Massive Attack / Blue Lines reissue

Ruined it. All the warm subtleties gone along with the dimension for the sake of loudness and over eq. Used to be my reference CD..

PS – on the french amazon, it is even cheaper than the german one, at 54,69€ ;-)

True, guys… Only the high res DVD seems interesting to me…

Anyone got any clues about the alleged high-res downloads? At the moment, if you click on that option on their website, it gives you a link to itunes… I was hoping for a bit higher resolution than that, I admit…

Still on the fence about this release. It’s a great album, and I’m keen to hear it in better-than-cd ways, but it’s priced ludicrously high for one album spread over three formats in this box. If there is an option for the high-res downloads separate to the box, that’s probably what I’ll go with. Who’s listening to the cd in that boxset? Maybe you’d use that to rip it to your ipod, but that can be done from the downloads anyway.

Tim: agreed! U2 are the worst high-profile offenders as far as remixes go. The bonus discs of their first two best-ofs are virtually unlistenable. As for posters, I thought they were great… when I was 13. And when they featured Debbie Harry.

I’m baffled by these re-releases where the same stuff is spread out over several different media types. Vinyl, cd, dvd, digital download. I need one format of a release, if I want to make high quality mp3’s from that I can.

As a consumer this is what I want:

CD
any promo vids
Well-written liner notes with interesting information about the history of the album. Lyrics as applicable. Production credits.
B-sides
Remixes as appropriate. Around ’94 the whole mix thing got out of hand with a lot of remixes not even sounding much like the parent track. I don’t need the house mix, the trance mix, the d&b mix, the techno mix, the dj’s cat takes a stab at it mix.

What I don’t need – t-shirts, hats, key rings, posters, needless duplication of product. I don’t need an elaborate box, I’m more concerned with content than appearance. Concert dvd’s aren’t needed unless they are contemporary to the subject matter and bring something to the table other than the band playing the album version of the song note by note for an adoring crowd. I’m not trying to impress someone with a product that they see on my shelf and think, oh, he spent $100 – $200 on that…..

I remain baffled by this trend of packaging CDs with vinyl, or putting anything on vinyl that isn’t available on CD or download. It’s been a quarter of a century since I owned a turntable – and, while I don’t begrudge anyone who prefers that format, all it does for the majority of us is a) deter us from buying boxes full of stuff we can’t play and b) encourage us to illegally download tracks that are vinyl-only.

If it turns out I’m in the minority, and every other superdeluxeedition reader buys and listens to vinyl, I’ll apologise. In between eating my hat.

I have the first edition vinyl LP that came in the screen printed mailer. It’s different to the one pictured on the top left above, as they’d had to remove “attack” from their name at that point because of the Gulf War.

Seems to a bit of duplication of the same material on this set though. I would have liked to have seen a classics albums documentary blu-ray, or something similar to Peter Gabriel’s So DNA CD.

Unlike PG’s So, the remixes & b-sides for the album have been widely available, so I’m not lamenting their omission from this set too much.