https://www.plaidroomreco...10-03-2025

.

One-Step vinyl is the ultimate vinyl pressing.

.

Because Sound Matters' meticulous One-Step process creates the definitive sounding audiophile version of the all-time classic album, Prince ‘Purple Rain’.

.

192kHz/24bit files transferred from the original EQ’d analog master tapes have been used to ensure‘Purple Rain’ has never sounded better!

.

This initial pressing of this One-Step version is limited to 6,000 copies. The album is housed inside a top quality, uniquely designed numbered slipcase. The enclosed LP will feature an “Old Style” single pocket gatefold tip-on jacket with original artwork, including the original inner sleeve and poster.Special care has been taken to faithfully preserve the original sound with exceptional clarity and depth, capturing the recording's nuances and subtleties at every step, in order to create the best sounding record possible.

.

The One-Step process is highly regarded among audiophiles and collectors for its unparalleled sound fidelity and represents the pinnacle of vinyl manufacturing craftsmanship.

The Estate will greenlight ANYthing that has to do with Purple Rain.

The Estate is now the subject of Gold, wanting to sell what's already been sold.

They're probably hoping that by coinciding the release with the premiere of the Purple Rain Broadway musical, it'll help them sell a few extra copies.

It's all about money.

[Edited 9/4/25 21:09pm]

I think it's great things like this happen, given Prince is a musicians' musician.

When you think of all the years we had to spend with these atrocious, lifeless CD masterings (and wear our vinyls and cassettes to a thread), or the brickwalled remaster Prince made, it's good news to see The Work finally treated as an audiophile treasure.

Some unsung mastering heroes come to mind when it comes to digital: Foefur's, even though his work ranges from exceptionally good (his Black Album is phenomenal) to a bit overcompressed and shiny, or Irukandji, with some 1985/1986 tracks sounding better even though they have been released since on the Crystal Ball 4CD set, or on the SOTT SDE.

We can only hope these guys have a fan big ol' ear, and that it's not just a marketing stunt (still, at 6,000 copies only, there are better ways to become a zillionnaire, so it looks more like a work of love).

That said, the "24 bits/192 kHz" statement is a huge marketing stunt, given it exceeds by far the audio range vinyl is capable of. But hey, that's how the audiophile world works.

[Edited 9/5/25 19:01pm]

They keep pumping this shit out because people keep buying it.

This time, its to try and suggest lossless remasters cut 'once' onto 75 year old technology that adds background distortion, is now the way you need to hear it.

How do they know they are scraping the barrel? The price. They are looking to squeeze whatever they can from the people willing to shell out yet again.

Also, notice the wording on the release. It's not limited to 6000. It's limited to 6000 for its 'initial run'. If enough mugs buy it, they will whip up another batch.

SquirrelMeat said:

They keep pumping this shit out because people keep buying it.

Yes, there are fans who has to have every format it was ever released in. Me, I'm happy with the CD and nothing else.

How many fucking copies of Purple Rain do we need? Are radio-listener fans the ones running the estate?

Londell and Charles are the thieves in the temple. Getting paid to do nothing.

TrivialPursuit said:

yawn

MIRvmn1 said:

This 'one-step' process is a scam. Yet another marketing bs to extort huge chunks of money out of vinyl-believers' pockets.
.

But I'll go further: the entire vinyl industry has become a scam by now. Almost everyone's mastering from digital files – and if you know a bit about vinyl mastering, you know that there are far more limitations the format demands than there are for CDs.

.

A master (which almost always is a digital file in these days) can be distributed untouched, uncorrupted as a high resolution (24bit), lossless, digital file. If you want to hear the master EXACTLY as it was finalised in the studio, the hi-res digital file is the format to get, period.

.

If you want convenience and you like to collect physical formats, then go for CD. That will sound almost exactly like the hi-res master, with only minor file conversions that are proven(!) to be undetectable by most humans' ears.

.

