Metamatic Forums John Foxx John Foxx and Louis Gordon Double Metamatic CD this Autumn

A 2CD edition of Metamatic! I can't wait!

I've mentioned it on here before; there's definitely tape drop-out on 'Young Love'.

Message to Rob; are you restoring the artwork? After the Island re-issues I hope so!

So apart from better sound quality, what do we want from the new edition? What additional tracks would you like to see on there? Here's a list of what we officially know of - can anyone add to it?

Plaza
He's a Liquid
Underpass
Metal Beat
No-One Driving
A New Kind of Man
Blurred Girl
030
Tidal Wave
Touch and Go

Additional Tracks:

Young Love
Film One
No-One Driving (7" mix)
Glimmer
This City
Mr No
Burning Car
20th Century

The recent 'Architecture and Morality' came with a DVD which included the Drury Lane performance and 3 videos - I hope we get some of the videos with this 'Metamatic' re-issue.

Sorry but that's brainwRong!
If they're pressed from the same digital master file they'd be ... the same - more recent manufacturing won't make it sound any different.

I wouldn't like to hear new stereo mixes, that would just be ridiculous sacrelige!!
A new 5.1 mix from the original multitracks would be a nice bonus though.... mind you, since it was only an 8-track recording to begin with, there's not that many different parts to play with!

Bring it on!!!!!!!!!

I have not heard any of the stuff referred to in the other messages.

Looks like I am buying some more CD's!

My 9 year old will be looking forward to getting my old copy of Metamatic though!

H

I can see your point F1, but i was thinking in terms that manufactures are improving the qaulity of there aluminum
and plastics at pressing plants constantly to improve the sound captured from the same digital masters from any bands out put.

Secondly, the edsel discs do not state being remastered (which would have been a good selling point if they had been), but the sound qaulity is better.

i think you need to do a little web-reading on how CDs work! ANY disc has thousands of "errors" on it, but the CD player basically manages to "correct" them when it reads the disc... if there's too many, you just get digital hash or skipping - below that threshold, it sounds the same. It's not like an analogue format where you get progressive worse.
So, in short, "improvements" in the physical disc manufacture won't make a blind bit of difference - either the disc plays or it doesn't.

A lot of modern "mastering" of discs is dreadful anyways - they put ridiculous multiband compression on things to make them "louder", ruining the dynamics of the original.

'A little web-reading'

I read a pile of books over 9ft tall just to pass my early exams on the way to becoming an IT and Digital Media Professional. The cd player component your referring to is known as the 'correction circuit'. Yes if theres too many errors it simple will not play, BUT they do still play if made with bad qaulity aluminum and few errors. But it still plays with the laser refracted back rather than a clear reflection, hence the sound change even though it plays.
Think of it as like the difference between good and bad qaulity mirrors, you get a change in the image, but its still there.

Sadly, i agree with you about the multiband 'whatever thingy whats it'

Well pardon me if I'm misunderstanding you (I only have an MSc in Music Technology, myself ;-) but you sound very much like you're under the misapprehension that there's a nice analogue relationship between the laser coming back and the sound output, like the way a needle reads a vinyl groove.

As you should be aware, CD's a binary digital medium
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Disc#Data_structure
The laser is either decoded as a 1 or a 0... provided there's no uncorrectable errors for a frame, it doesn't matter how dodgy the laser was, the PCM data is still reconstructed perfectly. If the media is so borderline that you're getting tons of uncorrectable errors (C2) then you'll start hearing skipping, glitching and the like - *not* a *subtle* "oh, this version of the CD sounds somehow better than the other one".
Anyway, pressing plants always QA checked things for those kind of errors.

I do recall doing an A/B test of the Virgin Metamatic CD with the Edsel one at the time, and seem to recall they did sound subtley different - this might suggest they were pressed from different digital transfers of the original analogue stereo master tape... certainly there'd been no drastic re-EQing or dynamics processing applied to them, which is probably a good thing!

The original vinyl Metamatic would of course have been mastered with an appropriate vinyl-EQ curve, to stop the needle jumping out of groove when the moog basses and CR78 bass drums kicked
As I'm sure many folk know, many CDs in the 80s were pressed from these vinyl cutting masters, with their attendant bass rolloff etc, and were digitized using wick A/D convertors,
and so sounded pants.
Conceivably, both the Virgin and Edsel CDs coulda been produced this way, but I doubt it...

I know F1, thats why i/we have always valued your opinions on the more techy subjects at the Foxx threads at EV. It was as you said though, me being misunderstood.

Yes it could well be just different master tapes used in the virgin and edsel cds, so if we use this as common ground to agree in part, it should save the 'double metamatic cd' thread from being accidently hijacked.

well, it's a fairly pertinent subject - if we're being offered to the chance to buy Metamatic a 4th time (vinyl, and 3 CD issues), it's good to know what the differences are!