Cult Legends

I bought the Iggy & Bowie Mantra studio broadcast in the supermarket. This sounds like a radio broadcast, recorded on cassette, then digitized straight to mp3 with very common Chinese hardware (which comes in various fancy outfits, but all contains the same inside), then edited to remove tape hiss and such (yea *cough*, "remastered" *cough*), then again saved (recoded) to mp3 before putting it on vinyl (*cough* high quality 180g vinyl *cough*.)

Sounds very thin, like it went through a band filter (which probably was the case while *cough* remastering) and was recorded way below the optimal level in at least one of the recording/converting processes. It is full of mp3 artifacts, which is no wonder as FM & mp3 are not compatible and recoding mp3 again to mp3 is an absolute no go.

I have no problem with low quality obscure recordings, but at least release them in a way that doesn't completely wastes the sound any further. I didn't listen to any other release of this label, but I rather spare myself the effort. Anyone releasing this is absolutely incompetent to release anything.

I can only give this label and it's *cough* "sound engineer" this advice: the lower quality your source is, the more important it is you use good quality equipment and, most important, that you actually know how things work. Recording artifacts tend to multiply each conversion.

This should never have been put onto vinyl or CD, put it on Youtube or something...

Rating: below zero...