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It has long been a goal of mine to have a record player. Just feels right. First music I had that was MINE was the "Thriller" LP.

So I got a new studio and I got a record player and a bunch of records. From Bruce: "The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle," "Born to Run," "Darkness on the Edge of Town," "The River." I need Greetings, Nebraska, and Born in the USA to have all the albums made to be RECORDS at the time, right?

Just listened to "The River" for the first time. And I mean that. I've heard the CD thousands of times, but I've never heard the RECORD. WOW. I love it. It is SO good. It's immense and sprawling and long and a journey and focused and thematically right on. Etc. It's great.

This is interesting because I don't feel that way about "The River" on CD. Never liked it. Rarely listened to it. LOVED the songs, but it just didn't do it for me as a recording (I still think best Springsteen recordings are "Nebraska" & "Wild and Innocent").

Curious to hear thoughts on this. I'll start:

The way the sides break down on the LP is PERFECT. It's a four act structure instead of two. Works much better for the story. "Point Blank" can't start the second act, but it can start the THIRD act of FOUR.

Bill Horton was a cautious man of the road. 

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I think your make a good point. An album that was originally released on vinyl will have been sequenced for two sides. Someone thought long and hard about which songs and what order and that would not necessary work as well as one long piece. 20-25 minutes is also a more reasonable amount of time to sit still and listen. 50-70 minuntes is long time to sit still.
Why don't you just create your own digital version of "The River" on four CDs? You can even have a studio and live version of "The River" for a boxed set. Hell you can even add additional outtakes discs.

The killer app of digital media is the search function and not the audio quality.

Let's see what happens after you start skipping songs on the LPs and scratch a few tracks.

→→→→→→→→→→→→→→←←←←←←←←←←←←←←

In the basement at St. Johns well I found her where she fell

Just another busted sister of Heartbreak Hotel

My wife and I knew how compatible we were when we found out we played "Till There Was You" on Meet the Beatles at 78.

As for Bruce albums in vinyl, listen to Live 75-85 in the vinyl version. The album becomes a near masterpiece thematically with each side telling a story that fits into the larger story of the album. Except for the disastrous editing of Backstreets and the losing of the storyline on sides 8 and 9 with the commercial compromise of the BITUSA hits, it would have been. If he'd combined sides 8 and 9 (War, Cover Me, Hometown, Promised Land) and instead made side 2 end with Incident and new side 3 with a complete Backstreets and one other song (there are several I can think of would have fit here), Live would have been a masterpiece.

 

"I've done my best to live the right way"

I'm not really sure I see the point of this, at least from the perspective of the sequencing of the songs. Aren't the songs in the same order on the LP and CD versions (if not, please correct me). I agree with DirtDiablo on this - you have the ability to do whatever you wish with the CD tracks - just do it.

The real debate on LP vs CD has always been the sound quality - that's what (I think) this thread should be all about.
I once had a Tom Petty CD which had a cheesy but amusing bit in the middle where he said something along the lines of "Hello CD listeners. At this point, those listening to this album of record or tape will be getting up and turning it over to the other side. In fairness to them we'll just take a short moment before beginning side 2. Thank you."

I agree that the sequencing is important. Most of my early Bruce album purchases were on tape or LP. It must mean something that you remember the first track of side 2. Promised Land was a good example on Darkness.

Syd.
Originally Posted By: Deep Set Syd
I once had a Tom Petty CD which had a cheesy but amusing bit in the middle where he said something along the lines of "Hello CD listeners. At this point, those listening to this album of record or tape will be getting up and turning it over to the other side. In fairness to them we'll just take a short moment before beginning side 2. Thank you."


That's on the Full Moon Fever CD.

As for The River on LP, it sounds far better than the CD version, nowhere near as tinny.
Originally Posted By: neiLkatz
I'm not really sure I see the point of this, at least from the perspective of the sequencing of the songs. Aren't the songs in the same order on the LP and CD versions (if not, please correct me). I agree with DirtDiablo on this - you have the ability to do whatever you wish with the CD tracks - just do it.

The real debate on LP vs CD has always been the sound quality - that's what (I think) this thread should be all about.


Just caught sight of this older thread and was intrigued because
the playing of the album at MSG has brought it somewhat out of the
woodwork.

The point, Neil, is not the song order, but the side sequencing.
As the op noted, the original 4 sides play out much like "acts" in a
play, which is lost on cd, where it plays straight through without
the pauses that remind you of the act breaks. And as good as DirtDiablo's
suggestions are, the op is getting the benefit of *both* sound and
sequence with the lp :-)

Another alternative along the lines of DD's suggestion, for those
without turn table or the lp to play on it, is to burn the cd
with significant pauses between sides, That way you could play the
"lp" version in your car :-).

Mike
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