Sorry Mark. I work as a salesman selling studio quality monitors and recording equipment.  I have a recording and mastering studio in my house, where I auditioned the recordings.  The cymbals are hashy, and sound to me like cymbals sound when they are over-compressed and then compressed again in mastering.  My biggest beef, as outlined in the original post, is the use of Antares Auto-Tune on the vocals.  It is especially audible at points and it really bothers me.  I had no problem with the little bit of out of tuneness of the original recording.  I wish they hadn't tried to fix it.  To me the mixes sound lifeless and harsh.  Even though there is a lot to be desired from some of the Glynn Johns' mixes as far as the quality of the mastering, I far prefer that version of "naked" without auto-tune, bad digital reverb and lousy over-limited cymbals.

---------- Original Message ----------------------------------
From: Mark London <mrl@psfc.mit.edu>
Reply-To: audities@smoe.org
Date:  Thu, 20 Nov 2003 16:27:46 -0500

>>From: "bob" <segarini@sympatico.ca>
>>We must have gotten two different versions of the CD...mine is a HUGE
>>improvement over the previous release and boots..
>
>I would be curious how you 2 listen to the CD.  I.e., with speakers, 
>good headphones, or portable CD headphones?  The difference in 
>listening experience has to be different.  Considering that many 
>people listen to music like I do, which is to do so using a portable 
>CD player, with your basic inexpensive headphones, I've often 
>wondered if producers test how their mix will sound with a portable, 
>especially when new digital techniques are used to try and increase 
>the quality of older recordings.  It might make the music sound 
>brighter, but at the same time, you lose the some of the smoothness 
>of the original analog recordings.  This is especially true of the 
>drum and cymbal sound, which Frank complained of.  If you listen to 
>music with portable CD headphones, the music is right up on your 
>ears, and something like overloud or annoying drum or cymbal sounds 
>might be more noticable than if you listened with speakers (and 
>especially since portable CD players have no controls that allow you 
>to correct the sound, except for "extra bass" and "lots of extra 
>bass")
>
>P.s. if you have the time, in some cases, you can correct the problem 
>with the cymbals by applying a high pass (or notch) filter.  The 
>drums is another story.  I've actually taken the time to use audio 
>editing software to manually smooth out the start of each drum hit. 
>Although you have to be crazy like myself to spend the amount of time 
>necessarily to do this, without being paid for it!
>
>