As has been previously reported, Jade Warrior's third album "Last Autumn's Dream" is being reissued by Repertoire, in a remastered mini-LP Digipak format. This album has been out of print for a couple of years: both the 2000 reissue on Background and the more recent very-limited Japanese reissue on Air Mail Archive sold out some time ago. A few weeks ago, I received an email from Eroc, the German musician and mastering engineer who had been contracted by Repertoire to prepare this album for reissue. He reported that he'd just finished the work, had sent the album off to Repertoire for production, and was very impressed by the original production work Jade Warrior had done on the album back in the 1970s. He pointed me to his web-site discussion of his efforts on this album, and sent me a copy of the results on CD-R for review. We've had a very engaging conversation back and forth since then. As I now understand it, the remastering Eroc did on this album (and, I infer, on the two previous Jade Warrior remasters he has done) did not involve going back to the analog master tape and re-digitizing it. Rather, he works with an existing digital transfer - whatever's the best available from the label or band - and works on it via digital signal processing to make it sound as good as possible. He feels that there's a lot that he can do, with today's sophisticated digital mastering capabilities, to restore the ambience and details of recordings which were lost due to the limitations of the older gear on which they were made. In the case of "Last Autumn's Dream", the digital transfer that Repertoire gave him to work with... ... was the LINE CD from back in the early 1990s. Ugh. Eroc very quickly identified all of the major defects with this CD that had been noted on this mailing list... the excessively dull sound (which he ascribes to excessive use of a crude noise-gate circuit) and the fact that the left and right channels are 180 degrees out of phase (as Kok Yong had discovered). He also determined that there had been a very serious tape-head azimuth error during the playback of the analog tape - this creates a timing skew between the two channels, and also rolls off the high frequencies. He described the quality of the CD as being scandalously bad, and told Repertoire that he really couldn't do anything worthwhile with such unpromising starting material. He asked Repertoire to contact the band and ask for a better digital transcription. Fortunately, he got one... "light years better" than the LINE CD. I suspect that it may be the same one that the Background release was made from, but he wasn't sure of its exact origin. There were still signs of some (relatively minor) head-azimuth errors, which differed from one track to the next, but these were well within the range which were correctable. You can read some of his comments here: http://www.stevehoffman.tv/forums/showthread.php?p=2344429&highlight=eroc#post2344429 Eroc's own site is at: http://www.eroc.de He's done his magic on it... and I really like what I hear. He's apparently got some very sophisticated DSP tools available to him, and has good taste and sense about how to use them (and where to stop!). As I understand it, he did several things to the signal: [1] Applied a subtle, but effective, boost to some of the midrange and treble. The net effect of this is to add some presence and liveliness to the transients - guitar and percussion are clearer and cleaner. He was cautious here, I think. I don't hear the effect as being shrill, over-bright, or excessive (unlike what Polygram did to the four Island albums when they released the "Elements" compilation a decade ago). It's just cleaner. [2] He applied some careful noise-reduction processing to keep the presence-boost changes from making tape hiss more of a problem. [3] He corrected for the tape azimuth errors. This involves actually shifting the timing relationship between the left and right channels back into proper phase, so that transients aren't time-skewed. [4] He boosted the average playback level, so that the loudest passages of the album are just a hair under CD full-scale. I spot-checked a half-dozen of the loud parts, and I don't see any signs of clipping... it looks as if the whole album was normalized to full-scale via a simple linear gain-boost after the rest of the processing was done. The latter change made it a bit tricky to do an A-B comparison between his version and the Background version... if you don't compensate for the volume difference, the louder version will usually sound better even if they're otherwise identical. I did my best to compare the two albums fairly, though... and I think Eroc's version sounds significantly better than the Background version. It's not as big an improvement as the Background's advantage over the loathsome LINE edition, but it's still there. How to characterize it? Well, when I listened to the album on a decent set of headphones (Sennheiser HD-580s) I noticed two things in particular: - The track "Dark River" includes quite a bit of conga drumming. The sound of the congas comes through more clearly - the slap of the hands on leather, and the resonant "bwoop" from within the drum seem sharper, more individual, and more clearly placed in the left/right stereo space than on the Background album. I suspect that the inter-channel timing-and-phase corrections for the tape deck head-azimuth error are largely responsible for this. - At the beginning of "A Winter's Tale", as Glyn begins to sing, you can hear an echoing reverberation behind his voice. I'm not certain whether it's synthetic, or whether it's the actual acoustic space in which he was singing - I suspect the latter, as it sounds too good to have been synthesized using 1970's reverb gear. In any case, it's distinctly more audible and detailed in the new version. To sum it up: based on a very limited sample (one listener, one evening's worth of comparison, and one playback system), I think that this could very well be the best-sounding edition of "Last Autumn's Dream" yet. I'm definitely looking forward to getting the final CD and package, once Repertoire starts shipping them to dealers. I'll be very interested to hear other peoples' reactions to the album's sound, once you've had a chance to listen to it.