Surrender

HP wireless Lan on, that's a good start to blog I think sat in front of the laptop today.
Well, over here we're in awe of the Olympics with some events taking place in nearby Manchester despite all that London 2012 stuff, it's much wider than that and I'm thinking back to the first Olympics I recall watching, the '76 ones in Montreal, QE.
That takes me back to an artist who was jam hot back then, Diana Ross and specifically the 'Black Album' that helped rise the bar of  emergent disco with the classic Love Hangover seguing from soft soul to full on disco as well as tracks such as Do You Know Where You're Going To? and her cover of the Charles Chaplin song, Smile. Well recently the specialty arm of Univerrsal, Hip-O reissued it with alternative mixes and previously unreleased songs all freshly re-mastered on 2 cds.
That's no bad thing as a number of those early Motown cds do sound at best mediocre and some downright edgy and for years they've been the only ones on the market. This double issue of Diana Ross (1976) is a big improvement on the old 80's American cd and comes close to my original UK Tamla_Motown lp with more transparency and presence.
I also got a number of other titles issued over the years in this series by Hip-O although one - the Expanded edition of Last Time I Saw Him - is out of print on cd so I went to my favourite download store, 7Digital and bought a 320Kbps download of it. You don't have install any fancy software on your computer as you can get the 'Zip file' download option, and using the extraction tool built into Windows, extract to the Music library to ply or share with your digital music player.
I'll proceed to annoy the audio purists by saying in my opinion, the download did sound really good being better than a number of cds I've bought new!
The titles so far In I have are, Diana aka Ain't No Mountain High Enough, Everything Is Everything, Surrender including the UK#1 I'm Still Waiting, Touch Me In The Morning, Last Time I Saw Him (Her country flavoured set) and Diana Ross. I hope they tackle Baby It's Me as my old cd suffers from 'sticky top syndrome' being made by Nimbus here in the UK when this accident was common in the late 80's and I'd love to replace it.

Twofer mania!

Just when you all thought I'd got it all done I surprised a few with an outbreak of twofer mania this month. I blame antonkk and that Diana thread!!! He didn't realize not only did it have me searching the world for a decent copy of her 1980 project with the guys from Chic, I ended up chasing an early series of discs Motown issued in the 1980's. 

The scene was the purchase of the 1986 CD release, Diana coupled with her 1979 Ashford and Simpson project "The Boss" with hits such as "No One Gets The Prize". There is a basic and I insist real problem with the 1998 Kevin Reeves version of Diana namely distortion and dynamic squashing. I know some have said he didn't do this and he mastered it from the originals which were hard to reproduce on on Lp with a lot of bass and so required some filtering for LP pressings but it isn't unknown for stuff to happen to a mastering engineers work after he's done it. Anyway I bought this old disc and it, as much as it might well of been a generation down from the master, sounds much freer and expands beautifully. "

Spurred on this find, I after nearly twenty years waiting got the Commodores Natural High/Midnight Magic twofer CD from 1986 pressed in Japan for Europe. It is very hard to find. It use the single edits of Flying High and Three Times A Lady to fit both albums within the then 74 minute time restriction of a CD but sounds amazing!
I also got the Marvin Gaye What's Going On & Let's Get It On twofer cheaply which sounds more natural than the 1994/8 issues

I got Mary Wells Two Lovers coupled with My Guy from the States which is a great stereo disc and actually quite rare

In January 2010 I picked up very cheaply The Supremes Let The Sunshine In c/w Cream Of The Crop from 1986 which was pressed in Japan