Iron Maiden albums (CDs) pressings with best sound quality

Jeffmetal said:
In this case, by general consensus, if there's one on that thread. But as I suspected, the japanese pressings seems to be really the top quality ones.
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  i got a japanese LAD today and it sounds really good. All my albums are american or englis and this was the first Japanese album I got and it blows everything out of the water.
 
Man, I listened to Somewhere In Time last afternoon, and as I was talking to Twarkle before in this thread, it just blew me away!!! It captures all the sonic nuances of the album's production. I strongly recommend to anyone to get it asap.
 
Jeffmetal said:
Man, I listened to Somewhere In Time last afternoon, and as I was talking to Twarkle before in this thread, it just blew me away!!! It captures all the sonic nuances of the album's production. I strongly recommend to anyone to get it asap.
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Yup.  You know which other Black Triangle gets over looked?  Iron Maiden.  You can even hear reel to reel tape hiss on that version.  I mean it's still sounds raw, but it has a more 3 dimensional quality than the other pressings, better separation.  The soundstage seems larger to me.

Also the BT's of Iron Maiden and Killers always mess with my head.  I grew up with the U.S. versions of those albums so I always expect to hear Sanctuary and Twilight Zone which were always on the U.S. releases, but weren't added to the rest of the worlds versions until later releases.  I believe those songs were singles in other countries, back then singles were often songs that were not on the album for those who may be confused by that.
 
Twarkle said:
Yup.  You know which other Black Triangle gets over looked?  Iron Maiden.  You can even hear reel to reel tape hiss on that version.  I mean it's still sounds raw, but it has a more 3 dimensional quality than the other pressings, better separation.  The soundstage seems larger to me.

Also the BT's of Iron Maiden and Killers always mess with my head.  I grew up with the U.S. versions of those albums so I always expect to hear Sanctuary and Twilight Zone which were always on the U.S. releases, but weren't added to the rest of the worlds versions until later releases.  I believe those songs were singles in other countries, back then singles were often songs that were not on the album for those who may be confused by that.
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That! :edmetal: Except that my debut and Killers never had Sanctuary and Twilight Zone (Details Of Twilight Zone, in this case :lol:). Every album from the BT and first japanese pressing has an incredible 3D sonic spectrum and that separation I mentioned about the new Sabbath remasters. Essential!
 
Wow! This is so interesting! I don't consider myself an audiophile (regardless of whatever negative or positive connotation  you have with that word), but I am a high-fidelity enthusiast.

I was never aware that better quality CDs even existed! This is very good news! So as you can see I am pretty much a newbie when it comes to all the "underground" Iron Maiden stuff, do you think I might be able to find these special pressings online in lossless format? What exactly should I look for? "Iron Maiden Japanese 1 for download"? Or perhaps something different?
 
Pilau, go there - http://avaxhome.ws/, and type Iron Maiden japanese cd pressings, black triangle (from the debut up to Seventh Son, the serial number starts with CP-32), Powerslave is the only one you'll have to find on torrent and there is one; and The X Factor, which is not on the site, too.
 
I'm new to the whole FLAC/lossless thing.  Can it be burned to CD?  Will Mediaplayer do it?  I'm confused.  (and sadly my career is in IT)
 
Thanks Jeff!

You can play FLAC (which is a free lossless audio codec, well that's what it stands for actually) in most mainstream media players today, like WinAMP and Foobar2000 for Linux maybe.

You can burn them to a CD of course. However I wouldn't be able to help you with that because I don't use CDs :)
 
Jeffmetal said:
Pilau, go there - http://avaxhome.ws/, and type Iron Maiden japanese cd pressings, black triangle (from the debut up to Seventh Son, the serial number starts with CP-32), Powerslave is the only one you'll have to find on torrent and there is one; and The X Factor, which is not on the site, too.
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Many thanks, this thread got me interested even though my speakers are shit.  ;)
 
Chaosapiant, you can burn flac straight into a CD and also turn into wav, 'cos you won't lose any of the quality. But the best thing is to look for a nero plugin for flac. I also used foobar2000 to extract tracks which are in .ape format. Some albums you'll find on avax doesn't have the cue sheet tacked into them, so you'll have to extract the whole album into one single flac or wav file and then cut it on an audio editor (I use Cool Edit Pro) and turn them into wav to keep it loseless; that done, then, BURN!!! :edmetal:
 
chaosapiant said:
I'm new to the whole FLAC/lossless thing.  Can it be burned to CD?  Will Mediaplayer do it?  I'm confused.  (and sadly my career is in IT)
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You have a few different options here.  Media player can play them, but it you will need to install 3rd party codecs, since Microsoft doesn't want to support flac.  You can find those here http://xiph.org/dshow/

