Led Zepplin Mothership vs. hi-res vs. newest

Whart, that's useful info. Part of my interest in this hobby is keeping a log of engineers and producers for rock bands 1960s thru 80s. Never felt the need to keep track of the mastering engineer, but nowadays the digital mastering is what determines the sound of the release. (even though it may be very different than the final mix).

I know I know, I need to get a life.

I can only talk about the CD versions but Mothership is pretty heavily compressed.

I think the new issues are the best digital available-in my system the downloads are a tad better than the CD.

Really amazing how different the responses are about Mothership's sound quality. Personally, I think it sounds sterile and generally is the worst sounding Led Zep remaster of them all. Nearly unlistenable to my ears. As to vinyl recordings being ruined by having ben subjected to some degree of digital processing or sourcing, that's not been my experience at all. The "Led Zeppelin" remaster 6 lp box set (Atlantic 7 82144-1) sounds very fine to my ears, much better than Mothership. I've not heard any of the latest releases. I've got good clean copies of the originals and the Classic vinyl releases, so I'm not in any hurry to buy the catalog yet again.

I suspect the wide differences in opinion with respect to Mothership is a reflection of the wide differences in system performance. Just saying.

I think it's how people react to compression.....I'll be the first to admit you can be seduced by volume and my take is that even a moderately expensive system if you are not atuned to compression it really probably only affects you subconsciously....or you might get irked when you can't find a happy listening level-it's too quiet then it's too loud.

I'd argue if your system isn't reasonably high end then compression might not bother you that much.

However if you have potent amp/speaker matching or a big system it can be unbearable-it really sticks out.

Mothership has a DR rating of about 6/7 and the new remasters 9/10 which mean more dynamic range and less compression.