Does anyone actually have a confirmation that Avalon is even due for a US release?
I now have authorisation to post the original editorial, courtesy of David Price at www.hi-fiworld.co.uk
"My own personal favourite Roxy Music album is ‘Avalon’. It’s an unfashionable choice – lacking as it does the redoubtable talents of Brian Eno, it’s by no means as innovative, edgy or experimental as the likes of ‘Roxy Music’, ‘For Your Pleasure’ or ‘Stranded’. Released in May 1982, the band’s eighth studio album is actually quite significant, inasmuch as it proved to be the last where we’d see Phil Manzanera, Bryan Ferry and Andy Mackay working together.
‘Avalon’ was recorded at the Compass Point studios in Nassau, and the Power Station in New York. As with most ‘final’ albums, there were tensions in the studio during its recording, with the band pulling in differing artistic directions. Nonetheless, in conjunction with producer Rhett Davies and a wealth of session musicians (13, so I believe), it took the Roxy sound to new areas. Indeed, it could be argued that it set a blueprint for the production values of eighties rock albums – sounding immensely expansive, polished and atmospheric. A chance meeting with singer Yannick Etienne in the studio corridors famously led to the title track’s arrestingly powerful female vocal refrain weaving through the sax and guitars.
The result was tremendous chart success – in the days when you needed to sell more than double figures to get into the Top Forty. The first single, ‘More Than This’ reached number 6 of the UK charts in March 1982, ‘Avalon’ number 13 in May and ‘Take A Chance With Me’ number 26 in July. The album topped the charts and stayed in the album charts for 60 weeks. The original British LP release also proved something of a hi-fi stalwart. Its superb production values and very high standard of recording quality made it the dem record of 1982 – and for many years after.
With this in mind, I was most excited when I received an invitation from the record company to attend the launch party of the new SACD pressing of ‘Avalon’. Not only did it offer the chance to hob-nob with the three band members at Soho’s swanky Groucho club, but I’d have a chance to speak to producer Rhett Davies about how he achieved that brilliant sound. After thinking about the offer for all of three tenths of a second, I graciously accepted.
On a baking June afternoon, yours truly braved the London heat to get over to the Groucho. Upstairs I had a chance to drink beer and chat with the people behind the new Super Audio Compact Disc release. It was an impressive event, all done in the best possible taste and with no small measure of style. However, when I finally got the chance to ‘interrogate’ Rhett on the precise details of the new superbly packaged, shiny new SACD, things went swiftly downhill…
I started by saying how nice I thought the original vinyl pressing sounded, and he agreed. I then said that SACD would be an ideal vehicle for the re-release, with its nicely warm and detailed sonics well able to capture the delicacy of the original analogue master tapes. Instead of nodding emphatically, he dropped a bombshell. “Err, you know that this SACD is taken from DAT masters, don’t you…?”
Suddenly, the room started spinning. It wasn’t through an excess of ice-cold Budwar (which I’d been drinking for purely medicinal reasons), but Rhett’s revelation that one of the biggest, most significant SACD re-releases to date would afford not one scintilla of the theoretical benefits of Direct Stream Digital coding – multichannel mixes notwithstanding. Why? Because it had come straight from an old 16bit, 48kHz PCM digital tape recording!
Whilst the PR blurb had taken great pains to point out the sonic benefits of SACD, the album’s producer had just told me that they’d cut it from a second generation digital copy made sometime in the late nineteen eighties!
Apparently, the masters had been recorded onto a faulty batch of Ampex 560 which had been stored incorrectly, and its poor adhesive duly caused it to start shedding oxide. When the engineers noticed, they’d archived the masters to DAT before they passed the point of no return. The result is that the SACD had been mixed off these very second generation masters!
In an adjoining room at the Groucho Club, the new multichannel mix was being played through £50,000 of monitoring equipment, including five top B&W studio monitors. It sounded deeply mediocre. I told Rhett that I’d heard far better from my old Rega Planar 3, NAD 3020 and Tannoy Mercury system on which I’d originally played the album back in 1982. He didn’t look surprised – an early eighties vinyl pressing is, after all, far closer to the original (now tragically defunct) analogue master tapes…
All I can say is that - if this is what’s going on behind the scenes of most ‘high resolution’ digital reissues - then heaven help hi-fi."
