Best of

What is called "remastering" in the CD world is simply someone using a digital equalizer to alter the audio spectrum of the music to suit their taste, their listening environment and their low quality audio reproduction equipment. Obviously, the companies that allow this to occur don't test the results on good quality audio equipment before going to press with the results.People have different preferences in musical sound, have different listening environments and differing qualities of audio equipment. Trying to force everyone to listen to the audio preferences of someone else rather than simply allowing us to obtain the sound preferred by the artists in conjuction with the recording producer is uncalled for.The purchaser should be able to tune their own audio equipment to suit their own taste. However, these "remastered" CDs interfere with the purchaser being able to do that.Most CDs have the original studio audio spectrum while others have altered spectrums which would require different settings of the listener's audio equipment.The remastering of this CD caused two undesireable affects; booming Hollow sounding lows in the voices as well as emphasised high pitches - actually deemphasized lower vocal tones. The result is that they don't sound like the same group as on other Four Preps CDs.This is especially anoying on track 10. In the second phrase several words contain a loud hollow sounding bass overlay of some words. At several points in the solo voice of the lead singer, the voice also has a booming hollow sound. These booming sections seem to occur when the voices hit certain tonal ranges.All of this from flawed remastering. The hollow sounding base notes are the result of an artificial increase of a very narrow frequency range at a bit over 100Hz. The push appears to have been about 9db. When the voices hit certain tones, a bad harmonic is produced which produces the booming effect.At the other end of the spectrum, the high frequencies were pushed by a considerable amount. Unfortunately, the pushed frequencies include the mid to upper vocal range. The effect is to make the voices louder when they hit a higher note which overpowers the lower frequency ranges of the voices. Thus, the voices seem to not have as much of their natural lower frequency constituents, yielding a somewhat tinny sound.While I was able, with eight to ten hours of work, to restore a more natural sound to this CD, the work shouldn't have been needed. Therefore, for destroying this CD and forcing people to either do a lot of extra work or put up with audio distortions, I'm giving it only one star.

Excellent! I bought for my 84 year old friend, she loved it! It brought back memories for her that she enjoyed very much.

The previous reviewer must be young if he thinks the Four Preps were obscure--they were an extremely popular group in the late 50s and early 60s. They had many hit records and did TV, radio, and personal appearances all over the country. I only wish more of their music was available on CD.They were very talented singers and writers. This is proven by the many awards they have won since the 60s and the fact that they are still working.

This is an outstanding value for the price,only 10 songs on here but very pleasant to listen to and remember.Their original songs are what is expected(very nice, no disappointment here), but I must comment on the other songs that were not theirs originally,they are unexpectadly well done and a pleasure to hear done by these guys.

very enjoyable.