Moody Blues "Question of bal." CD or SACD vs Vinyl

I would agree with you on the Moody Blues but the copies of The Yes Album and Fragile are excellent and rival the best in my collection.

OTOH, although the 5 different copies of Close to the Edge in my collection don't approach sonics of The Yes Album or Fragile the Japanese version on Atlantic is quite nice; better than the MOFI by a wide margin. Interestingly both TYA and Fragile are nothing more than standard US Atlantic first releases. My copies of Tales, Tormato, and Relayer are all very good but not great.

I'll have to keep an eye out for the Japanese version of CTTE. I've got the MoFi as well and it does sound pretty good. I tried to get a UK original Fragile but got burned. It plays well enough that I get an idea of how good a clean copy must be.

I have all Moody Blues major albums on original vinyl and on CD. I have all the US remaster version CDs, the MFSL version of Seventh Sojourn and had the original CD issue versions before.

I also have many solo Moodies efforts on either vinyl or CD, depending on title.

Also have seen them live in concert 5-6 times over the years, including several times within the last 3-5 years.

I have listened mostly to the CDs of late, but plan to revisit the vinyl again soon for comparison at which time I can offer some comment if anyone is still interested.

Overall, the re-masters were a nice improvement over the original CD releases. I find the recording quality to be satisfactory as a whole, occasionally very good. I could probably offer more meaningful comment on specific albums if desired. I can't really say that any one album offers categorically better sound than another. "Keys to the Kingdom" from the early 90's is probably the sloppiest, most variable or inconsistent from song to song, but it still sounds good.

The MFSL copy of Seventh Sojourn is very enjoyable, one of my favs, but I cannot say that I think it really sounds categorically better in any meaningful way.

Live, they are exceptional, true professionals, and sound better than ever, having refined their sound and arrangements over the years.

Their discography is not recorded to the nth degree of excellence, still I am never disappointed going back to the recordings after a live performance nonetheless.

I would say the arrangements on Question of Balance are the simplest and most conventional of the classic 7 albums. As such, this album will probably sound good on more systems of various quality than the other 6. The CD remaster of this particular album is quite good, I would say.

There are other Moody albums where the arrangements and mixing seem much busier and more of a challenge to discern audio details with, I would say. Lost CHord and Children's Children come to mind.

Regarding sound stage, I can proudly say that 80% of any stereo recording I play, regardless of source, including all Moodies recordings, has a sound stage from wall to wall, about 20' across with my Ohm 5's, even though the speaks are positioned only about 5' apart from center to center. I attribute this to the omni-directional nature of the Ohms combined with good clean amplification.

For the other 20%, the recordings are generally miked with a stronger center bias, so the sound stage is variably more limited in width, depending on specifics of the recording.