Verve - A Storm In Heaven Album

!!!CAUTION!!! The vinyl is fine, first rate ... I purchased both "Storm" and "Northern Soul" with both arriving with severely damaged corners. The process used for affixing the jacket artwork to the cardboard is lousy, resulting in creases that look like bends to the jacket. Also no download card. I've not heard from UDiscover Music (https://store.udiscovermusic.com), I've contacted PayPal whom inform me that if I do not hear from the company within 10 days, my money will be returned to me and the merchandise is mine to keep. Did you ever wish that you'd just not ordered something in the first place?

This version is alright for $20-25 but far inferior to the original vinyl pressing. If you love the album and have extra coin in your bank, I highly recommend the original press. I'm holding onto my original, so you'll have to buy from someone else.

yes exactly, "inferior"! updated to reflect that. sorry for the confusion.

I think he meant "far inferior to the original".. .

So it’s far superior to an original but you recommend the original?....reading this and trying to work out what you’re saying is doing my head in ????

Not the best of sound on this one. Nothing terrible, but not good at all. No download card, no printed inner sleeve. Just a cheap repress

With all due respect ... are you saying that the album has not been Remastered, that it's just a digital repress?

On my set up (Rega Planar 1) i'd describe the sound as not perfect, but pretty good. Bass is a little lost in there sometimes, and there's not quite the clarity you'd like overall, but, for the price you can pick this up for in stores, i'd absolutely recommend it.Nice heft to a lot of the tracks. My copy is a wee bit poppy at times, but this might not be the same for everyone. Packaging is fairly bare bones, gatefold with one sealed pocket, plain white sleeve, no insert, but of course has the four classic Brian Cannon/Michael Spencer Jones album photographs in a nice big format, although it's missing the band member shots. If you like this album and you don't already have it on vinyl then don't hesitate to get this reissue IMO, i've enjoyed it a lot since i got it.

Dont bother with this reissue - its a digital transfer. The 1993 copy and the composition itself, with electric guitars done purely on tape is probably the last and most recent homage to (british) psychedelic rock in its truest sense as it always was done (properly) in the 1960s - especially that last track - a tambourine!? It was around that time (93) small time studios and bands all started to embrace CD mastering (bigger audience/reach). The 2016 release is somewhat of a gimmick compared to the original, I will boldy venture and even suggest to buy the mp3 over it (because CD practices, let alone the performance of converters in your setup have become quite dubious and/or that watered down since Digitals introduction in the 80s).Anybody who spends hundreds on a hifi system, to play mp3 through is kidden themselves (like I did - a mistake), spend a quarter (something like £50 2.1 system off amazon) and you get more or less the same result. However with properly recorded music, like the 93 release, this changes of course with a chance the £50 will blow you away even more, still.Regarding technology, analog equipment is/was relatively compatible with itself in all its forms (tape etc), like dye / water dilutes with water where as digital is like water and mud, stones or glass - even bad analog systems sound good, as pure electricity; it flows how it wants. Then digital came along and complex-ified / restricted everything ten fold with maths, the signal flow has more tightly conditioned variables for matching the rec and playback sides for success, deeming the event of 'live' music more unlikely to get to listeners at home intact. Its only natural in a capitalistic market both ends were marketed / shot to pieces; a giant puzzle or maze one had to pay their way out of (sometimes not even expenditure could save you - for instance super expensive CD players in the 90s had highly flawed output stages).Electricity was simpler! Granted, digital was/is more convenient so its really a question of Restaurant vs Drive-Thru but I do anticipate the day we cannot switch the 230AC on at the wall because some idiot invented smart-usb-6.0power sockets, complete with touch screens and buggy software that prohibits users from switching it on, all for the sake of an extra marketing bullet point; accessibility or paranoid safety features! Insane! SMART DIGITAL TOILETS!!! it's coming for your money! BE WARNED!

