This makes Presto a perfectly workmanlike album from a band that made a name for itself with its creativity, containing all the ingredients of a Rush album minus the sense of ambition and fun that ran through the veins of the group's earlier work.
I just got it today and have only listened to Presto. It's not loud, at least to my ears. I thought it sounded great, but to notice any differences between it and the last remaster I'd have to dig that one out and listen to it again. The packaging is minimal.
It's not like the Sector boxes where the CDs have inner antistatic sleeves. No inner sleeves. No credits either in the booklet, just lyrics. I bought it from I-Deals Store on Amazon US and it is made in the EU. I'm going to go through the rest on headphones and post later how they sound. Click to expand.I listened to Presto through Test For Echo on headphones so far and I'd say yes.
Earlier I said I didn't think they were loud, but that was on a Bose acoustic-wave stereo. I did have to turn the volume down some on headphones when comparing them to the last remasters. I could see some people upset about that. But I heard things on the new editions that I couldn't pick up at first on the previous remasters.
Little percussion sounds, keyboard notes and such. I'm going to keep my previous remasters for the liner notes and inner artwork, and to have the 'flatter' version too. Just to reiterate the new boxset does not come with inner artwork. You get simple outer cardboard sleeves and a lyric book, that's all.
Click to expand.Yes, if you want the original liner notes and photos, keep your originals. This box is disappointing from that aspect. It's pretty cheap. The Sectors blow this away and they didn't cost all that much more. I'd have preferred to pay a little more to get better quality packaging. As for sound, I think each album is at least marginally improved in some way from the original (or, in the case of the 2004 remasters, those). Even Snakes & Arrows sounds better, and I can't put my finger on WHY.
I think it might be less compressed but I await more of the seasoned pros' official waveforms and DR readings. I've listened to most of these albums dozens and dozens of times, and each of the remasters has given me a little surprise upon initially queuing them up. All I can say is I'm very pleased that I bought the box, and I wasn't really planning on using these as my go-to copies. It was just bought to have it to complete the collection of boxes. So, I bought the HD Tracks version of Studio Albums 89-07 only a few weeks before the remix of Vapor Trails was announced. I was only slightly annoyed that I would have to repurchase VP, which I did (on CD). But if they knew there were plans to do a remix, why not delay the box a few months?
This set only came out early this year. Am I reading correctly that they've remastered it only months after release? What is the story here? How are these 'great times' for Rush fans?
(as the article says.). I just ripped the 1989-2007 box version of Presto to FLAC in EAC. Foobar2000 dynamic range tool gave me DR9. It gave a whopping DR15 for the previous remaster.
With the ABX tool, I'm listening to both now in headphones. The box set version has a harshness to it, and the loudness difference is obvious. The previous version sounds more balanced to my ears, but even it's not that great either.
It's a DDD recording with a similar feel to the sound as Queensryche's Operation Mindcrime from just the year before. Click to expand.Yes, that's an interesting illustration.
Never having mastered anything, and knowing what little I do about it from various posts here, I'd like to comment on that graph and see if someone can 'put me right' in a way that teaches me something new. The graph for the original obviously has a lot of headroom. In the 'top' channel (I'm assuming that's the left, but it doesn't really matter) I'm seeing about three maxima around the 0.8 mark I'm seeing much the same other than one stray maximum (about a third of the way into the song on the upper part of the wave) which looks closer to 0.9. I'm assuming that, broadly speaking, the mix was handed to the mastering engineer and s/he ensured that the biggest maximum on the track still had headroom above it: in other words, this mastering is about as uncompressed as you can get given the limitation of any compression already in the mix. That gets a big thumbs-up from most people on SH forums. (Of course, that's assuming that this is more or less that loudest track on the album, but that's not a ludicrous assumption with rock of this general character.) Now, if you apply the same reasoning taken with, say, recordings of the '1812 Overture' you'd say 'we want to hear as much instrumental detail in the track as possible'. That piece starts with a small string ensemble playing quietly and ends up with cannon-fire, so pretty much every recording puts draconian limitation on the cannon fire: if you had to give headroom over the natural volume of the cannon fire you would end up squeezing every instrument into a tiny part of the amplitude graph and, into the bargain, probably blow the speakers of everyone who tried to listen to it.
What the mastering engineer on that Presto track seems to have done is thought 'I'm not going to lose twenty-five per cent of the volume of the track for the sake of seven or eight split-second maxima that the mixing engineer should have got rid of in the first place'. So he's used what I suspect is a mixture of limitation (to squeeze the maxima) and then compression to ensure that the differences in amplitude that are most important to the listener (the difference, in my analogy, between the brass playing loud and the string ensemble playing soft) are always very clearly audible, whereas the 'cannon' are somewhat diminished. (Not having the original mastering I can't check but I'm guessing that the 'cannon' here are probably a handful of extra-feisty drum beats scattered through the song.
