Search - Duane Eddy :: Duane a Go-Go / Does Bob Dylan

Fake Stereo-A-Go-go

Doc K | 01/17/2010

(2 out of 5 stars)

"Up front, understand that I'm a big fan of Duane Eddy - he put out some fantastic guitar instrumentals. Neither of these Colpix albums had a chart hit for Duane, but that wasn't for lack of good material - it was simply because the musical tide had turned against that sort of music by 1965. The reason for my low rating of this CD isn't for the material, but for Collectables abysmal handling of the sound (mentioned in another review). I have these original LPs and wanted to replace them with a clean CD. The surprise is that not only is the sound cleaner on the LPs, but on the Duane A-Go-Go album my copy of the CD uses some odd re-channeled fake stereo while my vinyl copy is in glorious wide true stereo. Why? It sounds as if they took a less-than pristine mono LP and first ran it through some clean-up process which left a few distortions and ticks in the background. Then they processed the sound so the treble is high on one channel and the bass on the other. After that they echoed the dip out of it. At least Duane Does Dylan is in actual stereo (though you can hear the needle sound running on the vinyl at times indicating they didn't use tape for this either) - thanks for small favors Collectables. It would have been a 1 star review if not for the music which is great on the A-Go-Go LP. There is classic old school sounding Eddy including a remake of "Moovin' N Groovin'" (which is spelled correctly on my LP, but omits one of the O's in Moovin' on the CD - go figure). The Dylan piece is a bit more hit and miss with too much reliance on a nasal harmonica that ruins many of the songs. Maybe time for an upgrade somebody?"