of it, those horns do have some distortion on the record as well, but maybe it's just that analog is much more forgiving so it's not noticed so much when played on vinyl.) I figured all the subsequent releases were just made from the same original CD masters.
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