Some prints of this album, in fact, all the common European prints as well as the Japanese mini-LP editions have been mastered with the pre-emphasis flag set. This rarely used feature is only found on a limited number of CDs, produced in the '80s. It intends to reduce noise, by over emphasizing the higher tones in the recording, and indicating to the CD player to correct that. However, some CD players and in fact, almost all computer based players cannot handle the necessary filtering, and will play back the CD with unintended harsh high tones. If you created your own mp3s of your CD, you have most likely been listening to the uncorrected master with emphasis applied. Even worse: The respective labels seem to have been unaware of this and delivered the music to iTunes, Apple Music, Spotify, etc. without applying the required filtering.
This album was released on CD, but very hard to find in most countries. Beware: there was also a 1992 CD edition (on the CAM label) which divided the album in two tracks and featured the last half of "Ignacio" in stead of the first half of "La Fete Sauvage". A new release changed the order of the tracks but still got the Ignacio part wrong. CAM finally corrected their mistake with a 1992 re-release, which would currently be the best choice to buy this album, for its sound quality. For a table with all the earlier CD versions, see the (June 16 1998 update) of the latest news section on this site.
New Edition - New Edition Solo Hits (1996).zip 1
The original LP did not list any track names, nor did it have clear indexing. This is reflected on the CD versions, as they present the music in either 1 track for the entire album or 2 tracks, one for each LP side, depending on which edition you play.
A planned re-release with an official Vangelis supervised remaster on Cherry Red's Esoteric label sadly never materialized. A new edition of the album was released as nr. 27 on the Sugar label. Indeed it is remastered, but the result is quite a disaster. The label does not shy away from the "loudness war", using limiters that noticeable mess up the louder percussion parts. The tape is played back slightly to slow. Worst of all, the sound is processed to sound more stereo, with pleasant results for the mono parts of this album, but seriously downgrading the stereo parts of the album. Perhaps the engineers listened only to the first track, concluded the album must be mono, mixed it down to one channel (or worse, perhaps they discarded one?) and worked from there. Unacceptable.
Released on CD, first by Barclay, later re-released several times on the CAM label. The first CAM editions however mistakenly contained the first half of "La Fete Sauvage" instead of the last half of "Igancio". CAM finally corrected this problem in their final re-release in 2002. For a table describing the various CD versions and some more information about this, see the (June 16 1998 update) of the latest news section on this site.
"Earth" was for a long time out of print, not having been released on CD, resulting in a number of bootlegs circulating, especially in the French progressive rock scene. In 1996 the Greek department of Polygram finally released the work officially on CD (Vertigo 532 783-2), but only within the borders of Greece. This CD edition however sounds a bit strange, as if it came from a poor master tape. There are de-noising artefacts, and additional reverbs were added to the recording. To compare, two tracks are available on a compilation CD called "Greek Pop Classics", in better sound quality and without the manipulations. 2ff7e9595c
Comments