Springsteen Remasters: Wild, innocent and E Street Shuffle: Fantastic!

Music
1

Before buying the whole reissue series I thought I’d try one title that I knew could sound pretty good, since it has a lot of acoustic instrumentation.

I compared a track from an 88k download I found floating around a while back , which was of dubious lineage since the album had never been released in high resultion, but the track did sound a little better than the cd rip.

Al. I can say is that this new remastering is simply fantastic. The process they used (which had been used for the grateful dead Remasters) where they correct for wow and flutter on the original master, is clearly evident. The pitch stability and solidity yields real benefits. The bandwidth of the individual instrments on recoding is increased as well. There may very well be less compression, but can’t say for sure. Certain instruments and voices do seem to leap out. At moments this becomes almost like an audiophile recording, which for any Springsteen release is saying quite a bit.

While it would have been nice for them to have gone back to the multitrack masters, or release in DSD, I am quite happy with the purchase, and will probably end up buying all the releases. I have promo pressings of this album on vinyl, which I have not been able to compare yet, but I simply can’t imagine the LP providing this level of fidelity, even with my LP rig that costs many times what the the DS does.

2

Yes, they seem to have done an excellent job with these reissues. I sprang for all of them (ouch) but it was worth it. I don’t have the CD box set to compare to so can’t say how much better the high res downloads sound on the DS than the CDs but the downloads sound great.

3

Steve, are there any titles you wouldn’t have bought based on sound?

4

I haven’t listened to all of them all the way through or gone back and compared each of them to the CD versions I had. The quality of the original recordings does vary by album so some sound better than others. That said, the samples I listened to all sounded relatively quite good. I never liked the sound of The River that much but if you like the album this is an improvement. I think something like 5/7 of these albums had not previously been remastered. The high res Born to Run beat the remastered CD I have (which is not the one from the new box set).

livedownloads.com has the albums (as does HDtracks.com) and is often cheaper than HDtracks. They are also selling high res live recordings from recent tours. They sound pretty good too. (You can access them on the Springsteen site but when you purchase it sends you to livedownloads.com.)