SACD's to avoid due to poor remastering.


I have just purchased and played a copy of a SACD titled "The Ultimate Tony Bennett" CS63570 a Columbia release.. This would have to rank as one of the worst remastering"s I have ever heard. The sibilance is unbearable, the soundstage is congested and instrument tonality unbelievably poor. I dont think I have heard a CD that sounds worse let alone a SACD.
I thought compiling a list of such titles to avoid may be interesting.

Regards

FWIW I have a Playback Designs MPS-5 which to my ears is the most analog sounding digital player to date. This therefore reinforces my criticism of the remastering of the disc.
ecka
Finally! A thread worth responding to. Send me back to 1970 right NOW. It's about the money, it's ALWAYS about the money! My suggestion is don't buy any of it and you won't be disappointed.
I have noticed that on Diana Krall's "The look of Love" the bass is mixed much lower on the stereo SACD layer than on the CD layer. Not sure if it is worth avoiding it as a result but I thought it was curious.

Mark
totally agree, there is a lot of bad recordings on formats that are capable of much more. For example there is so many bad trasfers on blu ray movies. It all starts with the type of lenses,type of film, camera, camera settings, lighting, transfer technology and finally the director style he wants for the film. Initially the movie can be extremely sharp but if he/she wants a lot of grain and high contrasty film (wicht is the actual trend) the movie will lose resolution. The same happens with music, it depends on the quality of the instruments, the recording studio and the sound engineer. One of the worst recording i have heard was Red Book "Counting Crows" their latest album (2008) wich is dull and awful.
What amazes me is the much higher quality off of
DVD Soundtracks than their CD matching counterpart.
What the hell are they using for the Mastering source
for these CD's? Why not just rent the DVD Movie and
rip a copy of its Soundtrack? It would still sound twice
as better than its CD counterpart, or not half as bad!
That would end the Market for horrible sounding CD
Soundtracks based on the worst Mastering ever. That
could put some of those horrible Master Copies out in
the Corn Field permanently, where they belong.
As mentioned above I found most of the original SACD's pretty unimpressive-Miles Davis discs in particular.