Brain Killers / Family Of Intelligence - Border Line download free

Collector_Cave_Guy ...disappointed with the sound quality. I would be interested to see what others think about the sound quality of this repress. To my ears it sounds really grainy, muffled and pretty awful. I had my concerns when the MP3 version was mailed to me when I pre ordered. Any one else got the same issues? I don't own this vinyl reissue (I do own the original pressing, though), so take what I say with a pinch of salt.Judging by the audio clips of the reissue on the Kemet website, the sound quality of it is indeed very unimpressive, despite the claim that it is "remastered". Maybe the vinyl reissue was pressed with better recordings - no doubt this is what those responsible for the reissue will vehemently insist - but I highly doubt it. Why would they deliberately use different and poor quality recordings on the website if the vinyl is made using much better recordings? What advantage would this give to anyone? The sound clips have certainly put me off buying it, and from what you say I was right not to.In fact, I was waiting for a comment such as yours to appear, confirming what I suspected, before I said anything with conviction about this reissue.Analysing the sound clips, A2 and AA2 are almost definitely vinyl recordings, although A1 and AA1 may be digitally sourced. This makes sense since A1 and AA1 both featured on some CD compilations from back in the day. These tracks could have easily been sourced from those CDs and would basically be near enough the same quality as the original DATs, so would be perfectly adequate to use for this reissue. The other two tracks, though, have never been released digitally, as far as I am aware. I would not be surprised if the original DATs for these two tracks have been lost, so for this reissue the tracks were recorded from the original vinyl. Their sound is of poor quality and absolutely could have been recorded better.As for AA1, even if it has been taken from a CD, it sounds like someone has crudely run it through a noise remover (unnecessarily, I might add) and the subtle dynamics, notably at the start, have been stripped away. It's yet another victim of the "remastering" craze that is spreading like a plague through most reissues of oldskool tracks.At this point, before someone suggests it, I must stress that it's not beause the sound clips are a low bitrate that they sound poor. I know exactly how low bitrates can affect sound quality and in this case, this is not the problem.Technically, the tunes may indeed have been "remastered", in the sense that they have been mastered once again, but this doesn't necessarily mean they sound better (although, this is of course the implication). In reality, they often end up hyper-compressed and sound distorted and painful to the ear. Other times they are run through a noise remover (such as AA1 of this release) and they just sound jarring and strange. Sometimes they are unwittingly subjected to digital damage. For example, there is a shocking number of lossy-to-lossless transcodes out there which are allegedly "remastered straight from the original DAT".I am surprised that so many customers don't complain about these shoddy remastering jobs. I hestitate to suggest that it is probably since the target customers are aging ravers whose hearing has long since been crippled, and are unable to tell apart a good recording from a bad one. Nor do they care very much...I wish artists/labels would re-release their tracks as they were originally mastered and stored on the DATs. Very few CDs from back in the day had the sort of remastering problems described above and those CDs sound excellent. It saddens me when I see a label/artist I respect release "remastered" tracks, it typically means that the tracks will never be released in proper quality since the owners are unlikely to bother re-releasing the tunes once again since they have already released them digitally and remastered on a previous occasion.If the DATs are lost then I would be content if the owner re-released a (good quality) vinyl recording, provided they are honest about where it came from instead of lying that they are taken from DATs, or trying to cover up the fact by slapping the label "remastered" onto them and hoping nobody notices.