Can anything be down about this? There must be an agenda!

Ebay and Half price books are you friend, just make sure you check the database first. I also troll the groups on twitter when they release a new version that is compressed as hell. Maybe if more people bitched something would be done. Maybe we can get Steven Wilson to do all remasters. He is the exception to the rule.

My bad. What I meant to say was the audio frequencies of vinyl recordings are best captured at 16 bit/48 kHz.

@millercarbon, it seems there was another secret meeting at Hyde Island where the exact opposite 'strategy' was concocted. Based on the premise there is no perfect digital, the industry decided to put out a crappy product, but sounding just good enough (accompanied by highly agressive marketing) for the convenience argument to win the game and convince everybody to switch to the silver disc and 'perfect sound forever'. After that 'big switch' they could get away with putting out endless variations of the original sin (uh crap), known as 'remasters', accompanied by other marketing tricks like new packaging and/or redundant bonus tracks. As long as the buying public could be convinced that every new remaster would benefit from higher bit rates that technology made available or offered something 'extra', they could milk this cow indefinitely.

Like with Jeckyll and Hyde, both are real (or unreal, if you so prefer). In some cases the first cd issue still sounds best, in other cases the higher bit remaster sounds better. But alas no 'Jeckyll' or 'Hyde' stickers, so there's no way to tell which is which.

Let's ponder this question: will we ever see a 'first cd pressing' collectors market?