David Bowie – Sound + Vision

very good and clear sound,sound quality can be a little lacking on the rarities but is understandable, has some very realistic 3d sound to some tracks, the booklet is very interesting and the overall presentation is very beautiful, quality of plastic casing not good, crumbled upon opening it, it seems the later editions with a cd rom instead of cdv are still intact, because of this i can't rate it too high.

Tray completely disintegrated upon releasing from its boxed slumber, might need to find some small plastics workshop that can make a replacement or something

These cassettes sounds solid. Stoked I came across this at my local record store. Solid price for 20 bucks.

"The differences to be heard in contrast to the original RCA CDs are in no way subtle or minor.
These new discs sound alive and three-dimensional - the RCA discs sound like a cheap AM radio in comparison.
Instruments that were inaudible on the RCA discs are clearly heard here,
as are bits of echo and other effects totally absent from the original LP releases."

http://www.5years.com/ryko.htm

There's a guy on Amazon somewhere who said he 'laughed' at people who speak of 'THE RCA Version'.
I now know wot he meant.
As for the 'Ryko Version' being too tart etc ?
Which one are you talking about ??
There's a set of gold ones with A Different Master.
They are even more expensive......
One of the recent vinyl reissues is supposedly a direct copy of the original UK RCA pressing.
Why don't they just do that for all of them again ?
Or is that already pencilled in ??

ISO disc one only. Please let me know if you can help. Thank you.

Are discs 1 2 and 3 listed on Discogs? I own 1, 3 and 4 myself.

I felt some trepidation buying this vinyl version due to the comments that the pressing sounded way too bright. I'm quite sensitive to "shrill" recordings so it kept procrastinating, eventually I pulled the trigger and am very glad I did.

Apart from two tracks which are indeed on the "shrill" side ("Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere" and the live version of "white light/white heat") the other 44 tracks sound perfectly fine, granted my MoFi and Analogue Productions titles sound better, but this box is not an audiophile pressing.

The pressing is DMM which could appear to have a brighter and more defined top-end, but also has less surface noise (the Bowie box sounds "very clean") I do have quite a warm analogue sounding system (all Marantz with Buchardt Audio speakers) but honestly very happy I bought this box as it has quite a few rare tracks which are near impossible to find on vinyl

What no one has mentioned is that while it was v lovely looking new.
The inside tray that holds the CD's in place is the first thing to go.
'sealed'
Oh Yeah......
The tray/support for the discs that holds them all in place.
I've bought two of these and both 'rattled'.
The thing disintegrates with time ?
Or it's that fragile it falls apart in the post.
oh yeah
IF
Anyone has just the tray part,
I'm looking for two of them......

Rev 6/30/21a

The following refers to the circa-1990 Rykodisc CD-releases of Heroes and Sound + Vision, which I obtained in 2021 and were in excellent condition, although CDs don't have to be in very good condition to play perfectly due to the error-correction system built into the CD record-playback system. The high end on these releases is detailed, liquid, and open (although I wouldn't call it audiophile-grade, due to the quality of the analog masters, which were never intended to be audiophile-grade). So, I suspect that they were digitized with a 1st-gen (16-bit, 44.1 KHz) ADC (a Sony PCM-1610) with Apogee aftermarket input filters, which was the first commercially-available approach to obtain 16-bit, 44.1 KHz digital recordings with a clean high end and good spatial characteristics. (The PCM-1610's stock input filters had phase nonlinearities, which produced recordings with a dry/smeared high end, and mediocre spaciousness and imaging.) Chesky had a proprietary 24-bit ADC from the dawn of the digital era. The Apogee filters were introduced in about September of 1985 and were very popular among recording engineers for the detailed, liquid high end and good spaciousness and imaging of CDs made with them. 1st-gen decks were replaced by various commercially-available systems with high-res oversampling ADCs in the form of rack-mount components, hybrid circuits, or chips. Because oversampling ADCs sample at a high frequency, they don't require complex active input filters such as Apogees, and instead use simple passive filters. 20-bit rack-mount ADCs were introduced first, in 1993, and 24-bit units were introduced in 1997. There are now 32-bit ADCs, which some recording engineers claim are necessary to obtain acceptable sound quality from digital mixing.