But if your a believer in vinyl, boy, you'll be taken for a very expensive ride. Not only the vinyl format is incapable of handling the dynamics achievable on CD, let alone the significantly lower signal-to-noise ratio, the noise, the unprocessable stereo bass range, the several different forms of distortion – but in 99.9% of releases, it will also be cut from the digital master file mentioned above. In other words: the vinyl-mastering process always corrupts the sound quality of the original, digital master in many ways.
Yes, even in the case of 'one-steps', no matter what they claim. They will sound better than normal pressings, but they're still worse than the digital originals.

.

There is a physical limit of how many records can be pressed with one stamper and that is usually around a thousand. So any 'one-step' release coming out in significantly higher numbers is either not a true one-step, or it is produced with a worn-out, noise-producing stamper (which already defeats the point), as creating another stamper would require repeating the whole vinyl-mastering process, cutting a new lacquer. That is why several thousand copies of one-step releases are only done from a digital source (remember the scandal of Mobile Fidelity lying about cutting their one-steps from analog masters?), as the precious analog master tapes would wear out too by playing them each time they'd need a new lacquer.
.
So why pay a premium for this heavily corrupted sound quality when you can have the original file it was sourced from? I know we all like to collect nice things, but let's not fool ourselves: vinyl today is a thing of nostalgia, not much else. You might even like the sound of vinyl more than the 24bit digital master, that's your preference, but it's NOT because it is 'better' (it cannot be better if it's different from the original master, as the later is what was approved in the studio), but because your ears are more used to the sound characteristics of all those sonic artifacts of our old, analog gear. That is not to say, of course, that digital gear cannot sound bad, but we're talking about the quality of digital masters, not how they might sound on a 'My First Sony' Discman.

.
And let's not even go into other stupid myths around 'virgin vinyl' and '180g vinyl' sounding better than the rest...

who are all these people who have 12 different copies of Purple Rain and 7 different version of the SOTT movie, bootleg and internet 'enhanced' versions not even included?

why?

is it because there is nothing else to buy?

SoulAlive said:

MIRvmn1 said:

People need to stop paying for celebrations, merchandise and all the pointless Purple Rain releases. Only then will the estate open the vault and release more music. But as things are now we most likely have to wait 2–3 years every time before there’s a new release.

Exactly! I really wish that the fans would stop buying and supporting these tedious re-releases.I absolutely refuse to buy another copy of ‘Purple Rain’ in any format.

But my God if you need yoga pants or a $5000 jacket, or a shitty tote, they got your back.

TrivialPursuit said:

SoulAlive said:

MIRvmn1 said: Exactly! I really wish that the fans would stop buying and supporting these tedious re-releases.I absolutely refuse to buy another copy of ‘Purple Rain’ in any format.

But my God if you need yoga pants or a $5000 jacket, or a shitty tote, they got your back.

yoga pants!

Good lord!

Can you imagine if the 12 year old you was told that one day, you could go on your typewriter and type in a few letters and you will have a whole store of Prince things!

and then you get this crap!

CANT TAKE IT NO MORE!

Thanks, Kares. Your message needs to be put in a FAQ or something.

I have PR on Vynil,VHS, Laser disk, 3 reg cds, 2 special cds, reg dvd, blu-ray.

PLEASE..........stop it. ................and yes.........I've learned my lesson.

I'm a dorky record collector, I love vinyl mainly for the bigger artwork, the nostalgia, and the collectability. I wouldn't ever bother with physical media in 2025 for other things; like, CD audio seems fairly unnecessary in a world of computers and digital files. But vinyl is fun to look at and listen to, I like the sound, the crackle, it's charming and I understand why people like it.

Also for a specific era of music recorded on analogue tape, mixed and mastered to suit vinyl as the dominant format of the time, it's awesome. Even the time constraints work well for me, it felt like albums got too extended, flabby and looooong when we all moved to CD and later to MP3. Sometimes the constraints of an inferior legacy technology can still yield pleasing results for all kinds of listeners, and that's how I feel about LPs.

