This Is Book’s Music

This news piece from Reuters makes me wish more fans would make a commotion. It proves that there are fans who still buy physical product and care for the audio quality.

The issue in question is a series of reissues Rhino Records released for New Order earlier this week. Fans bought them but realized the audio quality is not up to par, with some claiming that a few of the tracks on the bonus discs are sourced from vinyl. While using records as a master is not a bad thing, this is New Order we’re talking about, a group whose master recordings are still in existence. The albums in question are Movement, Power, Corruption & Lies, Low-Life, Brotherhood and Technique. The same albums were reissued in England and throughout Europe last month, when fans discovered some of the errors on the discs. Surprisingly (or perhaps not surprisingly), the masters used for the UK remasters were sent to Rhino and what Americans are hearing are the exact same discs as British fans. (In the past, individual countries could create a unique master for a particular release, so that a pressing in Japan may sound very different from the one in the UK. These days, the same “clone” of an album is used throughout the world.)

New Order’s Peter Cook made a statement on his MySpace page claiming the reissue process was a mess, and that no one sent him or the other members of the group test pressings in order to have a bit of quality control. The articles goes on to say that Rhino released a statement indicating “We are now in the process of correcting the problems, but it should be noted that due to the age and condition of some of the original source tapes, the sound quality may vary”. Warner Japan had planned on creating limited editions for these new reissues, but since it seems they were going to use the same masters as the UK and US discs (as is customary these days), the Japanese reissues have been officially canceled.

All parties involved will eventually allow fans to exchange their discs when an official announcement is made.

If you’d like to see an updated forum thread on the errors found in these reissues (“300 and counting”), head over to NewOrderOnline.com.

Osibisa were a band introduced to me by my auntie (r.i.p.), and I got into their music immediately. In the last 15 years, finding decent quality editions of Osibisa albums on CD has been difficult since the CD’s were mastered from unknown sources, meaning it could have been a 5th generation tape for all we know. The first digital appearance of the first two albums happened in the mid-90’s, and the sound quality was okay but not anything too special. A few years ago the BGO label did a two-for-one reissue, but some say a few of the songs are obviously mastered from vinyl.

It seems the Repertoire label in Germany are to the rescue, with the help of mastering engineer Joachim Ehrig. If the name is familiar, Ehrig is known to some as Eroc from the German prog band Grobschnitt, and he also released a number of solo albums. Ehrig has been a mastering engineer for awhile and according to a post at the Steve Hoffman boards, the source of the masters were DATs that came in from England. I had been told that the actual master tapes were hard to come by, since founding member Teddy Osei has them and allegedly did not want to give them out unless he was properly compensated. Depending on the source of the DAT, it’s possible that Osei has had a change of mind. Fans have not been entirely pleased with the CD reissues, so having it properly done may move people to discover and rediscover these classic albums.

The CD booklet will feature slightly revised artwork from illustrator Roger Dean. The remasters of Osibisa and Woyaya will be released on December 19th.