The Who - Quadrophenia (1973) [Director\'s Cut, Super Deluxe Edi torrent

The Director\'s Cut/Super Deluxe Edition of The Who\'s Quadrophenia seems deliberately engineered to disappoint. The growing audience for 5.1 remixes got short changed when the label remixed 8 songs into 5.1 and then just got bored with it and stopped. Just stopped! Lazy! And let us not forget that the CDs have the 1996 remix of the album only; not the original 1973 mix (I\'ve been told they put the original mix on the new LPs, but I can\'t vouch for that. Fans of the original mix will be well-served by the MFSL CD. Or even the West German, depending on preference.)

Now, the original mix had its problems. Just like Roger Daltrey said, his voice really was too quiet in the mix, especially on \"Can You See the Real Me.\" A remix was a valid course of action. But the remix removes the cool flanging effects on Daltrey\'s voice in the aforementioned track, as well as \"Drowned\" and parts of \"I\'ve Had Enough.\" And there are places where it introduces problems. Why, in \"Love, Reign O\'er Me,\" do the strings suddenly get louder in the third measure? Then there\'s the problem of \"The Dirty Jobs,\" which must have been split across two tapes; one for the main body, one for the coda. Between the body running a little fast and the coda running a little slow, there\'s a noticeable drop in pitch at the last syllable of \"I\'m not gonna weep again.\" They could have at least fixed this one thing for the new box set, but they didn\'t. (This one bugs the hell out of me, so, since I have the technology, I made a speed-corrected version.)

Then of course there\'s the fact that Jon Astley brickwall-limited the music within inches of its life. Not a fan of dynamic range, are you, Mr. Astley? Can\'t we get beyond this era of pointless compression?

Really, the saving grace here is the 2 CDs of demos. They are far more complete than the bootleg collections. Since most people already have the 1996 remix, the demos are the real stars.

Scans of the box and book are also included. (Whoever scanned them didn\'t have a big enough scanner to fit everything, so he had to do a lot of the pages in parts. A shame, but they\'re here. These jpegs were resized from files that took up almost 950 MB of space and were 9-times the current resolution without actually providing any more useful detail. Trust me; I\'m doing you a favor.)

Incidentally, these rips came from the Japanese SHM CDs. \"What is an SHM CD?\" Super High Material CD. They use a superior grade of polycarbonate for greater transparency. Supposed to let the laser read the data more accurately. \"Does it make the CDs sound better?\" No, but some people like to pretend it does.