This wouldn't amount to 'robbing the drums of all their impact'.) Now, I'm not saying that the mastering engineer didn't overdo it, or that the track would even sound better for his work, but this is not a case surely where one would look at the waveform and say that it's a bad waveform. DR9 isn't actually shameful, and there are indeed moments in recordings where the original mix has let through a stray sound that could have done with taming in the mix. In this particular Rush example we also need to bear in mind that the original waveform (as Denesis pointed out) is of a mix that is already pretty compressed, and the only parts of the song that show any real contrast in amplitude are the percussion in the intro and the fade at the end.
Personally I do find the new master unpleasantly bright (not that I've got the original to compare it to) but I sense that the waveform is being taken as vindication by those who are suspicious of the remastering and I'm wondering whether you can really tell that from this particular waveform. Wouldn't the ideal master maybe lie closer to the remaster's waveform than to the original waveform? Yes, that's an interesting illustration.
Never having mastered anything, and knowing what little I do about it from various posts here, I'd like to comment on that graph and see if someone can 'put me right' in a way that teaches me something new. Now, I'm not saying that the mastering engineer didn't overdo it, or that the track would even sound better for his work, but this is not a case surely where one would look at the waveform and say that it's a bad waveform. DR9 isn't actually shameful, and there are indeed moments in recordings where the original mix has let through a stray sound that could have done with taming in the mix. In this particular Rush example we also need to bear in mind that the original waveform (as Denesis pointed out) is of a mix that is already pretty compressed, and the only parts of the song that show any real contrast in amplitude are the percussion in the intro and the fade at the end.
![Album Album](/uploads/1/2/5/4/125470310/501302704.jpg)
Wouldn't the ideal master maybe lie closer to the remaster's waveform than to the original waveform? Click to expand.Thanks for the long reply. I wanted to address a few points.
First, I'd like to echo what others have said about this video/thread being required viewing to inform discussions like we're having now: Second, I agree that some middle ground may have been best in this situation. I would have been tempted to tame a few of the transients and allow the overall levels to be higher to bring out more details from the 'shadows', to use a photographic analogy. Perhaps that would have rendered a DR value of 12, thus splitting the difference between the DR15 of the previous version and the DR9 of the new version.
Third, the point about not jumping to conclusions based just on numbers and waveforms is well taken. Even after listening, it's not a very good first impression, but I still want to give it some more time. Here are two comparisons I did recently to illustrate the point about this being less cut-and-dry than some wish it to be.
I got hold of a 24/96 FLAC of Rush - Hemispheres from Linn Records and did some A/B comparisons with the recent Audio Fidelity version. For 'La Villa Strangiata', foobar2000 gave me DR8 for the Linn and DR13 for the AF. I preferred the AF enough to abandon the comparison after a few minutes and rock out with the headphone amp cranked. However, for Supertramp - Breakfast In America 'The Logical Song' I prefer the new 'Blu-ray Pure Audio' 24/96 FLAC over the MFSL version.
This is despite the fact that the former is DR9 and the latter is DR12.and the fact that Mr. Hoffman himself dismissed the new version as 'yucky-poo'.
It certainly helps to have the luxury of being able to listen to both versions side by side. This isn't usually how it pans out in the real world though.we're more likely to be reading the hype sticker on a remastered version of one our old favorite albums and fall victim to the hope that it would sound better. Yes, if you want the original liner notes and photos, keep your originals.
This box is disappointing from that aspect. It's pretty cheap. The Sectors blow this away and they didn't cost all that much more. I'd have preferred to pay a little more to get better quality packaging.
As for sound, I think each album is at least marginally improved in some way from the original (or, in the case of the 2004 remasters, those). Even Snakes & Arrows sounds better, and I can't put my finger on WHY. I think it might be less compressed but I await more of the seasoned pros' official waveforms and DR readings.
I've listened to most of these albums dozens and dozens of times, and each of the remasters has given me a little surprise upon initially queuing them up. All I can say is I'm very pleased that I bought the box, and I wasn't really planning on using these as my go-to copies. It was just bought to have it to complete the collection of boxes.
Throughout their career, Rush have always been a band that you could count on to push the boundaries of what rock was capable of, and their discography contains a laundry list of ambitious albums that helped to bring prog to a wider audience. Having said that, Presto is not one of those albums. On this return to a more guitar-oriented sound after the synth period that dominated the '80s, the bandmembers emerge from the electronic fog and try to reorient themselves to once again working with their more traditional setup. While none of the songs here are out-and-out terrible, listening to the album definitely gives you the sense that things just aren't quite clicking, as if the band is just a little bit rusty after stepping away from this kind of songwriting for nearly a decade. This makes Presto a perfectly workmanlike album from a band that made a name for itself with its creativity, containing all the ingredients of a Rush album minus the sense of ambition and fun that ran through the veins of the group's earlier work. And though this isn't an album you necessarily need to run from, a brisk walk to their work from the '70s is advisable.
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