Updating the Beach Boys on cd

While the C virus is uppermost in our minds being all over news and affecting our everyday lives, I thought I'd revisit an artist that had been last mentioned on here in a 1990 entry and whose 'classic' sixties albums had come out by that year but the Beach Boy's like a few other artists don't have a consistently great set of cds so across the years I had been putting together the least imperfect set with the 1993 Good Vibrations box set and the DCC Gold editions from the mid nineteen nineties of the Endless Summer and Spirit Of America compilations to catch stray tracks and singles not on albums.

I had picked up the 1990 two on one cd series which wasn't too bad but the attempt to remove tape hiss and clicks did take something away from the sound of the best records so I did pick up the MFSL gold two on one Surfing' U.S.A with Surfer Girl albums from 1963.

That issue came out in May 1989.
For the reminder I got the Japanese "Past Masters" single album issues that while not perfect were more or less what was used for the lp issues and that bit better.
The issues of three albums in that series had their own issues which lead me to look elsewhere for their replacements.

 In 2015 Analogue Productions in the states issued on lp and cd a slice of the Beach Boys studio albums in slightly differing forms.
Those albums that never had an original stereo mix used an after the event version intended for the much criticized 2012 Capitol cds, criticized for being very bright sounding and relentlessly loud.
The Lp versions were on a separate mono and stereo issues but the cd, actually Super Audio cd playable on regular players too had both on one disc.
The Today album is the home to three singles, "Dance,Dance,Dance", "Do You Want To Dance?" and "When I Grow Up (To be a man) and five classic Brain Wilson love songs with delightful arrangements.

Summer Days (and Summer Nights !!!) issued in the Summer of 1965 found a way of making commercial songs that had some of lyrical and musical complexity group leader Brian Wilson had in his head.
This had the hits "Help Me, Rhonda" and "California Girls" on it.
Both it and the preceding album only originally had mono mixes that were mixed in to echo laden mock stereo  and of  these issues come with new true stereo ones as well as the original mono which I prefer.

These two cds are much better than my 1990 two one copy.

 Pet Sounds is a classic album that pushed the limits of both how a studio could be used to make sounds and also the lyrical concerns of popular music.
It contains the hit singles  "Wouldn't It Be Nice", "God Only Knows", "Sloop John B" and the much talked about track "Here Today".
For a long time on record all you get is an awful fake stereo version and the 1990 mono cd was thin and lacking in detail.

For a long time this had been my go to edition but while it was better than most others it was a little dull and had some obvious low frequency boost that just didn't sound natural.
This new Super audio cd edition is a lot better (I suspect the mono lp from it is too).

 A stereo mix was made in 1996 and revised a few years later when a few missing bits were found for the Pet Sounds 30th anniversary box set and that mix is featured together with the original mono one sounding better than ever in this issue.

It's good after many years of cd collecting to have great sounding versions of albums I grew up with.