Paul McCartney's latest CD

[John Hope]

I bought the set of CD plus DVD of Paul Macca's latest CD which is entitled something about his Back Yard; I forget the exact name.
What's interesting about this disc from an audio fidelity point of view is the difference in quality between the CD and the same music on the DVD.

The CD is mastered REALLY REALLY badly! So much so that it sends me into a rage when I hear it on any setup at all. It's like some 6-year old has stood in for the recording engineer and played with all the whizzbang recording kit he could find. Clearly the compressor must have had quite an alluring Christmas Tree array of lights for the whole CD is compressed to the extent of a HipHop radio station on DAB radio. The DR must be all of 6dB !

I have never heard such a poor recording since the AM radio recordings of Bing Crosby my dad used to record on his Windsor Dauphine reel-to-reel in 1963. Perhaps Paul got his new baby to do the CD mastering?

On the other hand, the DVD recordings were engineered far, far better. Good, even. The discrepancy isn't simply attributable to the DVD's better technical specs, which one can hear on many CD/ DVD combo sets provided they don't use Dolby or some other bit-reduction compression. It shows that the original recordings were made well.

Music-wise it's not as good as Flaming Pie, but it grows on you provided you don't listen to the CD.

Cheers

John

[MCH]

Originally posted by John Hope


The CD is mastered REALLY REALLY badly! So much so that it sends me into a rage when I hear it on any setup at all. It's like some 6-year old has stood in for the recording engineer and played with all the whizzbang recording kit he could find.


John

Well that's only one opinion. I for one like the recording.
Maybe you should hear it on my system.

[John Hope]

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