Decent sounding Pretenders album?

I haven't listened to any of my Pretenders albums in a while, but I recall that they sounded pretty good. These were original vinyl issues, however, and I can't comment on CD issues since I don't have any.

If they haven't issued remasterd versions of their early albums on CD, then I would suspect they will sound bad. (Early 80's digital is about as bad as digital gets).

I haven't heard the new "Best of", so I can't comment. Sorry to not be of much help. The main point of my post was that their albums were generally well-recorded, so a good version can be had, either by getting the vinyl or finding/waiting for remastered CD versions.

Cheers.

Early 80's digital is about as bad as digital gets

Would you prefer remastered versions with no dynamic range? Not this little brown duck.

For their eponymous album, the best sounding versions are the original Sire (target design) from either West Germany or Japan or the AF remaster.

The targets are hard to find, but not impossible and not too expensive in the used stores. Here is the WG one:

http://www.targetcd.com/pretenwg.html

AF released this recently as Audio Fidelity Gold AFZ 052, remastered by Steve Hoffman, and it sounds very good, although missing the phone noises on "The Phone Call" as these sound effects were reputedly not on the master tape.

Regards,

Rhino reissued their first album as a 2 cd set in 2006. The first cd is the album remastered and the second cd is demos, a couple non album cuts and some live tracks. The sound is pretty good.

Although a little different from most of their catalog, the CD Isle of View is an "unplugged" type live performance that is pretty decent sounding. Some of the arrangements feature strings and decidedly mellower than avg. album of theirs, but a nice change of pace...Cheers,
Spencer

Point taken, Metralla. Remasters are not guaranteed to be better. They should be, if done right.

Cheers.

I definitely agree that remasters frequently offer no improvement thus the original post on the 2008 release "Best of the Pretenders"?

I have the first four albums in original vinyl and they sound great. I also have the "Cuban Slide" bootleg from that era, off a soundboard. The original lineup was amazing, especually Honeyman on guitar. You should look for that on Bit-T share sites.