I now have authorisation to post the original editorial, courtesy of David Price at www.hi-fiworld.co.uk
"My own personal favourite Roxy Music album is ‘Avalon’. It’s an unfashionable choice – lacking as it does the redoubtable talents of Brian Eno, it’s by no means as innovative, edgy or experimental as the likes of ‘Roxy Music’, ‘For Your Pleasure’ or ‘Stranded’. Released in May 1982, the band’s eighth studio album is actually quite significant, inasmuch as it proved to be the last where we’d see Phil Manzanera, Bryan Ferry and Andy Mackay working together.
‘Avalon’ was recorded at the Compass Point studios in Nassau, and the Power Station in New York. As with most ‘final’ albums, there were tensions in the studio during its recording, with the band pulling in differing artistic directions. Nonetheless, in conjunction with producer Rhett Davies and a wealth of session musicians (13, so I believe), it took the Roxy sound to new areas. Indeed, it could be argued that it set a blueprint for the production values of eighties rock albums – sounding immensely expansive, polished and atmospheric. A chance meeting with singer Yannick Etienne in the studio corridors famously led to the title track’s arrestingly powerful female vocal refrain weaving through the sax and guitars.
The result was tremendous chart success – in the days when you needed to sell more than double figures to get into the Top Forty. The first single, ‘More Than This’ reached number 6 of the UK charts in March 1982, ‘Avalon’ number 13 in May and ‘Take A Chance With Me’ number 26 in July. The album topped the charts and stayed in the album charts for 60 weeks. The original British LP release also proved something of a hi-fi stalwart. Its superb production values and very high standard of recording quality made it the dem record of 1982 – and for many years after.
With this in mind, I was most excited when I received an invitation from the record company to attend the launch party of the new SACD pressing of ‘Avalon’. Not only did it offer the chance to hob-nob with the three band members at Soho’s swanky Groucho club, but I’d have a chance to speak to producer Rhett Davies about how he achieved that brilliant sound. After thinking about the offer for all of three tenths of a second, I graciously accepted.
On a baking June afternoon, yours truly braved the London heat to get over to the Groucho. Upstairs I had a chance to drink beer and chat with the people behind the new Super Audio Compact Disc release. It was an impressive event, all done in the best possible taste and with no small measure of style. However, when I finally got the chance to ‘interrogate’ Rhett on the precise details of the new superbly packaged, shiny new SACD, things went swiftly downhill…
I started by saying how nice I thought the original vinyl pressing sounded, and he agreed. I then said that SACD would be an ideal vehicle for the re-release, with its nicely warm and detailed sonics well able to capture the delicacy of the original analogue master tapes. Instead of nodding emphatically, he dropped a bombshell. “Err, you know that this SACD is taken from DAT masters, don’t you…?”
Suddenly, the room started spinning. It wasn’t through an excess of ice-cold Budwar (which I’d been drinking for purely medicinal reasons), but Rhett’s revelation that one of the biggest, most significant SACD re-releases to date would afford not one scintilla of the theoretical benefits of Direct Stream Digital coding – multichannel mixes notwithstanding. Why? Because it had come straight from an old 16bit, 48kHz PCM digital tape recording!
Whilst the PR blurb had taken great pains to point out the sonic benefits of SACD, the album’s producer had just told me that they’d cut it from a second generation digital copy made sometime in the late nineteen eighties!
Apparently, the masters had been recorded onto a faulty batch of Ampex 560 which had been stored incorrectly, and its poor adhesive duly caused it to start shedding oxide. When the engineers noticed, they’d archived the masters to DAT before they passed the point of no return. The result is that the SACD had been mixed off these very second generation masters!
In an adjoining room at the Groucho Club, the new multichannel mix was being played through £50,000 of monitoring equipment, including five top B&W studio monitors. It sounded deeply mediocre. I told Rhett that I’d heard far better from my old Rega Planar 3, NAD 3020 and Tannoy Mercury system on which I’d originally played the album back in 1982. He didn’t look surprised – an early eighties vinyl pressing is, after all, far closer to the original (now tragically defunct) analogue master tapes…
All I can say is that - if this is what’s going on behind the scenes of most ‘high resolution’ digital reissues - then heaven help hi-fi."
