![]() ![]() ![]() So what makes a great album these days? Judging from the MTV results (listed below), it's the album with the most successful singles. The MP3 shuffle has made such agonising almost pointless. ![]() On vinyl, the norm was to start each side with an uptempo track, to capture the listener's attention – in the same way you build a setlist for a gig – and, preferably, you would take the listener on a journey thereafter. With the MP3 player you can just hand pick the good ones from the start.Īrtists used to – and some still do – agonise over the track order on the album. In the 1980s and 1990s, the listener would just press the skip button when faced with a filler track. But has cramming almost twice as much music on to a disc resulted in a better album? The limitations of vinyl meant the artist had to think long and hard about what would merit inclusion on the final tracklist. Permenidis believes that, contrary to popular belief, today's digital masters create degradation in sound compared to the old analogue ones.Īccording to mastering engineer Dick Beetham (who is now, incidentally, the man who mastered "the second greatest album of all time"), a CD can hold up to 79.59 min before it risks not playing properly. You also lose bass if you try to pack more grooves on to the restricted space of a vinyl album. The shorter the album, the louder it can be mastered – which means there will be less noise. I remember watching an interview with Quincy Jones where he relayed how Off the Wall was a longer album initially, but they realised that once they passed a certain length on one side (I think it was somewhere around 25 minutes), the whole thing sounded horrible.Ĭhris Parmenidis, a mastering engineer who specialises in vinyl, tells me that for the best sound, the ideal album length is actually 12 to 14 minutes per side. Some would argue that the quality of albums went down with the invention of the CD. But who's the runner up? Well, it's that groundbreaking milestone in the history of recorded music: Born to Do It by Craig David.Īt a time when a US No 1 can reach that height by selling a paltry 60,000 copies, I wonder if a competition for "greatest album ever" is even relevant. ![]() No surprise there – if by greatest you mean the biggest seller of all time. For all of you people who can't take the suspense any longer, I've had a peek at the results and I can reveal that the winner is Michael Jackson's Thriller. Actually, the term Greatest Album Ever is a bit misleading, since they have only included albums that were released from the year MTV launched (1981) onwards. This Saturday, MTV will announce the winner in their Greatest Album Ever vote. ![]()
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