Parlophone Finally Finishes Ruining David Bowie’s Catalog Mastering (PART 2)

The botched 'I Can't Give Everything Away' box set plus two others

Now for part two of our David Bowie vinyl guide aka “how Parlophone botched most of their current remaster series” (part one here). Before we dive in, I’ve read all the comments about part one and have a couple things to address:

Yes, the '70s albums inherently aren’t the most dynamic mixes, nor would I want them to be. Yes, Bowie and Visconti (when applicable) often went for a thick, processed sound, and they achieved that on the originals. That’s what Bowie presumably signed off on at the time he made these records. What’s egregious is to change the sound to make it more extreme in a way that also sucks the life out of these albums, which is what many of the Parlophone remasters do. More on the “original intent” stuff later.

Someone mentioned how the 1984 RCA CD editions differ based on territory. I’m well aware of that, and I’m aware that the West Germany RCA Low CD is supposed to be the best one. Well, I found a rip of it and it is indeed by far the best digital Low, a good simulacrum of the original vinyl, though not as good as the best LP copies. However, I still stand by my general statement that most CDs from the ‘80s never sounded very good, and a CD from 1984 shouldn’t so easily beat a hi-res remaster from 2017.

“’Til the 21st century lose”: Loving The Alien [1983-1988] and Brilliant Adventure [1992-2001]

David Bowie 'Loving The Alien' box set

I didn’t buy the physical sets of Loving The Alien [1983-1988] or Brilliant Adventure [1992-2001], though I’ve streamed the lossless files. Throughout the series, the maximum-resolution (varies by era) lossless streams sound identical to the vinyl copies. The ‘80s box is excessively compressed and deadened, but the EQ isn’t dreadful. Still, the original American LPs of Let’s Dance, Tonight, and Never Let Me Down (the latter DMM), all mastered by Bob Ludwig at Masterdisk, are unbeatable for what these albums are. Okay, the original Never Let Me Down is a little too bright, but otherwise Ludwig’s cuts have the perfect amount of compression to pack a serious punch yet still have room to breathe. The original Let’s Dance has truly impressive slam. Bowie was signed to EMI America at this time, so the original US pressings are undeniably the originals.

Inside the Loving The Alien box is a 2018 revamp of Never Let Me Down, retaining Bowie’s original vocals but re-recording some of the instrumentation (particularly the drums). Bowie himself wanted to redo the album for a while, and in 2008 even commissioned Mario J. McNulty to produce a new “Time Will Crawl,” with the original vocal recording detached from the ‘80s cheese. McNulty’s full-album rework of Never Let Me Down is interesting, but the contrast between Bowie’s original vocals and the new production honestly makes it messier than the original. Plus, there’s no salvaging “Bang Bang,” which I think is worse than the still-deleted “Too Dizzy.”

Side note: the prevailing rumor is that a royalty dispute has blocked Parlophone/Bowie’s estate from doing a big Tin Machine set, because Tin Machine was set up as a proper band and not just David Bowie backed by three other guys. (Still, Music On Vinyl reissued 1992’s Tin Machine II in 2020.) Sometime around the new year, I bought an American original (Sterling DMM cut) of the 1989 debut at A-1 Record Shop in the East Village. Near mint. It was the first time I’d ever seen a copy in the wild, though I saw UK originals in London this summer. I don’t think the first Tin Machine record is that bad, even if it’s dumb and silly and indulgent. Only Bowie post-Glass Spider could write a line as masterful as “they’re just a bunch of assholes with buttholes for their brains!” Overall, Tin Machine is more consistently listenable than Tonight and Never Let Me Down, even if there aren’t really any highlights. It helped Bowie artistically recenter himself for the ‘90s.