There's definitely a small audiophile subset of vinyl lovers who also want the best version of that vinyl sound that they can achieve, within that class of technology. It's pretty harmless imho - and arguably it's not about the best possible audio fidelity / reproduction (of course, because it is vinyl) but it is more about getting the best possible vinyl experience, within the limitations of the format. They're not dumb believers, it's just their interest and why not?

Having said all that... no one needs another copy of Purple Rain, we have enough now. It was a badly recorded album, with tonnes of bleed between the tracks, so chasing audiophile perfection there is kinda missing the point. My original copy from 84 still sounds great. I've bought all the other versions too, and I think... honestly I am done with spending money on Purple Rain.

Kares said:

This 'one-step' process is a scam. Yet another marketing bs to extort huge chunks of money out of vinyl-believers' pockets.
.

But I'll go further: the entire vinyl industry has become a scam by now. Almost everyone's mastering from digital files – and if you know a bit about vinyl mastering, you know that there are far more limitations the format demands than there are for CDs.

.

A master (which almost always is a digital file in these days) can be distributed untouched, uncorrupted as a high resolution (24bit), lossless, digital file. If you want to hear the master EXACTLY as it was finalised in the studio, the hi-res digital file is the format to get, period.

.

If you want convenience and you like to collect physical formats, then go for CD. That will sound almost exactly like the hi-res master, with only minor file conversions that are proven(!) to be undetectable by most humans' ears.

.

But if your a believer in vinyl, boy, you'll be taken for a very expensive ride. Not only the vinyl format is incapable of handling the dynamics achievable on CD, let alone the significantly lower signal-to-noise ratio, the noise, the unprocessable stereo bass range, the several different forms of distortion – but in 99.9% of releases, it will also be cut from the digital master file mentioned above. In other words: the vinyl-mastering process always corrupts the sound quality of the original, digital master in many ways.
Yes, even in the case of 'one-steps', no matter what they claim. They will sound better than normal pressings, but they're still worse than the digital originals.

.

There is a physical limit of how many records can be pressed with one stamper and that is usually around a thousand. So any 'one-step' release coming out in significantly higher numbers is either not a true one-step, or it is produced with a worn-out, noise-producing stamper (which already defeats the point), as creating another stamper would require repeating the whole vinyl-mastering process, cutting a new lacquer. That is why several thousand copies of one-step releases are only done from a digital source (remember the scandal of Mobile Fidelity lying about cutting their one-steps from analog masters?), as the precious analog master tapes would wear out too by playing them each time they'd need a new lacquer.
.
So why pay a premium for this heavily corrupted sound quality when you can have the original file it was sourced from? I know we all like to collect nice things, but let's not fool ourselves: vinyl today is a thing of nostalgia, not much else. You might even like the sound of vinyl more than the 24bit digital master, that's your preference, but it's NOT because it is 'better' (it cannot be better if it's different from the original master, as the later is what was approved in the studio), but because your ears are more used to the sound characteristics of all those sonic artifacts of our old, analog gear. That is not to say, of course, that digital gear cannot sound bad, but we're talking about the quality of digital masters, not how they might sound on a 'My First Sony' Discman.

.
And let's not even go into other stupid myths around 'virgin vinyl' and '180g vinyl' sounding better than the rest...

You state "corrupts the quality" like it's always a bad thing.
I would say AAA will always sound better than AAD, especially for all the pre-90's Prince records.


Before we old-timers hit our fifties, we all had good audio memory (possibly some of us we still do), and there's a reason why a lot of us complained for years about the very poor mastering of Prince's albums CD releases (again, until the end of the eighties).

Do not confuse "audiophiles", these pathetic wankers, with musicologists: the latter have nothing but praises for the so-called "poor recording" of Purple Rain. It's precisely the paste, the warmth, the textures they're after, fuck Bruce Swedien and his "Acusonic Recording Process", and all the pathetic masturbations about pristine sounding.

