Neil Young - Greatest Hits (Remastered)

Review Neil Young - Greatest Hits (Remastered)

It would not only be carrying owls, but carrying whole carloads of owls to Athens, to take up time on Neil Young and his songs, especially his second Greatest Hits from 2004. So, the reviewer has no choice after the 12 years since the first edition of his 2004-Greatest Hits but to compile a few facts in the hope that the readers will not be too bored thereby.

The first Greatest Hits of the rock musician, who grey in all honors had recently arrived in the seventh decade of life, and who was known for his extreme style changes, and later for having extensive pleasure in improvising, and motivated by Kurt Cobain and Pearl Jam for harder rock, appeared in 1977. Not less than 11 songs of the total of 16 songs of the second Greatest Hits come from the first hit compilation. This can be interpreted as a quiet admission that later songs cannot hold the candle to the former ones. This situation however also can be interpreted as a tendency to nostalgia. Take it as you like it. In any case, it is unquestionable that the strong songs taken from the first Greatest Hits - just think of "Down by the River", "Cinnamon Girl", "Southern Man" and "Heart of Gold" - certainly define the identity mark the Canadian symbol Rock musician. If the remaining three songs "Only Love Can Break Your Heart," "Comes A Time," "Hey Hey My My," and "Rockin In The Free World" and "Harvest Moon" from the early nineties, reach qualitatively quite to the older songs is rather questionable. What is certain is that Neil Young regards these songs as representative of the time after the first Greatest Hits. What also seems to be certain is that the Neil Young fan will snatch the 2004 Greatest Hits as a download, even if he has already acquired the Hits twelve years ago, as CD, since the 96kHz / 24Bit download thanks to its higher resolution has the charm to sound clearly better than the CD with its obviously limited resolution.

The first 14 songs were naturally recorded on magnetic tape in 8- and 24-track format. From these recordings 2-track master tapes were obtained in those days, which after careful preparation formed the basis for the transfer into the 176.4kHz / 24-Bit PCM digital format. Songs 15 and 16 were digitally recorded in the 44.1kHz / 16-bit format and formed the basis for a later 176.4kHz / 24-bit PCM digital template after an upsampling process. A 96kHz / 24-bit master was obtained by means of a dithering process out of both digital templates, the one of the first 14 and the one of the last two songs, and this master was recorded on a hard disk as a one-to-one template for the fantastic sounding download Neil Young - Greatest Hits.

Neil Young, acoustic guitar, electric guitar, piano, vocals, harmonica

Neil Young - Greatest Hits (Remastered)

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