I agree with your second paragraph. As I'm sure you know, " you can't polish a turd "My problem with digital is the linear vs minimum phase debate, and how the former is inherant in delta sigma converters. SAR converters is a much more elegant approach if the entire system (including plugin / DSP is run at 192k). This makes digital filtering redundant in all its forms. Once out the other end, the target format is at the discretion of demand, it could be analog or digital. I actually don't like vinyl as a format, As it stands I would only recommend vinyl over CD if it was recorded prior to 1987, even then there is a chance the CD might sound better if recorded between 1980 and 87 all the converters used in commerice were wholefully SAR and did not comprise of digital filtration / decimation (in turn linear phase pre-ringing). Music made before 1987 is more or less guaranteed to have been soruced from the master tape (the piece may or may not have digital synthesis component beside other mic/guitar feeds like EMU/YAMY/ROLAND synthesisers, but thats besides the point of mastering and transfer - which this discussion addresses).Eliminating the possibility that a recording has been digitally transferred alleviates much doubt (unless the mastering was botched as you say).I dislike mastering engineers. In the past they were warranted (cutting engineers as a example) but today there is simply no need, the typical team for a well prolished product should onsist of a compsoser, insturemnetalists, and recording engineer, The rec engineer may or may not share his job with the synthesisiser guy, of whome in the 80s was tasked with setting up keyboards or sequencing effects as the band played. By 1990s the whole sampling element became and offshoot and was consumerized. Akai and EMU enabled affordable sampling products and in tanderm, magazines marketed the one man band concept which gave rise to bedroom producers, dance music like house, jungle and eventually trance and the like which in most cases is wholefully electronic piece (made by ' one man ') with a vocalist layred on the top. MAstering engineers are redundant today, although their jobs are way too easy as it is, they still mmisunderstand the difference between loud (compressed) and wholesome (harmonically rich in hard-to-hear frequency bands). The latter was more commonplace in the 60s and 70s, usually as a byproduct of the 'lowly' technology that was used. Ironically such effect was not deliberate and yet added quality to the sound.

In 1993 vinyl was an afterthought even to the UK/EU market and the original pressing appears to use exactly the same mastering as the CD, that a label would take the time to cut a debut album AAA is highly implausible. The original CD is the best this album sounds to my ears, having compared at length a nice minty copy of the original album I paid some $80 for in 2009, and since compared to the new vinyl and CD remasters. Clearly the remaster has some additional presence and clarity but it's not worth the expense in dynamics when listening at reference volumes on a loud system. YMMV.We can only hope that some day an audiophile boutique label will reissue this as a 2LP set mastered AND CUT FROM the original analogue stereo master, come on ORG Music, Analog Spark, Analogue Productions, Intervention Records, MFSL, etc.The problem with digitally remastering isn't the digital, it's the excessive dynamic range compression. Not so noticeable on a dinky entry level stereo / Bose Wave radio / iPhone with basic in ear buds / etc., but fatiguing on a decent hifi at louder playback volumes. Dire Straits Brothers In Arms was a 16/44.1 recording and look at the rave reviews the recent MOFI 2LP 45rpm Original Master Recording release got, it's all about the mastering. While I'd much rather see an album with an analogue stereo master get the AAA vinyl treatment, I'd gladly listen to well-mastered 320 Kbps mp3 files than 24/192 high resolution wave files subjected to heavy-handed mastering. There are far too many "high res" downloads available these days that have the same crappy mastering as the CD and vinyl counterparts, like that last Coldplay album for example; who wants to pony up $20 for 24/192 files that only measure DR5 with the TT meter?It's definitely a missed opportunity here to go back to the original tapes and digitally master but as soon as Chris Potter's name was mentioned it was clear that's what it would be. A Northern Soul suffered a similar fate, tape master, digital mastering for vinyl - the Loco sessions in the deluxe set suffer even heavier handed mastering. And like ASIH the original UK vinyl of ANS sounds very much the same mastering as the CD.While I don't have a $100,000 set-up, it's not peanuts - https://images2.static-bluray.com/htgallery/168872_full.jpg(Goldring GR-2, Parasound Zphono, Goldring 1012GX cart)