It's like saying "Rubber Soul" was poorly recorded, and by today's techno-obsessed all-surface-no-depth standards, they most certainly were. Go fetch the Abbey Road multitrack stems, and tell me they don't hiss and distort. That's what makes them fantastic. They have character, and so did Prince recordings before he turned all bourgeois.


Years before "Tape Saturation" plugins became all the rage, Prince had it nailed: its sound greatly relied on pushing needles in the red, as Susan Rogers stated many times. Anyone complaining about the "audio quality" of the eighties clearly never experienced Prince's records in a proper manner.

Bernie Grundman understood it perfectly, and so did the engineers responsible for Prince's vinyl pressings and K7 tapes duplication at WEA, Germany. You can vaunt about digital at will, it doesn't take away the fact that "Erotic City", "Another Lonely Christmas", "She's Always In My Hair", just to take some obvious examples, sound ten times better than any digital mastering that was made after their Maxi 45 rpm releases.


The problem is, analog degrades fast, and it would be difficult to compare them today, after having played them so much they crack and pop as if played from inside a chimney.

But for those who remember their Maxell 90 XLII CrO2 (the Gold Label, not the shitty black case things they produced after) playlists, carefully made from vinyl passing through real audio components (separate turntable, separate amplifier, separate cassette deck with VU-meters, each weighing a ton), the result was nothing short of aural 3-D.

There are true vinyl mastering artisans out there, people who know their shit and take maximum care of how the dynamics are interpreted and rendered. You're right in saying that it's utter nonsense to have digital master tapes and then squeeze them into vinyl.
That's a fad and an easy money grabber.


Nonetheless, just can't brush away analog just because, from a scientific standpoint, it has "less resolution". Its "limitations" are precisely why some skilled people can make harmonics shine and bite, compress in a musical way, and it was almost always the case back when HiFi was a real thing, not a Reddit channel for wankers. Everyone boasts about their audio system, but we live in a world with lots of self-deluded deaf people in it.

It all boils down to this: in the eighties, we were still on the comet's tail of the HiFi mania of the seventies, and it showed in the ear drums.
Even low-budget Sony Walkman and headphones packages sounded way greater than any bullshit, microscopic-transistor-made iPod or smartphone (Audio needs resistance. Any audio component that doesn't weighs at least 10 lb. is crap).
If you had the cash to get something great, or truly insane, you were in heaven.

Even when you reduce some of the Prince analog recordings to castrated 256k mp3's, they still sound better than the awful CDs Warner put out. Take "Dirty Mind" or "Controversy" in their "Homemade Deluxe Edition" (I'm referring to the bootlegs of the same name), they sound way, way, way better than their WB CD's counterparts. It's night and day.




Aside: I always repeat this like I'm senile: whatever the source, after hitting 40 (or 30, depending on how loud you damaged your eardrums in your youth) using an equalizer at all times is mandatory, there are tools to help you draw the curve your audition requires.

And if you're the headphones type, correction software is a must: Mac or iPad owners should go for this unlimited demo, (Apple doesn't permit to mingle with iPhones’ audio, those cretins, except for the inane marketing turd call "Atmos", as in "Utmost Hype").
Android users can use this.
Correction software can even improve budget monitors.



So Do Yourself A Favour if you haven't already: fix what goes into your Big Ol' Old Ears.
Y'all thank me later.




PS : So you can all (rightly) moan about it, but if they actually preserved the entire analog chain from the Bernie Grundman master tapes and put them into expert hands and ears, and if there is one Orger that didn't burn all his dineros in shit and patiently waited for this kind of audiophile release, I'm all ears, let me know how it sounds.

[Edited 9/11/25 18:28pm]

BonnieC said:

Kares said:

This 'one-step' process is a scam. Yet another marketing bs to extort huge chunks of money out of vinyl-believers' pockets.
.

