2. digital
  3. 1331510260

Digital Abbey Road fails for me


Thus far I've been really enjoying my system, which is now rarely spinning CDs, except to copy them to the Mac Mini. I've had fun trying Hi-res with the Rega DAC and the system synergy has been rewarding.

I ordered the 2009 Abbey Road remastered CD, which is one of my favorite albums of all time.

Yikes! It sounds LOUDER, almost as if the midbands have been pushed too far. Gone is the articulation of bass I recall and the layering is hard to hear when things sound so harsh! And I mean VERY harsh. My system is Manley Stingray running Merlin TSM-MXr's, which is a very sweet sounding rig.
I was so worried I re-biased the amp, but it was within range and Abbey Road did not sound very good. So I went upstairs and tried Abbey Road on my little Martin Logan motion 4's with the Dynamo sub and Denon amp. It sounded thinner, but still pretty bad. I recall Abbey Road sounding better on my Creek amp and Wharfdale Diamonds!

I threw on Stompin at the Savoy with Ella and Armstrong and all was well, smooth, balanced and just terrific sounding. In fact everything else sounds great including my Beatles Love CD, but Abbey Road is terrible. I called up a buddy and he confirms that his boxed set was sold off because it was terrible sounding (He's running Revel M20's with Parasound power).

So what's with so many great reviews of these CD's and the digital remaster? I did find VERY detailed reviews agreeing with what I heard (not many), but I am clearly in the minority. So what's up with that???

Cheers,

Rob
robbob

Showing 1 response by tmsorosk

tmsorosk
1,013 posts
 
There will always be good reviews of bad remastering jobs. Many of these folks are writers not audiophiles, they wouldn't know the difference. Stick to the guys you know and the ones that have good reputations. If the disc sounds bad in two fairly neutral system's then one must think there is a problem.
That puts me in mind of a Santana disc that was released a bunch of years ago ( Supernatural ) It had great reviews and became one of the top ten selling albums in the world. A few years later it became well known by philes and music lovers as one of the worst sounding albums around, I felt it was only a little worse than average of CD quality at the time, a time when CD's generally sounded pretty bad.
More to discover