David Bowie: Singles Collection and more

While enjoying the HD 192/24 downloads of his Five Years set of the first six albums I thought I'd blog about this.

 
At one time when it came to compilations it was fairly straightforward you had the Greatest Hits for just that or best ofs that mixed them with b sides and tracks only on album like the Beatles 1962-1966 and 1967-70 doubles.

 
David Bowie has had a quite a few over the years and being an artist who had hit 45's and 'radio hits' existing on album his from the get go were like that starting from 1976's ChangesOneBowie and the 1981 after the event ChangesTwoBowie sets which were not so satisfactory and had a brief appearance in the early days of the Compact Disc.

 
The one most are probably familiar with is 1991's ChangeBowie which was issued by Ryko in North America and EMI in the UK and rest of the world which had four extra tracks on the lp as typically the cd was of the long playing time single disc sort event though the lp was a double.

 
That isn't a bad compilation although like much of his catalogue hasn't been well mastered during the cd era but does suffer than the decision to put an well after the event version of Fame entitled Fame 90 that sticks out like a sore thumb.

 
This compilation,The Singles Collection, covers much the same period, from 1969's Space Oddity to his last solo album for EMI of this era, 1987's Never Let Me Down 
which is represented by Day In-Day Out but has the advantages well taken advantage of of adding key album tracks and his non studio album tracks  like This Is Not America.

 
Fame on this album is the original version which is always a gain and while his late 90's Best Of series covering 1969-1974, 1974-1979 and 1980-1987 have alternate mixes and b sides, they suffer from loud mastering that so reduces the variation in loudness and sounds a bit edgy.

 
In the absence of anything else intelligently compiled in chronological order, this one gets my nod of approval.

The recent remastered series:

I did pick up the issues of David Bowie, The Man Who Sold the World, Hunky Dory and Pin Ups off which were actually remastered this year by Ray Staff.

As with all the post 1990 issues they keep the original lp sleeves rather than 1972's RCA era re-issue sleeves that used Ziggy era pictures to resell these to the 'glam rock' audience which to me always was a misleading as these albums are more hippy folk/rock albums.

Having listened to them all I can say they sound better than the West German RCA using better tapes and having good tone balance decisions when it comes to equalizing to make the most of the tapes with wide dynamic ranges.

If you have the RCA's you may be satisfied with them but there's no need for younger fans to go hunting for expensive very long out print cds for these four titles.

Diamond Dogs Redux

My main copy on cd of this dystopian musical creation based on George Orwell's 1984 is the West German RCA cd from around 1984/5 and is the home of such 45's as Rebel Rebel, 1984 and Diamond Dogs. It also was the first album without the Spiders from Mars.

The description of how this cd sounds on music forums is 'dark', I'd say it was the sound of significantly high frequency loss with some alignment errors leaving it sounding 'lumpy'.

There isn't a universally approved later edition although the Japanese for US cd is much brighter although the other big difference is the West German breaks the songs into the groupings of the original UK lp and the Japanese cd all all others makes every song and intro a separate 'track'.

The Hifi people like the Japanese RCA but then at over £30 per copy as and when you see one, it's quite expensive.

It's been several years-make that over a decade-since I heard the 1990 remaster in it's UK form, a good number of which are equalized different compared to the Ryko versions and picked up a mint copy to demo.

This copy has much better high frequencies and is clear is from a much better tape and while being a bid midrange centred does have reasonable bass that those with tone controls can add  by a slight boost if you find yourself wanting deeper bass.

It certainly is more musically involving to listen to and will be my main listening copy until the next phase of the Bowie remastered campaign is released.