Quote:
Originally Posted by John Jordan
Bill-
Congratulations on the Oppo. While having no personal experience with one, it enjoys a great reputation. Looking on-line, it appears you can plug in a USB external drive and play audio files from it. So, you can rip some CD's with iTunes and you are good to begin.
Ripping SACD's is beyond my current pay grade. Not sure I even own any. However, a few months back, there was a discussion here in the AAF forum. Many well seasoned folks
weighed in with answers. Perhaps someone can chime in as to where this discussion is.
Cream is one of my all time favorite bands. Almost always a sucker when a new release is issued hoping for that last nuance of SQ. How is that SACD of Fresh?
|
John..... I don't mean to come off as some kind of half-arse Lester Bangs, but I, too, don't believe in going softly on musicians. Clapton, for all his undeniable talent, was one of those guys that had to be accompanied by other great musicians to draw the best out of him. If you sit down and [really] watch the documentary, "Life In 12 Bars," for example, you'll see that the guy had some real problems and, until he was tied down to a group project, he was all over the place. There's a version of "High" used in that documentary that still gives me goose bumps, but the point is that he was working with other great talent(s) when that song was first created; namely, the Derek and the Dominos (DATD) ensemble.
YouTube (YT) doesn't come close to doing it justice, but you can hear the version I'm referring to on YT now -- I'll provide a link at the end of this post -- but I can't help but think about what could've been if he had gotten it together sooner than he did...
By the time he was sweating it out in my home state (FL), he was fresh off of a three-year drug binge. In keeping with my point about having to be matched with other talented musicians, here's an excerpt taken from an article about the production of
461 Ocean Boulevard (in early '74):
"....When the time came to record the new album, Clapton was worried about both its commercial and artistic success, noting his concept of a new album would work only when there was chemistry between the musicians. Clapton also hired guest vocalist Yvonne Elliman and guitarist George Terry as full-time members of his group...."
Anyway, the SACD version of Fresh Cream sounds pretty good. Does it sound better than my "redbook" version of Plant's
'Now and Zen,'? No, but there's 22 years of audio recording engineering between those two wonderful albums. In short, and at the risk of "borrowing" a bit of another poster's thoughts, I've come to the conclusion that the only true way to determine if one format sounds better than the other is to listen to the same album in two different formats...so maybe a redbook version of
Fresh Cream is in order, aye?
By the way, the SACD I'm referring to includes mono versions of every song -- including versions of five of the twelve original Fresh Cream tracks that were taken off of a French EP. The French mono version of
I'm So Glad is particularly interesting. In closing, there are (32) tracks on the Fresh Cream SACD.
CLICK HERE FOR THE DATD ERA VERSION OF 'HIGH'