Eric Clapton reveals this week of his declining health

His Music will stay forever

A wise investment....Last fall I purchased Cream's "Wheels of Fire" album on a SHM-SACD from Acoustic Sounds. Paid $60.00. A year ago I went to a friends home who purchased the disc for a listen and was absolutely floored. Since SHM is the current standard for the SACD format, the quality of the album is stunning. Richer, fuller, very smooth, and very analog sounding with no digital artifacts whatsoever. Far better than the Mo-FI gold or re-master disc's from the past. The one tragedy I'll never get over when the album was cut by Atlantic in 1968 was how they butchered the track "Crossroads". When Clapton performed that song on stage, it was a very long piece, it was edited down and shortened so they could fit it in on side three due to the length of "Spoonful". We can only imagine what ingenious guitar work we will never hear from the full length version.

I hate to judge before all the facts are in but according to the Official Dynamic Range Database it appears the fairly recent Japanese Led Zeppelin SHM SACDs are horribly compressed. Is no one safe? 😬

The quality would be determined by which master tapes were used from the Zeppelin albums. Physical Graffiti is a terribly engineered album. The song Kashmir has always sounded harsh and cold. Their second album was much better engineered. "Whole Lotta Love" sounds warmer, richer, and more analog sounding. My SHM-SACD of "Wheels of Fire" sounds spectacular. If third generation master tapes were used would probably account for poor sound quality.

Shortened Crossroads.  How idiotic.

They did the same thing on 24 nights with "old love."