The Petra Zone

Is it just me or does Farewell sound "dead" almost? Every time I play it, it doesn't have that live, crisp sound that you want to hear. Even when I crank up the treble, it doesn't really give the CD any glory on the sound quality.
When IIGP's Vertical Expressions was released, they had Lord, I lift your name on high and Judas' Kiss on there, (originally from Farewell) and those sound better.
Does anybody else have this problem with their Farewell CD copy or do I have a pirate CD copy?

It sounds two dimensional and the ending was anticlimactic.

It sounds muffled, and at around the midpoint just before the rock medley, the volume level drops a couple of dB. I like the album, but the sound quality could have been better, especially since this was supposed to be Petra's swan song.

Pretty muddy sounding to me. I can't listen to any of the tracks on it with other albums because the sound is so different. At times it sounds like a bootleg.

Farewell is muffled, so is II guys Vertical Expressions.

how does this happen with modern technology?

Yes, it has a muffled sound and so does Back to the Rock as well. Take a look here:
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=56234

The sad truth is after J&H you have to run Petra songs though an audio editing software and spend hours messing with things like gain, volume, EQ, all sorts of stuff. And, even then it only sounds a little bit better, not what it should sound like. At least this is what I had to do with Back to the Rock and Farewell. Didn't do anything with Vertical Expressions. That one sounded ok to me. I really wish Bob or somebody could get a hold of the original recording of Farewell from Inpop and clean it up if possible.

It has nothing to do with technology. It has everything to do with who is doing it and what the artist likes to hear. They used a Yamaha PM5 as the front end, which is not a very dark sounding console by any means. Going into a DAW like ProTools or whatever contributes nothing in and of themselves. I would not consider any of the albums mentioned muffled, but nice and dark, which is intentional in this day and age, as a knee jerk reaction to being bright and brittle a few years ago.

That may have been the intention, but dark sounds muffled to me. If bright and brittle means crisp and clear, I'll take that any day.

Boray wrote:Yes, it has a muffled sound and so does Back to the Rock as well. Take a look here:
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=56234

I don't think Back to the Rock sounds muffled. I just think it's overly compressed and doesn't have enough separation between the instruments. It otherwise sounds sharp and clear.

I think BTTR sounds shallow or real tinty; there is no depth to the sound, and Greg's voice seems to be layered over the music instead of in it.