The Best Of The Easybeats + Pretty Girl (Remaster)

 

 AUS Parlophone Mono LP, PMCO 7541
Released June 1967

01 - For My Woman
02 - She's So Fine
03 - Wedding Ring
04 - Sad & Lonely & Blue
05 - Easy As Can Be
06 - In My Book
07 - Women (Make You Feel Alright)
08 - Pretty Girl
09 - Come And See Her
10 - I'll Make You Happy (Just Like Your Mama Wants)
11 - Too Much
12 - Sorry
13 - Made My Bed (Gonna Lie In It)
14 - Friday On My Mind

 ==About the album==

"The Best of The Easybeats + Pretty Girl" was the first Australian compilation album by The Easybeats, released in mid-1967. Apart from "Pretty Girl", which hadn't been released previously in Australia, the album contained all the Australian A sides plus a couple of B sides, including three songs from the "Good Friday" album, which had been released in Europe in May 1967 but due to contract issues was not released in Australia: "Friday On My Mind", "Pretty Girl" and "Made My Bed (Gonna Lie In It)".

In October 2010, the album was listed at No. 6 in the book, "100 Best Australian Albums".

==About this transfer==

My original aim was to share a needledrop of my first-press LP. I did transfer it, and it came out very nice, however, when comparing to my reference copy (a 1990s Sony CD reissue, now long out of print), I noticed two things:

1. The LP sounded a bit duller
2. The CD appeared to be a straight, unfutzed-with tape transfer, right down to the tape hiss, tape machine/splice clicks and gaps between tracks.

So, recognising that my needledrop would not be a significant improvement over the CD, I decided to focus my attention on the CD mastering. See, I've always liked the CD, however, there's a number of distractions that stop me from *really* enjoying it. There's numerous dropouts, which, given it's clear the mono tapes were transferred on a stereo machine, are very noticeable (ie channel "ping pong"). The stereo transfer also introduced a channel imbalance, shifting the image slightly to the left. And, all of the side 2 tracks have "ticks" every 0.4s that's audible in the fades and gaps.

Fortunately, after some scrutiny, I observed that these problems were primarily limited to the left channel. So, I saw an easy solution.

I ripped the tracks to my hard drive and simply replaced the left channel audio with that of the superior right channel. This removed the obvious dropouts and ticks. The result was still not perfect though (good enough, but not good enough for me), as a small number of audible dropouts remained. I fixed these through some fiddly manual audio editing.

The result is an album that plays in true mono and free of obvious defects, thus making it IMHO much better than the commercial CD as well as my vinyl transfer.

So I offer it here, with full scans of the original LP artwork (the commercial CD artwork is atrocious), for your enjoyment.

Summary of my edits:
- Tape machine/splice clicks removed from the gaps after tracks 1, 3-6 and 8-11.
- Minor dropouts repaired in tracks 2, 4-6, 8-9 and 13-14. I've deliberately left some dropouts as they are inherent in the original recordings (for example, 30s into Sad & Lonely & Blue).

Notes:
1. "Sorry", "For My Woman" and "She's So Fine" sound like they're from vinyl sources as they're a little bit scratchy and distorted, but they're like that on the original vinyl as well.

2. There are some clicks scattered throughout, however, they are also on my needledrop, so I can only conclude that they are on the original tape (unlike typical vinyl clicks, these clicks appear equally in both channels). Thus I left them, as I prefer to present the audio as close to how it would have originally sounded on pristine vinyl way back in 1967.

3. It appears that the mastering is different on earlier EMI/Axis labelled CD releases. I can only confirm that the later CBS and Sony Music CD releases use straight transfers of the original tapes.

==Remastered by Q==

Source Matrices
01-14: Sony CD "The Best Of The Easybeats + Pretty Girl" - Sony Music Australia ** 465396.2 ** (DB) #05

Hardware
- N/A

Software
- Audition 3.0.1 (audio editing and repair)

Artwork included

CD quality (150mb) 

Hi-Res (not available)