The bottom line is that the sound quality of the circa-1990 Rykodisc Bowie CDs is what you would expect of transparent 16-bit digital copies of the original stereo analog masters when they were all less than 20 years old (which seems to be the point where 15 ips masters start becoming noticeably faded, if they're well preserved) - it's clean, detailed, rich, and has good spatial characteristics. According to Jeff Rougvie of Rykodisc in 2015, quoted in the The Ziggy Stardust Companion at 5years.com, "Bowie himself listened to and approved our original remasters - and he liked them a lot. So much so, that after the deal expired his office would call and ask if we had any copies left, as he preferred ours to the [later] EMI issues."

When these CDs were initially released, mass-market CD players in general still couldn't do justice to the majority of CDs. I gave up on CDs from 2004-2016 because I couldn't stand "CD sound," a subtle but irritating artificiality, sheen, and blurring, which in about 2005 was identified as pre-ringing associated with passband-ripple in the digital interpolation filters (DIFs) on DAC-chips (This type of pre-ringing is limited to digital filters. Google "Julian Dunn anti-aliasing" for details). [1] Pre-ringing was soon eliminated, although it might have taken several years for the best DAC-chips to filter down to mass-market players/DACs.

In 2016 I accidentally listened closely to a CD being played on the radio, and realized that there was no "CD sound." So I investigated and learned that "CD sound" had been identified as pre-ringing, and eliminated. So, in 2018, I decided to dip my toe into the digital waters again in the form of a $100 2017 Nobsound Bluetooth 4.2 Lossless Player, which has 2010-model (9018) Sabre DACs, TI-5532 pro-audio-grade op-amps for the output stage, and an internal power transformer with a separate winding for the digital supply and each of the analog supplies (+/-15). As far as I can tell, the Nobsound has no sound of its own. Now, I love CDs, although LPs have better detail and in many cases the best recordings are reserved for LPs since it's so easy to make perfect copies of CDs. LPs are also the only way to get good copies of some older recordings.

To get the best sound quality from your system, it's important to prevent its circuitry from getting dusty, such as by periodically spraying it with compressed air, and to periodically cycle its connections to prevent oxidation from building up on them. This includes power connections, such as AC plugs and all breakers between the system and the power meter. Before flipping any breakers, shut off everything that uses a significant amount of power, and wait for the refrigerator to shut off, just to be on the safe side. In about May, when the weather and my speakers warmed up (speakers have to be warm to sound their best), I used canned air to blow the dust out of my receiver, and cycled all of the system's connections, including the receiver's internal power connectors (all of its internal signal-connections are soldered). It had been two years since I did it previously, and although I flip breakers about twice a year anyways, I had never done it as part of my system-cleaning. The improvement in sound quality was stunning, and I had to go back and correct some reviews in which I claimed that some CDs have inverted audio polarity. Now I'm convinced that essentially all CDs have the right polarity.

Notes

[1] DIFs calculate and insert extra samples between the samples from the recording which is being played, to smooth out the "staircase" waveform at the output of the DAC-chip, so that it can be completely smoothed out with a simple analog filter which doesn't introduce phase distortion. (However, being smooth isn't the same as being accurate, which is why true high-res recordings, such as 24-bit recordings which were never downsampled to 16-bits, sound better than interpolated 16-bit recordings. If you discard the extra 8 bits of detail in a 24-bit recording, you can't get it back through interpolation.) DIFs, a type of digital filter, have an inherently linear phase response, so the combination of a DIF followed by a simple linear-phase analog filter has a linear phase response.

the compilers supposedly used a 1983 setlist as a guide (as did the superior sounding but much maligned "Golden Years"
single cd comp) and there are 15 songs from that tour on here. though it isn't really noticeable when its mixed in with all the other tracks
the 6 LP looked amazing but sadly Rykodisc's inexplicable and perverse mastering makes it unlistenable for me
and the 2003 set i bought had disc rot - clearly the universe doesn't want me to own this compilation- i take the hint!