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Purple Rain is still great, but the sound is terrible
By Alan Scherstuhl Wed., Jul. 9 2014 at 5:19 AM
Categories: Backbeat Features

Your copy of Purple Rain sounds terrible.

[...]

But for all that, your CD or MP3 version of Purple Rain -- an album that hit stores exactly thirty years ago -- is just a tiny, tinny hint of what the man and his Revolution actually unleashed.

[...]

Dare to turn "The Beautiful Ones" up loud enough for its waves of sound to wash over you with any power, and Prince's scream-o freakout at the end -- one of the best scream-o freakouts in all of pop -- will be so far in the red that you'll actually see that red: Your eyes will pop and bleed.

Has any album so great ever been allowed to sound so shitty for so long?

Seriously, back in the day, my dad dubbed the performance numbers from his VHS copy of the Purple Rain movie onto a high-end cassette tape. That tape still sounds better than the CD. Simply put: Non-vinyl versions of the Purple Rain album are like some beer you know will taste great but whose pour is half head.

[...]

Word is that Warner and Prince have made up. That new, remastered versions are on the way. That you'll be able to hear what the Revolution is actually doing. That the Vault will be opened and rarities appended onto the re-releases (the long version of "Computer Blue," maybe?). That maybe some of those vinyl-only B-sides and remixes might at last make CD in their full form. ("Erotic City" should never be less than seven minutes long.) That maybe The Time, Sheila E. and Vanity 6 might get welcome reissues as well.

That some of Prince's thousands of archived live shows might at last get legit release. That Prince fans will at last get pleasantly gouged the way Bowie and Costello fans have throughout the CD era. That there's still money waiting to be made on these old records.
That last one is certainly true, but not like it once was.

[...]

After one PR cock-up, in 2007, he tried to appease his hardest of hardcores by offering up a free song to a fan site. Called "PFUnk," and later "F.U.N.K.," its seven minutes of mad just-what-the-title-promises get-down stands, in my mind, as his best, freakiest recording of the 2000s. Prince being Prince, it's currently unavailable in any format whatsoever. Yes, even the free song he gave away to the Internet has been scraped off the Internet.

[...]

But when the deluxe Purple Rain finally hits, a little too late for its anniversary, will it be the culture-wide event it should be, something like when that last round of Beatles CDs hit a few years back? Or will it only be the old and nostalgic marveling at the way "The Beautiful Ones" bleeds into "Computer Blue," and "Computer Blue" bleeds into "Darling Nikki" -- and the way Dr. Fink's synthesizer flourishes on "Baby I'm a Star" finally don't sound like 8-bit Nintendo?

Sheesh. I suggest you read the whole thing, which is... odd.

I wouldn't expect the Beautiful Ones screams to be mixed out of the red any time soon.

Best point of the article is how good the film sounds.

The CD obviously to me doesn't sound as good as the vinyl, but it's by far among his worst sounding cds. SOTT and The Black Album are so bad it is comical. Even the Japanese SHM SOTT cd is well below acceptable. The fan made Foefeur or is it Pimp Sandwich are a little better, but I'll still take the vinyl versions of SOTT and Purple Rain over the released cds.

Jesus Christ Superstar! The CD doesn't sound that bad. Good lord. I remember when CD's were first coming out, and a friend had a player in his car (1986?). It was whenever that crazy French artist took over Houston, Texas and did a lightshow and with a music score... we marveled at how much clearer the CD sounded than our tapes or records. We were listening to "Let's Go Crazy" off of the CD.

It's not that bad. I feel like this is the exact opposite of The Emperors New Clothes in terms of the damnation of some of these CD', but the same sort of mass conformist delusion.

ufoclub said:

It's not that bad. I feel like this is the exact opposite of The Emperors New Clothes in terms of the damnation of some of these CD', but the same sort of mass conformist delusion.

Really? Have you listened to them since 1986? The drums are especially lacking.

There's certainly some mass comformist delusions in the Prince world, but I don't think this is one of them. The vinyl sounds better....typically Cd's sound better...not simply cleaner, but better dynamics....your cd would have been cleaned up from hiss, or dust, but it's because most of us have heard the songs in theaters, over radio, on vinyl, that we know the difference.

ufoclub said:

Jesus Christ Superstar! The CD doesn't sound that bad. Good lord. I remember when CD's were first coming out, and a friend had a player in his car (1986?). It was whenever that crazy French artist took over Houston, Texas and did a lightshow and with a music score... we marveled at how much clearer the CD sounded than our tapes or records. We were listening to "Let's Go Crazy" off of the CD.

It's not that bad. I feel like this is the exact opposite of The Emperors New Clothes in terms of the damnation of some of these CD', but the same sort of mass conformist delusion.

I know, right?!?

They could be better, sure, but they're not the utter unlistenable shit everyone likes to claim.

I expect the "remasters" to be given the crank it up, compress it down treatment to compete in the loudness wars. That would NOT make them better.

Hope I'm wrong, or that there's lots of bonus material to make up for it.

treehouse said:

ufoclub said:

It's not that bad. I feel like this is the exact opposite of The Emperors New Clothes in terms of the damnation of some of these CD', but the same sort of mass conformist delusion.

Really? Have you listened to them since 1986? The drums are especially lacking.

There's certainly some mass comformist delusions in the Prince world, but I don't think this is one of them. The vinyl sounds better....typically Cd's sound better...not simply cleaner, but better dynamics....your cd would have been cleaned up from hiss, or dust, but it's because most of us have heard the songs in theaters, over radio, on vinyl, that we know the difference.

I have all the 80's albums on vinyl AND on CD, and many on cassette. I've always listened to my music on a decent system and always EQ'd my music to my personal preferences, so, they've always sounded good to me. Vinyl of course sounds best as it has a richer more organic sound. CDs follow as there is no noise in the recording or playback. Prince's albums may not be among the best sonically, but they don't sound "bad" or unlistenable at all.

In my not-so-humble opinion, of course...

The Beautiful Ones doesn't bleed into Computer Blue.....

The one CD of Prince's that indeed sounds very flat and midrange heavy is Black Album, but really the others aren't as retarded a sound as the picture painted here!

Yeah, I agree. Purple Rain doesn't sound that bad. Not great either, but it doesn't suffer from the midrangey sound so much as some of the later stuff.

In the case of Prince's CD albums, many mastered before Diamonds & Pearls had a slightly off masters reputedly sourced from the master used to author vinyls (which have frequencies boosted and dampened to work with the vinyl record technology). At the most basic level these older CD masters could have been raised in level (without compressing the dynamic range), but they weren't.

But for those that think vinyl in general is superior in sound quality:

http://www.popsci.com/ent...lly-better

Take note of the part in the above article about the organic sound quality of vinyl. It's pleasant defect. But not at all an accurate quality. It's like an added sound effect. This is not the only article you can find about this.

I have all of Prince's albums and 12" up until Graffiti Bridge on vinyl. All my soundtracks I collect of movies were originally on vinyl. There's nothing wrong with CD's as a format in itself in terms of audio quality. In fact it can sound dramatically better to my ears.

What is really lost with CD, sadly, is the packaging art. That used to a huge part of getting an album. The big pictures, photos, graphics, sleeves, etc.