David Bowie 'Brilliant Adventure' vinyl box set

The Brilliant Adventure ‘90s box has some minor issues (starting with the name—why name a box set after an interlude from his worst ‘90s album?!), but I’ll give Parlophone a pass on that one. Most if not all of those albums are digital to start with, and the original CDs aren’t perfect. The remasters are sometimes a little too thick and sluggish, but some of the original CD masters (Outside, for instance) were a little thin, so there’s no ideal option for some of these. Bob Ludwig’s original CD master of Earthling reigns supreme however, and the remaster inexplicably chops off the first split-second of “Dead Man Walking.” Again, I haven’t heard the vinyl set, but it marked only the second complete LP release of Outside, the first being a limited Friday Music edition in an obnoxiously oversized trifold. Given how Friday Music’s Earthling turned out, I wouldn’t bet on their complete Outside. I also haven’t heard the long out of print Music On Vinyl reissues of Excerpts From Outside, Earthling, or ‘Hours…’. Originals of Black Tie White Noise and especially The Buddha Of Suburbia are extremely rare.

(Before anyone accuses me of disregarding these mid-period Bowie albums, or not being rigorous enough in my comparisons: these albums generally aren’t as sonically sensitive as the ‘70s and 21st century albums. The remasters from Loving The Alien and Brilliant Adventure have similar characteristics to the rest of the series, but the nature of the original productions means it’s not nearly as glaring.)

“I know something’s very wrong…”: I Can’t Give Everything Away [2002-2016]

David Bowie 'I Can't Give Everything Away' box set

Now to I Can’t Give Everything Away [2002-2016]. End-period Bowie has some of his best work, especially those final two albums. Everyone rightfully praises Blackstar, but The Next Day is almost as good. Heathen and Reality are less consistent but both have stellar moments, and the A Reality Tour live album is one of his most energetic live recordings. During that tour, he suffered multiple heart attacks on stage, then never toured again and remained almost entirely dormant until The Next Day in 2013.

About the sound: Heathen and Reality were partly tracked to tape then edited, assembled, overdubbed, and mixed digitally. I assume the final two albums are entirely digital. Emily Lazer mastered the original digital release masters of Heathen and Reality, and I assume previous vinyl editions were sourced from those. Lazer’s masters are loud, often hard-clipped near the brink of audible distortion, but there’s movement and musicality that makes her masters sound better than they measure. The original Heathen and Reality masters have a bit of top end glassiness, but they’re much better than John Webber’s new remasters in the box set (inevitably soon to be released individually). The remasters have an egregious bass boost, dried out atmospheres, and suffocated midrange transients. It sounds like a bad smiley-face EQ preset on your phone; was it “take your deaf toddler to work at the console” week at AIR Mastering?!

Michael Fremer and I compared three cuts of Heathen: US original, EU original Record  Industry cut (repressed by Music On Vinyl in 2011), and the new box remaster. The US original is okay but a little hollowed out, basically identical to the original CD. The EU original cut is by far the best, full-bodied with excellent transient definition, tight bass, and soundstage depth. Lossless/hi-res streaming comparisons between the old masters and the new ones, on both Apple Music and Tidal, produced the same results as the vinyl comparison. (Note that while the initial 2011 MOV reissue reuses the original 2002 cut, later MOV pressings and the 2017 Sony EU reissue use a later recut also done at Record Industry. I haven’t heard the recut pressing.)

For Reality, there’s an argument for the new remaster having better separation, except it doesn’t cohesively rock like the original. We didn’t check the remastered Reality vinyl, but I just got the 2014 Music On Vinyl pressing (technically the “original” LP since there was no 2003 vinyl release) and while blatantly sourced from the original bricked CD/hi-res master, it has a slight touch of added midrange richness that emphasizes percussion nuance. The MOV cut is very accurate to its source, which for an album like this is basically what you want.

