Petula Clark – Kiss Me Goodbye (Intermusic SA-CD/Super Audio Compact Disc Hybrid/1964
– 1968 Hits Set/Top Music International)
Sound/DSD
2.0 Stereo: B PCM 2.0 Stereo: B- Music: B
PLEASE
NOTE:
This Super
Audio Compact Disc is only available from our friends at Top Music
International, has a Compact Disc layer that will play on virtually all CD
players and can be ordered at the link below.
After so
many decades of several British Invasions and so many great female singers over
all those years, Petula Clark remains the biggest selling, most successful
British Female Vocalist of all time! She
certainly got a head start as a child singer in the 1940s and became a darling
of the entertainment industry, but from 1964 to 1968, she had her biggest hits worldwide
with Warner Bros. and those songs continue to be what she is best known
for. Many hits sets have come and gone,
but remarkably, Top Music and Intermusic have decided to issue them in the
Super Audio CD format and the resulting Kiss
Me Goodbye collection is highly comprehensive.
For
technophiles, here are the specs for how the disc was made:
The
Project re-mastered by Povee Chan
32Bits/192kHz
High Resolution Mastering
SADiE DSD
Digital Precision
Mastering
Monitor: Almarro M1A
Monitor
Amplifier: Octave Jubliee Preamp
Power
System: Isoclean Power Conditioning System
Mastered
with Black Rhodium Cable
Hybrid
Stereo, Plays on all SACD and CD Players
Made in Germany by
Sonopress
The hits
include:
1)
Kiss Me Goodbye
2)
A Sign Of The Times
3)
Don't Sleep In The Subway
4)
Colour My World
5)
Downtown
6)
I Couldn't Live Without Your Love
7)
I Know A
Place
8)
The Other Man's Grass Is Always Greener
9)
Let It Be Me
10) Who Am I
11) My Love
12) This Girl's In Love With You
13) Happy Heart
14) You'd Better Come Home
15) This Is My Song
16) Round Every Corner
In the U.S.
alone, that includes 12 Top 40 hits and 2 #1 hits. Track 5 is a classic, Track 7 also hugely
successful and Tony Hatch was responsible for writing (or co-writing) and
producing most of them. Track 12 is a
Burt Bacharach/Hal David classic. All
would seem to be popular and she still has many fans. The music holds up well and when you can hear
it sound better in this edition, you get a whole new appreciation for the hard
work done here.
The DSD
2.0 Stereo reveals new detail and even depth you have never heard in these
songs before unless you have an exceptional vinyl copy and even then, I was
surprised that recordings as old as 45 years old were sounding so good. The decision to skip a 5.1 or similar
multi-channel mix was a good one and though you can hear the age of the
recordings to some extent, it is better than compressing hiss or other items
out of them. But it is Clark’s
singing voice that is ultimately revealed as more nuanced, empathetic and offering
better phrasing than so many lesser copies of these songs drifting around would
have you believe. She was a big singer
for a reason and this SA-CD proves why.
The PCM 2.0 Stereo CD tracks are not bad, but they cannot compete
against the higher resolution of the DSD (Direct Stream Digital) signal.
As for
other great hits of the 1960s on SA-CD, the tendency has been to keep them in
DSD 2.0 Stereo and this has included the whole early catalog releases of The
Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan and hits sets of The Zombies, Herman’s Hermits and
The Animals (many reviewed elsewhere on this site), so this release of Clark’s
key hits fits right in. Back in 1996
when Intermusic was issuing 24K Gold CDs with SuperBit Mapping, several live
albums were issued, as well as Walk On
By, a collection of 20 of Dionne Warwick’s classic hits on her Scepter
Records label. It is long out of print
and hard to find, but remains the best CD ever issued of those classics. I hope Top Music and Intermusic can reissue
that set as an SA-CD of the quality of this Clark
disc and that we see many more such collections, as SA-CD is far from finished
and still the ultimate audiophile format.
A paper
foldout with brief notes is also included.
To find
out more about ordering, start with this link, then go to the ORDER icon at the
top of the page on the right-hand side under the logo:
http://www.topmusic.com/ud-sacd8935.2.htm
- Nicholas Sheffo