As mentioned above Winamp and Foobar are your best bets.  Winamp is easy to use and it's a solid player.  Foobar is an amazing player, that supports ASIO if your sound card uses it, which to quote Wikipedia, because I can't give a better description "is a method of bypassing the inherently high latency and poor-quality mixing and sample rate conversion of Windows audio mixing kernels ".  Foobar takes a good amount of work and downloading of plugins to configure, though there are plenty of ready made skins that come with all the necessary .dlls.

There are several options to burn it back to disc.  You'll need to convert it to a wav file first.  A few programs do the conversion for you and then burn it, but all the best programs are actually free.  The flac front end application which is free and can be found on the flac home page will convert to wav.  You'll need to run it as an administrator on Vista and Windows 7.    

You'll also notice if you are downloading properly ripped flacs they will usually come with a .cue file and a .log file and have been ripped with Exact Audio Copy (EAC).  The .cue sheet is what contains the exact information of where everything was laid out on original disc if you want to burn it back to disc.  Programs like Nero unfortunately don't support the type of cuesheet (called a compliant cue) that is used by EAC, dbPoweramp, etc.

There is a free burning program called Burrrn, that will read cue sheets.  The cue sheet should be in the same folder as the album you are burning to disc.  The problem comes if the person who ripped it didn't remove the paths from the cue sheet.  So it may be looking for D/JoeShmoes Music/Songs I like/, or something like but you keep it in C/Chaospoint/My Music .  It's not hard to fix and takes about 2 seconds, but it can be frustrating if you are getting a lot of errors.  Generally the the cue sheet can just be dragged or opened in the burning software and it will set everything up for you and you can just burn from there.  

If you want to get a bit more in depth and complicated, EAC is free program that has become the standard for ripping CD's to flac.  It has to be setup properly to and calibrated to your disc drive for both ripping and burning, but there is a guide and it's easy to follow, and will give you true 1 to 1copies.  http://blowfish.be/eac/Setup/setup1.html  Even if you don't go that route, read the guide and you'll learn a lot about working with.flac.

And remember you can convert flac to other lossless formats and it will remain lossless.  You could convert flac>Apple Lossless>Wav and back to flac again and it would still be lossless.  As long as you never introduce a lossy conversion into the mix you will preserve the lossless copy.

If you need more info, or a better more intricate description let me know.  It probably seems very confusing at first but it's as easy as anything else once you get used to it.
 
Twarkle, may I know please which albums I should look for to have all the albums that have been pressed in Japan and are regarded as highest quality? So far I have all albums from Iron Maiden up to and including SSOASS. What about the rest? Thanks!
 
pilau said:
Twarkle, may I know please which albums I should look for to have all the albums that have been pressed in Japan and are regarded as highest quality? So far I have all albums from Iron Maiden up to and including SSOASS. What about the rest? Thanks!
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After that point most people feel that there isn't much if any of of a difference.  I think the guy to ask about those versions is JeffMetal.  I have the Japanese pressings of everything but I'm not a huge fan of NPFTD, FOTD, X-Factor, and VXI so I didn't listen to them that much when they were released, and I don't listen to them often now.  I think Jeff said he hears a difference on that stuff so I'd defer to him there.  BNW, DOD, and AMOLAD are virtually if not exactly identical to the US pressings and my Japanese copies of TFF have not arrived but I suspect that they will sound the same as the US pressing, and my guess is that any differences are not intended.

By the time the 1990's rolled around the production facilities and quality control in North American and European countries had likely reached a level on par with the Japanese.  Though I've heard (I have no idea if this is true) that the Japanese still use one stamper per 25,000 discs, where as other countries only switch their stamper once every 100,000 pressings or so.  Does that have any affect on sound?  I have no clue. 

As I said in an earlier post while there is a difference in many of the recordings, don't fall into the trap of feeling like they are a million times better than the original pressings from other countries (they are a million times better than the remasters though).  The truth is, very few CD's from Japan had their own mastering, almost all of the time it is the exact same mastering that every other country has. .  A lot of the things that are different are subtle, and somewhere along the way the legend of Japanese pressings (not just Maiden) has become filled with as much myth as fact.  eBay has played a big part as well, as these discs often fetch big money which makes people think, "gee if they are so expensive they must sound great".  I guess what I'm saying is, if you feel you hear a difference and need to have those albums, I would look to download them or buy them cheap but don't be a sucker. 
 