I haven’t heard the Friday Music US reissues of Heathen and Reality—“mastered by Joe Reagoso at Friday Music Studios,” cut by Ron McMaster, and pressed at RTI—but I have the 2016 Friday Music 3LP set of A Reality Tour with the same specs. It’s thin and dimensionally flat and high-frequency transients are gratingly hard and harsh. The lower midrange is gone and there’s hardly any bass. At the same time as the Friday Music pressing, there was a European Sony pressing cut in-house at Optimal. Haven’t heard that nor the new Parlophone box set remaster vinyl, but the new Parlophone digital files actually sound better and more balanced than the original 2010 digital master. On the Friday Music vinyl (which I pulled out for the first time in years for this piece), Bowie’s voice fares alright but everything else is seriously fatiguing and almost unlistenable. You might as well put pins in your ears and scratch your eardrums.

Tracking Angle’s Dave McNair digitally mastered the original The Next Day at Masterdisk; Alex deTurk cut lacquers for both the US (United) and EU (Optimal) pressings. Fremer and I compared my copy of the original EU vinyl to Webber’s remastered box set cut. The original is bright but good! It’s got appropriate energy and enough space, even though the mix is dense and kind of congealed. The remaster has the same horrible, deadening bass boost as the others, and there’s a lower midrange push that extracts Bowie’s voice forward but also casts a weird, hollow shadow over it. The worst part is that you hear the remaster’s EQ way too much. Good, tasteful processing doesn’t make itself obvious; on this amateurish piece of crap, I can hear exactly where the EQ boosts are. (For what it’s worth, McNair doesn’t think the remaster is that bad, just “a slightly different EQ profile.” The new remaster has more dynamic headroom, but that doesn’t matter if the result sucks.)

Blackstar and the No Plan outtakes EP were thankfully not digitally remastered, though Webber at AIR recut both for the I Can’t Give Everything Away vinyl box. Ray Janos at Sterling cut the originals. On the original Blackstar, Bowie sounds like a ghost resurrecting himself for 40 minutes. The reissue gets into “uncanny valley” territory, making Bowie sound as if he’s alive and in the room. The atmosphere doesn’t sound right, and while the bass thankfully isn’t fussed with, Donny McCaslin’s saxophone at times sounds more mechanical and grating. It’s by far the “best” (more like “least atrocious”) reissue in this box, and it’s not “bad,” but it misses the point. Either Webber made some different (minor) EQ adjustments for cutting, or AIR’s cutting system excessively etched a certain character into the new Blackstar.

We haven’t compared Webber’s newly cut No Plan with the originals, though note that there are actually two original cuts of that: one cut by Janos at Sterling for the disc in the Lazarus cast recording set pressed at RTI (also used for the No Plan standalone EU original, pressed at Record Industry), and the US standalone pressing cut by Wes Garland at Nashville Record Productions and pressed at United. It’s been years and a few system upgrades since I’ve compared, but I remember the Garland cut being opaque and spatially flat compared to the much more transparent Janos cut. I assume Webber’s recut No Plan sounds like his new Blackstar cut.

Exclusive to the I Can’t Give Everything Away box set (vinyl, CD, digital) are Montreux Jazz Festival 2002 and Re:Call 6. The Montreux set is great, with a full performance of Low at the end. The sound quality is just like the others in this set, but the lack of other official releases automatically makes it more tolerable. This set’s Re:Call gathers up some excellent odds and ends, more so than the ‘70s boxes mostly comprised of single edits. I’ve always considered the 2014 recordings of “Sue (Or In A Season Of Crime)” and “’Tis A Pity She Was A Whore” essential, though copies of the original 10” single are still around. (The 2014 “’Tis A Pity She Was A Whore” is Bowie’s home demo, and both the original and the remaster have a lossy high frequency cutoff. I assume that Bowie himself only ever exported an MP3/AAC. After all, we now know that David Bowie at this time got by with cheap Staples notebooks for writing.)

What Went Wrong???

Bowie’s family seems to want nothing to do with managing his legacy. I don’t by any means interpret it as the family dismissing him or his work, rather that the man maintained such a great work/life balance that his family was never very involved in his work, and why would they start now? I’m not sure who “the estate” entirely is, anyway; maybe there are some longtime Bowie employees involved, but surely they’d be more on the practical business side.

