You've got to be kidding me, all they had to do was the bare minimum and just use reprints for the CD boxes and I would've been content. Despite some of the old releases having issues at least this scenario would have still been more cost-efficient than trying to hunt down each of those individual soundtracks. However, if they've gone and botched up the mastering on the older releases then it looks like I'll have to still go looking for some of them now anyway. It's a really good thing that I didn't sell any of the ones that I already owned yet since I want to be sure that I'm not replacing any of them with an inferior version.
I'll definitely be keeping my copy of the
Symphony of the Night OST now that's for certain, do the Saturn-exclusive tracks also have bad mastering? It's no surprise that Rondo of Blood sounds flatter than the original release since it's likely the same as the one featured on the
DXC soundtrack which most of us seem to agree is the inferior sounding release. I'm not sure how the CD Box release of Bloodlines compares to the original, but I'm not quite as worried about that one since it's already included on the
Rondo of Blood soundtrack which I was planning to track down anyway due to it sounding better than the DXC release. It's still good to know that this release of
Aria of Sorrow's soundtrack is better than the original, but I suppose that isn't saying much when you consider just how bad the original one sounded. Also, in regards to the SotN MIDI disc being "mostly spared," does that mean that some of the tracks featured on it were still given the same treatment? I figured it was just a reprint of
Midi Power Pro 6 and the SotN tracks from the
Akumajo Dracula MIDI collection.
Regardless, this news has gotten me a bit paranoid about the actual audio quality of these CD boxes. Would it be possible for us to do a breakdown of how each game's soundtrack on the CD boxes compares to that of the previous releases? I own all three of the CD boxes as well as a handful of the individual releases, but they're all still unopened and since I was planning to sell off the ones that I didn't need I'm hesitant over the idea of opening them up to look into it myself. However, I would be willing to purchase a couple of tracks from each albulm that was released digitally in order to provide them as samples that could be used to compare with the CD boxes. I'm aware that the digital releases aren't lossless like the CDs, but they should be enough to determine whether or not the CD boxes use the same masters or not, right?
I think the only entries which are exclusive to the
Kuro Box and
Music Collections Box are Legends, The Arcade, Kid Dracula (GB) and the Saturn exclusive tracks from SotN. I'm also curious if Haunted Castle's soundtrack is the same on both boxes or not since the only other full release it had was on the
Legend of Game Music 2 Platinum Box.