Well up until yesterday I only listened to the remastered CDs. Today I feel like a rich man, having totally rediscovered Iron Maiden's 80s albums with these Japanese pressings! It is simply unbelievable how much depth these records have had before the remastering flattened it all... I am seriously astonished, however less but even when I hear Iron Maiden, which we all know didn't have the best of productions.

So you're saying that I should try getting all the albums up to and including NPFTD? - I mean that X-Factor and beyond are not remastered so there's no point in trying to get the Japanese pressings.
 
I just dl'ed FLAC rip of Final Frontier. Couldn't wait until tomorrow.
For somebody that loves Pink Floyd almost as much as Maiden, Starblind in its full excellence is a pure fucking eargasm.
 
pilau said:
Well up until yesterday I only listened to the remastered CDs. Today I feel like a rich man, having totally rediscovered Iron Maiden's 80s albums with these Japanese pressings! It is simply unbelievable how much depth these records have had before the remastering flattened it all... I am seriously astonished, however less but even when I hear Iron Maiden, which we all know didn't have the best of productions.

So you're saying that I should try getting all the albums up to and including NPFTD? - I mean that X-Factor and beyond are not remastered so there's no point in trying to get the Japanese pressings.
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I think whether you get them or not depends on if it's important to you to have those.  It's not that the mastering is different on the Black Triangles from the original US and UK pressings, it's that the attention to detail, the quality of the machines used, and the over production of the actual disc were better.  As an analogy think of it like this, it's kind of like the difference between scanning a picture at your house and printing it out vs bringing it to professional photo store doing the same thing on extremely high end equipment designed specifically for the reproduction of photographs.  The picture is the same, but the professional copy will have far more clarity and depth and the colors will accurately represent the original picture.  

If you wanted to continue the analogy and then compare the BT and European/US original pressings to the remasters, the remasters would be like if you took that same picture and said, "let's take out those trees in the background, and make all the oranges red, make the greens blue, and remove all the yellows".
 
Well I think I should have tried to be more specific with my question :)

I understand the differences between the different pressings and what stands behind each version. I was simply asking, considering that I sincerely love all Iron Maiden albums except Virtual XI and I would like have the best quality version of each album, for what albums should I get high-quality Japanese pressings?

I guess that up to SSOASS it's pretty obvious because all I had where the remastered CDs, so I already downloaded all of these black triangle releases. but what about FOTD, NPFTD and TXF? And I say that it's obvious because I know and you also said that the these albums have been released as remasters and these are the only versions that I have listened to up to yesterday - the remasters. You also said that the biggest difference is found when comparing those original releases to remastered CDs. I don't know if the CDs of FOTD, NPFTD and TXF are remastered or not. This is why I am asking - What about these three albums? Cheers. :)
 
pilau said:
Well I think I should have tried to be more specific with my question :)

I understand the differences between the different pressings and what stands behind each version. I was simply asking, considering that I sincerely love all Iron Maiden albums except Virtual XI and I would like have the best quality version of each album, for what albums should I get high-quality Japanese pressings?

I guess that up to SSOASS it's pretty obvious because all I had where the remastered CDs, so I already downloaded all of these black triangle releases. but what about FOTD, NPFTD and TXF? And I say that it's obvious because I know and you also said that the these albums have been released as remasters and these are the only versions that I have listened to up to yesterday - the remasters. You also said that the biggest difference is found when comparing those original releases to remastered CDs. I don't know if the CDs of FOTD, NPFTD and TXF are remastered or not. This is why I am asking - What about these three albums? Cheers. :)
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Oh, sorry for the confusion man, it's probably my fault.  Very little sleep over the last 3 days.  Like I said I really can't compare those albums because I never listened much to the US versions or the Japanese versions because I'm not really into those four albums.  I think JeffMetal likes them and has said they sound better than the other pressings to him.  I'd ask him though.  I can't give you an honest answer because I just don't know.  Most of my Japanese pressings are now in storage and ripped to my computer and NAS box, but I never bothered to rip the Japanese versions of those 4 albums so I can't compare for you.  I'm sorry I can't be of more help.  Next time I need to get something out of storage I'll grab those discs and try and compare them if you haven't received an answer at that point.  :)
 
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