Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Being the 2nd reviewer for this set, and having read T. Fleming's enthusiastic post, I will now ministrate to my respective side of the hydrant. Ten years ago, I opted for the Queen catalog in Japan mini-sleeves, which I believe had Japan-dedicated remasters. I never heard any of the artifacting in the Toshiba discs that Mr. Fleming speaks of in the European releases. So, please remember as you are reading this, I do not have the domestic Hollywood or European releases, only the Japan discs: If you do not own those, you will probably not reach the same conclusions as I did. On the heels of those recent, terrible Rolling Stones "remasters", Universal has applied the same odious loudness compression method to another high profile catalog: Queen. If you're not familiar with term, the technical explanation is the application of an increasingly high ratio of compression to the dynamic range of a particular recording, and then increasing the gain of the recording, until the peaks have reached maximum. In layman's terms: There are no longer any quiet or loud passages in the recording, EVERYTHING is at the same volume. Go to Wikipedia and search "loudness wars". In that article, there is also a link to an excellent You Tube audio/video demonstration. Basically, the ubiquity of the iPod is the culprit in this plague: When music is played back thru earbuds in any environment with ambient noise present, by having the volume artificially jacked across the entire music spectrum, you can hear the content more clearly. When you listen to these new Queen editions in a home system, however, it's just a sheer wall of high volume sound; there is no dynamic range remaining. The vocals, instrumentation and orchestrations are all now in competition, rather than being in harmony, with each other, and the overall volume of each album is much louder than the previous versions. There is also a noticeable loss of clarity in the cymbals on the 2011 releases; they sound much sharper on the Japan discs. All of this adds up to a real heartbreaker, because a lot of the bonus material is excellent, and Queen fans have been waiting for a long time for this kind of look under the hood. There was also no reason to split the bonus material to a 2nd disc on any of these releases, other than to charge a higher price for each title. None of these albums with their respective bonus material approach the full capacity of a CD. There was even room on each album disc to include not only the new bonus material, but also the bonus tracks from the earlier editions. So, especially with the addition of a 2nd CD in each set, making each title more expensive, Universal's choice not to do so borders on the egregious. NOVEMBER 2011 UPDATE: Amazon has lowered the price on this set by nearly half. I was already regretting buying this set; now I'm just downright pissed, since it's "an Amazon Exclusive". As for the next three boxes (#2 is already out as of this writing), you might not want to buy them until they've also been discounted!