"Deluxe", "Remastered"! That sounds good! Yes?
Well, no.
The simple fact is that the mastering on the original version of Nevermind was excellent. Howie Weinberg was tasked with making the original sound as good as he possibly could. And the result was a clear, lively, dynamic and very punchy record indeed!
Then this came along. Unfortunately, the music industry no longer cares in any way about quality - really, they don't! So for this supposedly "Deluxe" version, they simply asked the mastering engineer to forget all about sound quality and just make the album sound artificially loud. And he's done that! All of the dynamics are gone, clear passages are replaced with digital distortion, the drums sound flatter and the whole album has a flat, lifeless and fatiguing sound to it.
And there we have it. A "Deluxe" version of this album which sounds 10 times worse than the original.
Sure the bonus tracks are a nice addition, but they aren't anything which hasn't been floating around on bootlegs for the last 15+ years. So, my advice is to keep hold of your superior "original" copy - A good memorial for those times when the music industry used to care about the quality of the stuff they release. Don't touch this shoddy re-release with a barge pole!
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As a quick update to this for all those who are curious about the sheer number of positive reviews here (or why I seem to have reviewed it twice), Amazon have pulled all the reviews from the original album, the "remastered" album and the "deluxe" album (remastered plus bonus material) all together into one group. Hence these reviews here also now cover the original release as well. Personally, I'd give the original 5 stars as well. It's this shoddy "remaster" that only deserves 2. If you haven't heard this album yet, track down a copy of the original. You won't regret it!
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