Friday, November 21, 2008

New Order reissues plagued with sound problems

A music label renowned for its elaborate reissues of vintage albums has annoyed British rock group New Order and its fans with a flawed package of the group's classics discs.

Rhino Records reissued "collector's editions" of New Order's first five albums, which all originally came out in the 1980s. Each one features a bonus disc, with 7- and 12-inch versions, instrumentals and remixes.

But alert fans quickly complained of about 300 errors, mostly relating to poor sound quality on the bonus discs. The pops and crackles on many of the tracks suggest they were transferred directly from commercially available vinyl recordings rather than from the original master tapes.

The discs were released in Britain last month, and music magazines there, such as Q and Mojo, did not mention any of the technical shortcomings in their rave reviews.

But Peter Hook, the bass player with the defunct group, said in his MySpace page that the reissue project was a "mess." He blamed the label for not sending out advance copies so that he and his former bandmates could do some quality control.

Despite the discontent, Rhino released the discs in the United States last Tuesday, and U.S. fans noticed the same problems. Rhino, an affiliate of Warner Bros. Records, plans to reissue the reissues, and will allow fans to exchange their dud CDs.

Read the rest here. (Via Reuters)

4 comments:

Dumbek said...

I was excited about these until I read the Amazon reviews. I'm staying far away form them for now. I'm not exactly a snob when it comes to sound quality, but everything I've heard about these points to them sounding horrible.

Jon said...

I hear ya'. I was looking forward to these releases...

Anonymous said...

Let me third, that I really wanted to get my hands on Movement and Technique in particular, now I'm forced to hold off... Let's hope they do the right thing and recall the copies rather than let them rattle around on the second hand market. Shamus

Jon said...

Yep - agreed.

So Shamus, when are you going to become TVD's correspondent in Japan ...hm?