Steve Hackett / Spectral Mornings to get standalone deluxe with 5.1 mix

These three titles along with Voyage of the Acolyte, Cured and Highly Strung are being issued on Japanese SHM-CD around the same time. They appear to include bonus tracks but are not surround mixes. I’m also unsure if they are the Steven Wilson remixes or if this is just a clever marketing ploy by Universal.

The idea is to provide the material that was exclusive to Premonitions to the people who already have all of Steve Hackett’s discography (like me). So that we don’t have to buy the big box just for the exclusive content. So it’s a welcome thing that the 5.1 mixes are available separately from the box (along with exclusives such as Seven Of Cups).
Now I hope that the live shows from the box also get the stand alone treatment, because some of them were also exclusive to Premonitions.

The Premonitions box set is a thing of beauty in terms of packaging, the sequencing of across discs not as good as it might have been. But I have all the separate albums anyways. That is curious about the handling of the bonus tracks…

As for the DVDs, I didn’t even notice the lack of hi-res stereo for Voyage and Defector as that’s not my primary interest. These discs should have provided lossless 24/96 DVD-Audio surround tracks, given Steven Wilson’s involvement; the label calls the shots and we get only DTS 24/96 as second best and Dolby Digital as third prize. There was plenty of room for both and the initial artwork indicated DVD-Audio.

I hold out hope that many of the surround releases the labels consent to give us in lesser that possible formats will be redeemed down the road as Blu Ray Audio in some form. The usual complaint (objection) to releasing surround product is the cost of remixing; since that’s already been done all they need to do is re-release them at full resolution. This business is all about re-purchasing our favorites!

frustrating the way they have handled some of the previous bonus tracks. the alternate narnias were missing from premonitions but now show up here. also many bonus tracks from spectral mornings were missing on premonitions, this set gets a few back on but is still not complete. why?

even if there was not enough room in the main section cramming the 6 albums onto 4 cds both those albums got single disc treatment for their remasters so there was plenty of room for the tracks on the boxset.

annoying that it seems there will likely be tracks that are exclusive to the box and tracks exclusive to the old remasters/seperate album releases forcing completists to buy twice.

USA link for “Spectral Mornings” points to UK.

Oops just noticed Voyage is not included in the release schedule.

What was lacking from the DVD’s in the Premonitions box was hi-res stereo of bother Voyage and Defector. They only included hi-res for Spectral and Please Don’t Touch as they had new surround mixes from multitracks as those for the others were missing and pseudo-surrounds were made. So do these stand-alone discs reflect the same content as the box or have they included h-res stereo for Voyage and Defector?

That live performance (from Reading, August 1981) on disc 2 of the Defector package should have been a bonus feature on an expanded version of the Cured album (originally released August 1981).

I love Steve Hackett and these albums are great, but this is a very confused reissue program.

First, you get Premonitions which, in spite of some of my reservations, I picked up. It’s a nice set albeit with some curious programming choices (split albums between discs, etc.), but not a terrible value for money if you shop around. It also mostly reproduces the bonus content from the last wave of reissues but with improved mastering, so no problem there.

These eliminate the bonus content and just give you three versions of the album in a digipack… I can’t help but feel this is just cutting corners while flooding the market.