I'm a huge fan of the Radio Birdman albums. But I hate the remixing job that they did for the CD reissues, especially what they did to some of the songs on Living Eyes. To appreciate the difference, listen to samples from "Do the Pop", off the first LP:
First, I should mention that I've tried to make all the LP songs sound as good as they could, using EQ'ing and other techniques, but it's still not going to have the quality from master tapes. However, it's good enough to give you an idea of what I'm trying to demonstrate, which is how much the high end has been increased. The LPs definitely do sound better when I did this myself, but they went much further for the CD mixing. Everything sounds like it's screaming. Try listening with headphones, and cranking up the volume and seeing how loud you can stand each sample. Some CDs will crank up the high end of guitars, but if you do the same for the vocals, they lose their rich full sound. Similarly, if you do it to the percussion, the drum cymbals become crashingly loud, and the drums start sounding like tin cans. And because of this, and perhaps other processing (echo?) the 1st LP now sounds like it was recorded in a gymnasium. The vocals are often blurred into the background. Is this really better than the original sound? Does it truly reproduce the original sound of Radio Birdman? (And why did they remove the "HEY" that you hear at the start of the LP clip?) Here's another sample, from Anglo Girl Desire:
The drums don't sound much better than tin cans, and the bass guitar is getting almost totally drowned out by the shrill sound of the guitars. You can increase the high end if you have a good solid middle range foundation, but it starts sounding bad if you have a flat range. Makes me wonder if the people doing the mixing had impaired hearing, like high end hearing loss, or tinnitus, which many older musicians have. I have tinnitus in one ear, and when it flares up, it's really impossible for me to make good mixing decisions. In any event, here's a comparison of clips from "Non Stop Girls":
I should mention that I do really like blaring music like Turbonegro or Backyard Babies, and love to crank up the volume, but I can't do that with these Radio Birdman CDs. It's very hard to make 20 year old recordings and instrumentation sound like today's sound. This is especially true now, when so many people now listen to music using portable CD players with headphones. Abrasive music sounds even more so with headphones. And as an aside, I think that how music sounds on portable CD players should be the gold standard when mixing music. Not just because so many people use them, but because they mostly don't give you the ability to change the sound, except for the stupid extra bass switch, which I've never found useful. With a real stereo, even ones in cars, you at least have a bass and tremble control, so you can compensate if you think it's too tinny, at least to some degree.
But onward to the more interesting "Living Eyes" CD, which often contains much different mixes than the LP. Here are samples from "455 SD"
It still has that shrill guitar and tin drum sound. And (although not demonstrated in these samples), increasing the high frequencies also worsens any lisps or "ess" problems in the vocals, something not a problem on the 1st LP, but definitely noticable on the 2nd, even on the LP. I was able to reduce their volume by either applying a notch filter, or manually editing and reducing their volume, but the CD leaves them in.
But what's really dissapointing about the 2nd album CD is the attempt to change the whole sound and feel of some of the songs. Note in the above sample, that the organ sound on the LP is almost totally deleted on the CD. Plus, at least in this sample, they used a novelty mix of having the chorus sound much louder than the lead vocals. I have to laugh every time I hear it, because it sounds so unnatural. Similar changes were made to other songs, for example "Alone In The Endzone":
God, I can't stand the cd version of this, no energy in the instrumentation, boring tin can drum sound, unnatural wide stereo separation (guitars totally in their own channel). And the keyboard sounds like a toy organ, and often gets drowned out in most of the rest of the song.
Oh yeah, have I mentioned the very loud thumpy bass drum sound which is heard throughout "Living Eyes"? Compression and EQing worsens this problem. I spent a lot of time suppressing this sound on my LP version. Here's a sample of "Hangin' On", which really shows how bad this problem, among other things:
This is the absolute pits. The piano sound is drowned out by the loud guitars with boring repetitive licks, unnaturally separated in each channel. The bass guitar, pretty low to begin with in the LP version, doesn't have a chance to be heard. And, as I said, there is a god awful thumpy loud bass drum sound. The CD version lacksthat full energetic sound. The only thing they got right on this song was keeping the true full vocal sound, although it sounds sterile without the instrumentation to back it up.
If one is looking for an exciting full sound, there are different ways to do this and still achieve a natural pleasant sound. One of them, of course, is a muddy garage sound. Another way is the wall of guitar sound. Listen to any of the Scandianvian hard rock punk bands, such as Turbonegro. But the Radio Birdman CDs don't sound like either, or for that matter, any other CD that I own. The power of these albums is not in their blaring loud guitars, but in their vocals and their lyrics. I've been able to listen to the LP versions over and over without tiring of them. In their proper form, they are great albums. But the production ruins them. These album deserves a better fate.