But I'll go further: the entire vinyl industry has become a scam by now. Almost everyone's mastering from digital files – and if you know a bit about vinyl mastering, you know that there are far more limitations the format demands than there are for CDs.

.

A master (which almost always is a digital file in these days) can be distributed untouched, uncorrupted as a high resolution (24bit), lossless, digital file. If you want to hear the master EXACTLY as it was finalised in the studio, the hi-res digital file is the format to get, period.

.

If you want convenience and you like to collect physical formats, then go for CD. That will sound almost exactly like the hi-res master, with only minor file conversions that are proven(!) to be undetectable by most humans' ears.

.

But if your a believer in vinyl, boy, you'll be taken for a very expensive ride. Not only the vinyl format is incapable of handling the dynamics achievable on CD, let alone the significantly lower signal-to-noise ratio, the noise, the unprocessable stereo bass range, the several different forms of distortion – but in 99.9% of releases, it will also be cut from the digital master file mentioned above. In other words: the vinyl-mastering process always corrupts the sound quality of the original, digital master in many ways.
Yes, even in the case of 'one-steps', no matter what they claim. They will sound better than normal pressings, but they're still worse than the digital originals.

.

There is a physical limit of how many records can be pressed with one stamper and that is usually around a thousand. So any 'one-step' release coming out in significantly higher numbers is either not a true one-step, or it is produced with a worn-out, noise-producing stamper (which already defeats the point), as creating another stamper would require repeating the whole vinyl-mastering process, cutting a new lacquer. That is why several thousand copies of one-step releases are only done from a digital source (remember the scandal of Mobile Fidelity lying about cutting their one-steps from analog masters?), as the precious analog master tapes would wear out too by playing them each time they'd need a new lacquer.
.
So why pay a premium for this heavily corrupted sound quality when you can have the original file it was sourced from? I know we all like to collect nice things, but let's not fool ourselves: vinyl today is a thing of nostalgia, not much else. You might even like the sound of vinyl more than the 24bit digital master, that's your preference, but it's NOT because it is 'better' (it cannot be better if it's different from the original master, as the later is what was approved in the studio), but because your ears are more used to the sound characteristics of all those sonic artifacts of our old, analog gear. That is not to say, of course, that digital gear cannot sound bad, but we're talking about the quality of digital masters, not how they might sound on a 'My First Sony' Discman.

.
And let's not even go into other stupid myths around 'virgin vinyl' and '180g vinyl' sounding better than the rest...

You state "corrupts the quality" like it's always a bad thing.
I would say AAA will always sound better than AAD, especially for all the pre-90's Prince records.


Before we old-timers hit our fifties, we all had good audio memory (possibly some of us we still do), and there's a reason why a lot of us complained for years about the very poor mastering of Prince's albums CD releases (again, until the end of the eighties).

Do not confuse "audiophiles", these pathetic wankers, with musicologists: the latter have nothing but praises for the so-called "poor recording" of Purple Rain. It's precisely the paste, the warmth, the textures they're after, fuck Bruce Swedien and his "Acusonic Recording Process", and all the pathetic masturbations about pristine sounding.

It's like saying "Rubber Soul" was poorly recorded, and by today's techno-obsessed all-surface-no-depth standards, they most certainly were. Go fetch the Abbey Road multitrack stems, and tell me they don't hiss and distort. That's what makes them fantastic. They have character, and so did Prince recordings before he turned all bourgeois.

Years before "Tape Saturation" plugins became all the rage, Prince had it nailed: its sound greatly relied on pushing needles in the red, as Susan Rogers stated many times. Anyone complaining about the "audio quality" of the eighties clearly never experienced Prince's records in a proper manner.