Thus, the estate has entrusted the entire recorded catalog (except the 1967 debut owned wholly by Decca/Universal) to Parlophone/Warner, and handed over Bowie’s entire archive to the Victoria and Albert Museum, who already worked with Bowie in his lifetime on the David Bowie Is… exhibit. Parlophone has paid a ton of money for the recorded assets, so they must know what they’re doing… right?!

Wrong, as the current remaster series proves. Sure, Parlophone brought in many of the original album producers to supervise the remasters when possible, but that’s not always a guarantee of quality or historical accuracy. The surviving artist/collaborator can use the process as an opportunity to drastically revise the final product, claiming that the new one is “what we always wanted,” that “the technology wasn’t there decades ago and finally we don’t have to compromise our vision!” And sometimes, those originally involved can’t remember exactly what they’d wanted back in the day, so they leave it to the mastering engineer now equipped with more “sophisticated” technology. There’s also a combination of those two possibilities, where whoever was originally involved changes it to fit their current sensibilities, regardless of their original intentions.

The same thing happens in film, and people are louder about it there. One notorious case a few years ago was when director Wong Kar-wai outraged cinephiles by closely supervising “restorations” of his beloved turn-of-the-millennium classics. Despite his films’ inconsistent release history around the world, the new versions objectively looked nothing like existing home video transfers or theatrical prints: one film was digitally cropped and stretched to a wider aspect ratio, while another was drowned in a heavy, distinctly digital green tint. Wong defended his revisions, saying, “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” His later output finds him overly gleeful with digital coloring, thus he forced those newer sensibilities onto his older work. And now, his revisionist new masters have become the dominant option, so that’s how most new audiences get exposed to the films and the oldheads who remember the originals will just have to deal with it (or shell out for older, less-altered copies.)

Similarly, Tony Visconti’s 21st century production work generally has more bass and a denser, more compressed sound than, say, Electric Warrior or “Heroes”, so of course he gives us a plumped up Low as “the”—or at least his—definitive version. No one at Parlophone will stop him. So listeners just have to deal with it (or spend $50 on an original).

Sure, most remasters differ at least somewhat from the respective originals, for better or worse. Yet Parlophone’s Bowie series feels like an extreme case, especially now that they’ve gotten through the whole discography: the mastering approach is inconsistent (Staff’s work on the Five Years set is very different from what he did with A New Career In A New Town), glaring defects slipped out on major titles, and it’s a terrible missed opportunity. Bowie’s catalog desperately needed a digital upgrade and good vinyl reissues, since quality and availability were an absolute mess. Parlophone has certainly organized it well, but they dropped the ball on the sound. It’d be different if the current crap remasters supplanted an older, better set of masters—at least then, you could tell your friends “skip the version on streaming, go find the older master on peer-to-peer.” But “better” older digital masters don’t exist for some of these albums, and now the Parlophone/AIR Mastering series is most people’s the default option for the foreseeable future. (We’re talking about one of the most frequently repackaged artists of all time, but his catalog is so vast that no way are they redoing the whole thing again for a while.)

I don’t buy into the idea that these remasters, or most remasters for that matter, “modernize” these old recordings. David Bowie’s albums have always sounded “modern,” not to mention that many contemporary recordings still pass through the same old analog gear. There’s little to no fundamental technological difference between a 2013 mastering system used for the original The Next Day and a 2025 system used for the remaster. The remasters of Low onward don’t sound like the originals, nor do they necessarily sound like most 2010s/2020s recordings.

