“Shields says that the effect of the differences is cumulative and best understood over the course of a full listen. Having listened to the CDs on three different pairs of headphones and two different stereo systems of varying quality, I can say that they are slightly different (one is just a hair louder) but the qualitative distinctions are extremely minimal, at best. And there is a digital glitch on “What You Want” on one of the remasters, which seems both comical and tragic considering how long these have been in the works. So I guess I’ll be listening to the one without the mistake, then.”
–
My Bloody Valentine Loveless (Reissue) By Mark Richardson; May 11, 2012
I think this is really the best/last word on the remaster aspect, which is clearly quite important to the release seeing as virtually everyone’s been able to listen to one of the most perfect albums ever made since it was released, yet it’s now time to re-inaugurate it as slightly more perfect.
Reading comments, blog posts, and discussions on the filesharing site have been illuminating, since I’m used to hearing talk of audiophilia in the arena of Bill Evans’s Complete Riverside Recordings or Steely Dan, neither of which I’m particularly interested in listening to. So when some people say things like, “This sucks. Not worth the download.”, I have to question their allegiance to anything at all. [Not worth the free and illegal download?!] And maybe some people just like Bill Evans more than MBV or like [authentic artist] more than [flashy artist] or vice versa — it doesn’t matter. That’s fine! But somehow (other than the rare classical music snob, who’s usually more measured about his [and it’s always a he] posting on internet message boards) the issue of audio quality has always seemed, paradoxically, to be separate from that musical quality. And it’s cool to me to see the question raised and then sort of waved away very elegantly as above.
What I’m saying is “audiophile” is practically an oxymoron if you think about it.