Bernie Grundman understood it perfectly, and so did the engineers responsible for Prince's vinyl pressings and K7 tapes duplication at WEA, Germany. You can vaunt about digital at will, it doesn't take away the fact that "Erotic City", "Another Lonely Christmas", "She's Always In My Hair", just to take some obvious examples, sound ten times better than any digital mastering that was made after their Maxi 45 rpm releases.

The problem is, analog degrades fast, and it would be difficult to compare them today, after having played them so much they crack and pop as if played from inside a chimney.

But for those who remember their Maxell 90 XLII CrO2 (the Gold Label, not the shitty black case things they produced after) playlists, carefully made from vinyl passing through real audio components (separate turntable, separate amplifier, separate cassette deck with VU-meters, each weighing a ton), the result was nothing short of aural 3-D.

There are true vinyl mastering artisans out there, people who know their shit and take maximum care of how the dynamics are interpreted and rendered. You're right in saying that it's utter nonsense to have digital master tapes and then squeeze them into vinyl.
That's a fad and an easy money grabber.


Nonetheless, just can't brush away analog just because, from a scientific standpoint, it has "less resolution". Its "limitations" are precisely why some skilled people can make harmonics shine and bite, compress in a musical way, and it was almost always the case back when HiFi was a real thing, not a Reddit channel for wankers. Everyone boasts about their audio system, but we live in a world with lots of self-deluded deaf people in it.

It all boils down to this: in the eighties, we were still on the comet's tail of the HiFi mania of the seventies, and it showed in the ear drums.
Even low-budget Sony Walkman and headphones packages sounded way greater than any bullshit, microscopic-transistor-made iPod or smartphone (Audio needs resistance. Any audio component that doesn't weighs at least 10 lb. is crap).
If you had the cash to get something great, or truly insane, you were in heaven.

Even when you reduce some of the Prince analog recordings to castrated 256k mp3's, they still sound better than the awful CDs Warner put out. Take "Dirty Mind" or "Controversy" in their "Homemade Deluxe Edition" (I'm referring to the bootlegs of the same name), they sound way, way, way better than their WB CD's counterparts. It's night and day.

Aside: I always repeat this like I'm senile: whatever the source, after hitting 40 (or 30, depending on how loud you damaged your eardrums in your youth) using an equalizer at all times is mandatory, there are tools to help you draw the curve your audition requires.

And if you're the headphones type, correction software is a must: Mac or iPad owners should go for this unlimited demo, (Apple doesn't permit to mingle with iPhones’ audio, those cretins, except for the inane marketing turd call "Atmos", as in "Utmost Hype").
Android users can use this.
Correction software can even improve budget monitors.

So Do Yourself A Favour if you haven't already: fix what goes into your Big Ol' Old Ears.
Y'all thank me later.

PS : So you can all (rightly) moan about it, but if they actually preserved the entire analog chain from the Bernie Grundman master tapes and put them into expert hands and ears, and if there is one Orger that didn't burn all his dineros in shit and patiently waited for this kind of audiophile release, I'm all ears, let me know how it sounds.

[Edited 9/11/25 18:28pm]

.

Frankly that's a whole lot of bs I don't even feel like responding to. But I really don't appreciate you putting words in my mouth. I never said 'analog is worse due to having less resolution' (it would've been a stupid statement too). In fact I said that digital resolution is not THAT important as 99% of folks can't tell the difference between 16bit and 24bit versions, so CD is still a perfectly good format.

SquirrelMeat said:

They keep pumping this shit out because people keep buying it.

This time, its to try and suggest lossless remasters cut 'once' onto 75 year old technology that adds background distortion, is now the way you need to hear it.

How do they know they are scraping the barrel? The price. They are looking to squeeze whatever they can from the people willing to shell out yet again.

Also, notice the wording on the release. It's not limited to 6000. It's limited to 6000 for its 'initial run'. If enough mugs buy it, they will whip up another batch.

Ding ding on the 6,000 copy catch, SM! I saw that as well but glad you pointed it out and posted it.