Please first learn what deliniates SAR converters from Oversampling ones to realise how unnessecary and promient the latter are in music production today before you acuse me of lying. I try to educate people in such a way thats saves them doing it. Such a comment wouldve been considered a luxury to the 18 year old me, I would have killed for such insight before wasting hard earned cash, as done before had I learned what I know now, that in my own time, that without guidance. Ave some respect Friend and maybe you will be granted ease of mind. Playing this from vinyl knowing that it was sourced from a DAT recorder and associated horrible converters therein, is illogical.Have a look at this picture. Last chance. https://image.ibb.co/j6SFbx/TDA.png

i care about this stuff man...records are either well made or otherwise..... too beautiful to be mediocre,,,,,

Dude this is prime copypasta meme material right here jesus lorde

Chill dude, nobody cares about any of this stuff. The vinyl sounds good, buy the original for $100+ if you want an AAA pressing

The attitude "nobody cares about any of this stuff" is precisely the reason why things are the way they are.The mastering guys said they converted it digitally before pressing to LP for the re issue. btw. I doubt you or the average fan will fully grasp how needless that is given that they had access to the original tape but hey-ho.With regards to digital audio... The crucial difference between pulse width modulation (aka oversampling) and successive approximation (aka 1fs undersampling) conversion systems is a digital filter. I'm not saying digital audio is bad just that its far n few between to find good systems (like Ferraris are) i.e. where the filter is programmed 'properly', or simply conversion that doesn't involve one at all. Filterless was the case in money-of-no-object 1fs converters of which were used back when the industry had robust turnover and the folks designing the gear had a throughout and less impartial inter-disciplined understanding of analog electronics, a then mature development. 1fs converters used analog filters, you know before manufacturers began to cheat with programmed ones in conjunction with oversampling and put minor but measurable transmission deviations, that these filters supposedly suppressed, forward as selling points before input resolution and throughput rate, the latter of which was restricted due to data capacity limitations of the CD (a non existent problem today - digital filters are theoretically redundant, outwith perhaps cost effectiveness / cheapness). Designers traded the casualty of sound (detected by means of impulse measurements, something of which was well payed attention to in the older systems) for linearity and noise improvements. Linearity of which at 20khz isn't audible, and neither is noise 72dB down - Only because some idiot could measure, discern and pitch those improvements they sold them. Its expected the effect this has on sound to be misunderstood by whoever is at the helm of production today, of which in case you've not noticed can be virtually anyone due to the sheer abundance and access of the means to do so on the average computer. Its not even a profession anymore.Such people wouldn't have the first idea about conversion. Its all very well selling flat-to-20khz phase AND frequency response concurrently to the public but try pulling that off properly digitally and you'll soon realize you need a computer that can sample as fast as time itself. Stop time (by digitizing) and the signal can be manipulated in ways that does not respect physics in the same sense electrons do (and thus the conventional speaker or headphone), nor does this exploration respect the way we hear in the normal sense. And I'm talking about what the signal undergoes before its even reached the user, the processing applied to the signal before its even in the computer! Its the equivalent of applying mp3 compression to everything you record, BEFORE its ready for manipulation with plugins. The prevailing oversampling method but an unnecessary leftover from the CD era.As Mike Batchelor once said "Well these people might be very clever at designing digital, but they haven't got a clue when it comes to the analogue part.". It would be pretty naive to think that by owning state of the art vinyl rig playing this re-press, formed of signals from some dubious converter (an assumption either way) one is going to get euphonic results that will match the original. If anything stick to the mp3 download and use digital gizmos to enhance the sound and a setup not worth more than 200quid. Steve jobs was spot on when he said digital is a gimmick, because it is mate, its fuvbin crap!. Convenient, but certainly not the quality marketing perpetrates these days. Still not convinced? http://www.akm.com/akm/en/product/featured/velvetsound - See here, Capitalism at its finest, diversifying the very art of the conversion of electricity to digital, imagine that. I then wonder why this manufacture has chosen to do that buddy? because they charge what they can get and water the rest down, as with everything that capitalism touches you get what you pay for, and the idea of spending an arm for an amazing setup, when the practice of recording (in the studio) is subject to the very bs on that page is nonsensical. If one truley cared about sound they would soon learn that the only music worth that route is stuff made before 1989, after that your on your own investigating if whether or not conversion was involved at any stage before it was pressed (let alone recorded properly, in stereo as per the original 1931 invention that involves two speakers duh). Diversification of digital sound technology (or consumer-ification as i like to call it, where things everything consumers want turns to sjit) began in 1989 when chip manufacturers (Crystal Semiconductor, AKM), introduced cost effective methods of conversion to audio gear manufactures with too-good-to-be-true, tempting specs. I personally blame apogee for introducing the idea linear filters to consumers in late 80s, apple for encouraging the copying of CDs to mac "rip mix burn" late 90s, and finally 'music entertainment' websites for encouraging the download and distribution of mp3s via their very own torrent software in the dial up days, websites of which believe it or not were owned by the big four recording companies themselves (ironic), all factors that have contributed to the proliferation of garbage mono we now hear on the radio. The only time it sounds all right, is once in a blue moon and every other time when its playing some track from 40 odd years ago. I'm 25 and I'll be damned if this is the crap younger generations are going to think as good enough, because its not, OK? Baby boomers and their direct descendants had it good. Convenience has enabled the spamming of GARBAGE, to the point I had to write this lengthy rant in response to, on a discogs submission on a release I KNOW was recorded right, but has failed to be re-released properly due to (unintentional) oversights and this at every level not just mastering because "nobody cares about any of this stuff". Worst of all people don't see Consumer-ification as a natural byproduct of capitalism. It reminds me of that scene from futurama which depicts cities of mutants that develop underground.Do watch out for those programmed digital wall sockets and toilets though... you'll see. Anything can be programmed if people mortgages depends on it.Regards

