Customer Reviews

Hit of the Week

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4 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(2)

 

 

...over processed. The label went a little overboard on the noise reduction. There's a definate "digital" sound to the CD. It's an interesting collection though. Great liner notes and a good variety of Hit Of The Week records.

One of my bad habits is collecting 78 rpm records and I have a number of Hit-Of-The-Week Records myself. These were single-sided cardboard 78 rpm records manufactured from 1929-1932. A product of the Depression, they were sold at newsstands for fifteen cents, a new record released every Thursday. Typically, they featured sweet, or at best, semi-hot dance bands occasionally with singers like Rudy Vallee stepping in. I've come to like many of them, and when I saw that a number of them were included on this disc, I thought I'd order it so that I could have "clean" copies of the music instead of my crackly old cardboard 78s. I ordered this CD some time ago and waited for its arrival with great anticipation. Boy was I disappointed when this disc finally arrived. The sound is terrible. The amateurish attempt to remove record crackle and surface noise from the original 78 rpm records has left terrible distortion, annoying digital artifacts, and remaining surface noise that cuts in and out at random, all of which make this CD very difficult to listen to, and nearly impossible to enjoy. If this is the best that Swing Time can do, I'd rather hear unprocessed transfers of the original records with no "remastering" at all. This disc was a complete waste of my money and time. I might have at least expected some liner notes with useful and interesting information about the recordings and the musicians who made them, but all I get when opening up the case is a brief note reminding me that Hit-Of-The-Week records were originally sold at newsstands for 15 cents, and how much effort (!) went into cleaning up the sound for my listening "pleasure." And on top of all of this, the disc itself is a cheap CD-R with flimsy paper inserts.

I'm normally not much of a complainer, after all, I love this music and want to encourage the record labels that do so to release more of it, but not if it's going to be ruined by such cheap, poor attempts as this. I have bought over 100 CD reissues of music from the 1920s and 1930s, and never have I been as disappointed as I was with this disc (in fact, this is one of only two or three discs I've ever complained about). I guess it's back to my turntable for me where I'll burn my own CD from my own Hit-Of-The-Week records.

I'm with the other reviewers here -- the sound is just awful, and the packaging is shoddy. Get your Hit of the Week elsewhere!