I also don’t believe Parlophone/Tony Visconti’s reasoning over the “Berlin trilogy” and Scary Monsters remastering. The originals LPs already have bass. I don’t believe the flat master tapes have as much bass as the remasters. The EQ boost is too obvious. The original UK and US pressings sound the way they do because that’s what David Bowie and Tony Visconti must’ve wanted at the time. Later on, both of them wanted Lodger to have greater clarity, which is what the remix presents an illusion of, while the remastered original mix only makes it muddier. Regarding bass levels, Rykodisc A&R Jeff Rougvie said, “David signed off on the Ryko masters and we never got any notes to boost the bass, which we could've (and would've) done if requested.” (The Ryko masters generally sound thinner than the original LPs in the bass and lower midrange.)

For the 21st century albums, there’s no reason why they needed any work (unless they improved the dynamic range, which they didn’t). The general public’s sonic preferences and playback technology have remained pretty stable over the last 20 years, and Bowie signed off on the original masters. The I Can’t Give Everything Away albums didn’t need such drastic EQ adjustment.

This isn’t audiophile purist whining, rather situating these remasters in the reality of modern listening. People stream everything. Young listeners hear about a record and queue it up on streaming. Whatever’s available there is the only option they think of, because it’s the only option presented to them. Or, if they’re in a physical record shop, the remastered vinyl reissues are likely what they’ll pick up. Used original copies of these albums are drying up and getting more expensive—the market went crazy after Bowie’s death, settled down before Covid, and is back up now. So if the widely available option sucks, that’s how the masses will hear it.

I genuinely believe that this remaster series negatively impacts Bowie’s musical legacy. Most casual listeners don’t think they care much about sound quality, but they subconsciously do. They might not “hear” something, but they feel it. If the remasters suck the life out of these records, which they do, then newer listeners might assume that the life wasn’t there to begin with, that all the acclaim is a product of nostalgic sensation from older generations who pull the James Murphy-esque “I was there” card on you.

For that reason, Parlophone’s David Bowie campaign might be the worst remaster series of any major musical act. There are plenty of other catalog remasters that don’t sound like the originals or aren’t nearly as good, but for almost an entire (large) discography to be so thoroughly deadened and otherwise ruined as the only currently available option is unheard of.

So Who’s Running All of This?

To Parlophone’s credit, they’ve done a solid job on curation and manufacturing. Sure, I’d prefer massive dumps of unreleased stuff over the archival drips and drabs, but that’s the same strategy Bowie took in his lifetime and it keeps fans engaged but not overwhelmed. Optimal has done an excellent job on all the 180g vinyl pressings, and any new graphic design elements (box set books, live albums, 7” picture discs) have been tasteful. That’s the bare minimum, however.

But is anyone listening to these remasters and thinking they sound good?

It’s not like Parlophone legally had to bring in Tony Visconti to guide the ruining of Low. They probably did so out of respect, and could’ve easily vetoed him. He’s the closest thing to a living authoritative opinion, so maybe they naturally assumed he was correct. Same with the other collaborators who supervised remasters for their respective productions. But again, the supervision/approval of the original producer doesn’t guarantee authenticity, much less quality. Someone at Parlophone should’ve executed greater quality control and referenced original pressings, even if the goal wasn’t to exactly match the originals (“different” and “bad” aren’t the same thing, and many of these reissues are outright mediocre if not truly bad). And no, digital is not to blame for the poorly remastered analog-era albums, because an all-analog remaster with the same mastering choices would’ve sucked just as much.

It’s not like Parlophone and AIR Mastering even applied a uniform sound across the whole discography, but the last three box sets (and some of the other archival remasters around the same time) all sound pretty similar. Whether this was a Parlophone directive, an intentional choice by Ray Staff and John Webber, or a product of AIR’s mastering chain, is unclear. Regardless, the regular blunders in the past decade of David Bowie reissues have established this as a “blame the label” situation, because the most obvious problem is a lack of truly informed oversight on these projects.

Anyway, it’s been quite wonderful revisiting all of these albums over the past few weeks. See you all next year when John Webber inevitably botches the 50th anniversary half-speed cut of Station To Station!