Early Bellaphon CDs ...

[JeffCarney]

... are the some of the most poorly mastered CDs to ever hit the street.

I don't know who mastered the stuff, but his hearing was so out of whack that he must have thought adding three times the treble of most everything on the market sounded good.

Listening to Omega's Hall Of Floaters In The Sky tonight. That somebody who would master something like this was allowed to work on stuff which was actually put on the market is just flat out inSANE!

Scattered amongst the crap are a few that aren't too bad, but most of them just plain suck.

Somebody could really do well to pick up this catalog and release better sounding discs. There are some recent vinyl reissues. I tried Krokodil's Getting Up For The Morning and it sounds far better than my old Bellaphon CD. It sounds like it is from digital files but the midrange is incredible and the recording is fantastic. The old CD sounds like one of the smiley EQ jobs that I guess some German engineers favored.

I know some people (me included) weren't happy about the amount of compression used on the Nektar catalog when it was issued by Eclectic, but in most cases the older CDs sounded far worse and some (IE: Tab In The Ocean) even had more compression!

[JJ88]

I have the Bellaphon CD of Nektar's 'Journey'...not good, to say the least.

[markwoll]

Back in the olden days, I would sometimes have to buy several Bellaphon LP's before I got a good one.
Just to be fair Janus was worse.
A lot of my mid 80's remaster cd's are unlistenable due to poor qualitys disks or poor sound.

[JeffCarney]

I have the Bellaphon CD of Nektar's 'Journey'...not good, to say the least.

Agreed. That is one of the worst CDs I've ever heard. It's mastered like somebody was trying to replicate the sound of tin cans being kicked around.

[JeffCarney]

Back in the olden days, I would sometimes have to buy several Bellaphon LP's before I got a good one.
Just to be fair Janus was worse.
A lot of my mid 80's remaster cd's are unlistenable due to poor qualitys disks or poor sound.

I've had almost no problem with Bellaphon vinyl. Most of their LPs sound amazing to my ears. Unfortunately, many of their releases are fairly pricey these days.

[JeffCarney]

Just thought of a good one. Nektar's Sounds Like This sounds pretty natural to me and Recycled is half decent as well.

Maybe in some cases there were CDs rushed to market and they didn't have time to have whoever was butchering these titles do his dirty work? If so, I guess we got lucky in those cases.

[presdoug]

I've had no trouble with Bellaphon lps, but the CDs l have heard have a less than adequate high end. Best sounding one was a quad lp of Dzyan's Time Machine. Oh, and my lp of Pell Mell's Marburg was good, as well.

[JeffCarney]

I've had no trouble with Bellaphon lps, but the CDs l have heard have a less than adequate high end. Best sounding one was a quad lp of Dzyan's Time Machine. Oh, and my lp of Pell Mell's Marburg was good, as well.

I have a 2nd LP pressing of Marburg which has the Purple label. The sound is incredible.

By contrast, the CD on Bellaphon (issued early 90s?) is hammered with compression and quite bright.

[Progbear]

Some of the early Virgin/Caroline Blue Plate releases likewise are just dreadful. By no means all of them (my copies of Steve Hackett’s Spectral Mornings and Magazine’s Secondhand Daylight sound adequate), but the original CD of Simple Minds’ Life in a Day was one of the worst CD master jobs I have ever heard. I was listening to the old issue of Fish Rising by Steve Hillage recently, and that one, too, sounds just awful.

Bellaphon did a fantastic job of completely wrecking the Nektar catalogue. Their issue of Remember the Future drawn from two channels of the quad master is justifiably infamous. Down to Earth sounds OK, and I can’t imagine them being able to do anything to make Sounds Like This sound any worse than the original recording. :P

[JeffCarney]

Some of the early Virgin/Caroline Blue Plate releases likewise are just dreadful. By no means all of them (my copies of Steve Hackett’s Spectral Mornings and Magazine’s Secondhand Daylight sound adequate), but the original CD of Simple Minds’ Life in a Day was one of the worst CD master jobs I have ever heard. I was listening to the old issue of Fish Rising by Steve Hillage recently, and that one, too, sounds just awful.

Bellaphon did a fantastic job of completely wrecking the Nektar catalogue. Their issue of Remember the Future drawn from two channels of the quad master is justifiably infamous. Down to Earth sounds OK, and I can’t imagine them being able to do anything to make Sounds Like This sound any worse than the original recording. :P

Virgin is a very good comparison because they were so similar. You put on a CD like Ashra's Blackouts and it's like demo level stuff, whereas something like Steve Hackett's VOTA or Steve Hillage's Fish Rising sounds like somebody added 4db of digital treble to the mix. Gong's stuff like You sounds pretty decent and is probably faithful to the tapes. They are just unpredictable. Like the Audience albums! Again with that treble boost!? Awful.

My guess is that it all comes down to what CDs were rushed to market. I suspect that for those that were, we sometimes got lucky. But when whoever was mastering these albums for Bellaphon (and Virgin) was let loose, look out. When they were given time to "improve" something, the chances of tinny, garbage sound are high.

[JJ88]

Remembering when I was young and the Virgin Megastore itself still existed, I do remember that most all Virgin reissue CDs were *generally* sold at a lower price than most catalogue releases. The packaging of their early CDs often left a lot to be desired, that's for sure- those Genesis ones with the cropped covers, for instance.

However, to give them some credit, they did put a significant amount of the Charisma/Virgin progressive albums out fairly early on in the CD reissue boom and have also left them in print to this day. EMI certainly didn't do this with Harvest and Phonogram didn't with Vertigo, it was left to labels like Repertoire and BGO to licence out the more esoteric stuff- with much higher prices.

[Progbear]

Remembering when I was young and the Virgin Megastore itself still existed, I do remember that most all Virgin reissue CDs were *generally* sold at a lower price than most catalogue releases. The packaging of their early CDs often left a lot to be desired, that's for sure- those Genesis ones with the cropped covers, for instance.

Reminds me of another category where Bellaphon usually drops the ball: packaging. The Victor CD, as I recall, came with a decent booklet reproducing that of the original LP, but that's rare. Most of them were disappointingly bare-bones, some with lists advertising other CDs. Lame!