I'm sorry but don't listen to this guy, the reissue is fantastic and sounds wonderful. Good enough for anybody who doesn't want to spend outrageous prices on the original pressing. Also most of what you say isn't true, just not a very good representation of digital audio whatsoever

Just bought this today and the first thing I noticed on opening is the sleeve differences. I own the original and it has a blue tinge and it has a gloss finish. The reissue is more green/grey with a matt finish..Also the front sleeve and the inside pic of the bloke on the chair are different takes to the original. The flames on this reissue seem more intense and obviously a different shot. On the original gatefold the bloke on the chair has his left arm down with the glass in his right hand. On this reissue the glass is in his left hand. Small differences but worth mentioning.

If anyone wants to know more about the verve record sleeves and artwork from all the early singles and albums check out Brian cannons microdot website. I have a rare book which gives info on every location and info on the covers. Book covers the verve,oasis,suede, and more. Can also look on YouTube Brian gives a guide to students about his work just type in brain cannon microdot in the search on YouTube it's a must for verve fans.

I didn't know about this release until I saw it listed on turntablelab.com. A few months ago I ordered the deluxe three vinyl edition from Hut Records off Ebay. As far as deals go that one is a no brainer. I can say that my copy sounds good, but a bit "fuzzy". Sorta like the cd I had from many years ago. I can't say what this re-release here sounds like, but I'd go with the review from ttmecvin below. Anyway it's great that this amazing album is back out there again. I only wish they released the b-sides to A Northern Soul on the reissue. I absolutely love the song "Grey Skies" which was released on the "History" single...

Hi there, here is a review. I am an owner of both SIH AND Northern soul original lps.I bought both these reissues as back ups. With regard to SIH i could see some cloudness on the surface while the NS was perfectly clear.Now a sonic comparison on my setup (garrard 401 denon 103r). The reissue is a really good performer compared to the original. I could say that it stood up to an 75% 80% of the performance of the original. However, it lacked on the crispness of the sound,the representation, a bit on the soundstage and less on the depth of the soundstage. The original was more involving and conveying in a better way the feelings of the tracks. Verdict- The reissue is a very nice piece of work and i strongly suggest its purchase for the amount of money it demands. Anyway, it comes really close to the original and this obviously depends on the capabilities of someone"s hifi system. I believe that in an entry level turntable the gap is even smaller. For the time being i will be keeping both my beautiful copies.Happy purchases! Enjoy your music...

Anybody got a review of the pressing/sound quality on this?

I've got crackles and pops too. They're not too distracting, but certainly noticeable. I guess that's a pressing issue. The actual master sounds pretty good, though I don't have an original to compare it with.

Got my copy today. Good sound, of course not as good as the original pressing. As is very often the case these days, this reissue is marred by loud pops and crackles even on first playback.What goes on?