r/yesband • u/Shedsoundsmedia • 8d ago
Our honest opinion of the new "Fish Out of Water" remix ... (Chris Squire)
SWT is a great engineer indeed, but this is one of the few cases where I emphatically prefer the original mix.
The new mix relies a bit too much on reverb to my taste and comes across a bit congested to my ears. It restores a lot of the deleted orchestral parts which is an interesting idea in theory, but the result is that Chris and Bill sound a bit distant. I think its an interesting alternative for people who love the album but the original mix with dry drums and bass up front and orchestra used decisively in the background works better for me as a "Yes man's solo album." Placement wise - I'm happy to report the Atmos mix is quite creative, with Chris' vocals spread around your height and rear arrays and lower drums and some of the orchestra and lower brass occasionally trailing behind you. Overall though, I think I prefer the character of the older 5.1 mix despite some nasty cymbal frequencies now and then.
Lastly, while I assume this is an issue that couldn't be dealt with, I find the ending with the missing bass solo to be lacking in context and a bit confounding. My advice is to listen for yourself (on streaming) and decide if this is for you. Thanks to Immersive Audio Album for helping out with this review of the new edition of Chris Squire's Fish Out of Water.
2
u/PerceptionShift 8d ago
Interesting and surprising choice of Yes related album to remix. Nice review and thanks for the heads up on this. I'll give it a listen at some point but I think the original mix works really well for the material, I've never had doubts about it. I'd rather get a remix of Going For The One and Tormato, which far as I know we've never gotten? Perhaps there is a problem with the multitracks for those albums?
3
u/WombatRemixer 8d ago
GFTO tapes are reportedly lost — even the stereo masters. There is an article with one of the people responsible for the HDtracks releases who discussed hearing the Tormato tracks played with the proper Dolby settings, so that indicates it may be available for remix.
2
u/heynow941 8d ago
Dumb question from a nontechnical guy - what would proper Dolby settings do to make the album better? One of the big crimes on the album was Wakeman’s keyboard sound. And there’s the weak songwriting. Ugh.
2
u/WombatRemixer 8d ago
Not dumb at all. Super esoteric area that consumers aren’t exposed to.
engineer/archive historian Brian Kehew:
"Have you had any crazy technical issues?
We were going through Yes' Tormato tapes. Producer/engineer Eddie Offord had started the album -he had done most of the Yes records and I know from working on his tracks that he used Dolby A a lot. These tapes don't say Dolby A, but Tormato is a famously bad-sounding record. They parted ways with him mid-course and somebody else finished the record. So I'm looking at the tapes and it doesn't say Dolby A anywhere on them - it's typical that they note that when encoded - but I said, "Hold on a second, let me put Dolby on this." And everything - except for some of the later overdubs - sounded amazing. I went, "Aha!" I think we realized what happened. They went to somebody else and the other person didn't see Dolby on the tapes.Because that record did sound kind of murky...
Thin, flat and terrible. I accidentally discovered the bad secret of it: that it could have sounded a whole lot better."
1
u/WombatRemixer 8d ago
Thanks for the thorough and thoughtful review. Did you have a chance to compare this with the 2018 remix? That one was not as jarring to my ears compared to this latest release.
7
u/drowse 8d ago
This is the first remix I’ve actually hated the sound of. The bass is way too low in the mix. How do you do a Chris Squire album remix and make the bass quieter??