Article: The Best Version Of… Jefferson Airplane’s Surrealistic Pillow

[bobbmd]

@JoshM thanks again for all the research and leg work/I am going to keep my 'French' address which is my hometown and neighborhood in USA central ny which Qobuz calls 'New France' which is what the entire northeast USA would have been called had the French won on the Plains of Abraham-always thought that was pretty cool and cheeky of Qobuz

 

[Ralf11]

and think how much better the food would be!

[Jazzbass12]

Wonderful article Josh.....I am really looking forward to more from this series. On a side note, I love how your bio states your Dad having you listen on his Boston Acoustics "listen closely"... I do that with my 7yr old grandson on my Advent 1970's Loudspeakers series. Keep up the great work.

[JazzDoc]

Great article Josh ... Looking forward to the next one!

[Jud]

I'm arriving late, but very, very much enjoyed the level of research and resulting information here.  Looking forward to much more.

 

By the way, speaking of Jefferson Starship, there were undeniably some really bad songs in their output, but I think "Caroline" (from Dragonfly) is a neglected masterpiece.

[lucretius]

Thanks a million Josh.  I picked up the "cheap and ubiquitous Irwin edition" for $7. Excellent!

[Waynefi]

I had all the major vinyl releases of this which are now sold, but also have the MoFi SACD. But after reading this, I found the "Irwin" mixed in some new CD's that I never listened to ! I am going to rip it, the it will be in Roon with my SACD backup of the MoFi  !

[FBX]

@JoshM Great article, and helped me to narrow down my pics for the SACD and the 2003 stereo remaster. I've done a lot of soundtrack ripping work in the past (mostly known for my Ultimate CST editions of the first three Silent Hill video game soundtracks), so I thought I might tackle this problem of the vocals being overly muted and a little too much reverb compared to the mono SACD master. I took the 2003 remaster and applied my own re-remastering, where I give the vocals a boost and remove some of the reverb. There's a slight loss of stereo separation to pull this off, but you would never know unless you compared it to the 2003 original. Even with that, the trade-off is totally worth it.

In my opinion, my re-remaster of the 2003 edition sounds the very best of any stereo release of the album. I uploaded a 320 MP3 (I meant to do FLAC but accidentally saved out as MP3) of White Rabbit. I won't link it publicly here, but send me a PM if you want to hear how it turned out.