"Only the Lonely" - The Motels

The oldest CD appearance I've heard for this song is Capitol's Motels best-of No Vacancy (1990). The song sounds great here, with excellent dynamic range, nice EQ, no evidence of noise reduction, and seemingly low-generation source tapes. The volume level is a little low, but that's not much of an issue.

All the other CD appearances that I have for this song all use the same analog transfer as No Vacancy, which is neat. In general, all sound excellent, with roughly the same sound quality for all of them. These include:

• Priority's Eighties Greatest Rock Hits Vol. 2 Leather And Lace (1992 - clips a bit, but still sounds OK)
• Sandstone's Cosmopolitan Vol. 6 (1993)
• EMI's Living In Oblivion Vol. 2 (1993; differently-EQ'd digital clone, possibly with a small amount of extra compression/limiting, and about a 4.5 dB volume increase but not loud enough to clip)
• Razor & Tie's Back To The '80s (1994)
• Time-Life's Sounds Of The Eighties Vol. 5 1982 (1994; differently-EQ'd digital clone of Priority disc)
• JCI's Only Love 1980-1984 (1995; very, very end of fade is about 1 second shorter than others)
• Madacy's Rock On 1982 (1996)
• Time-Life's 2-CD Body Talk Vol. 11 After Dark (1997; digitally exactly 2 dB quieter than Living In Oblivion)
• Time-Life's 2-CD Modern Rock Vol. 1 1982-1983 (1999; differently-EQ'd digital clone of Sounds Of The Eighties and Priority disc)

All of the above sound very nice.

The one exception: The version on swaitek's 50-CD promo set The A List Disc 14 (1994) uses a different source, has a very thin EQ, and has noise reduction - avoid. I suspect that it's based on a TM Century disc.

My recommendation:

May as well go for the source, Capitol's No Vacancy (1990), although Living In Oblivion or most of the other discs I listed will sound just fine as well.

Edited by crapfromthepast

Thanks to Jim for sending me the version from No
Vacancy. I edited the above post to include the
No Vacancy info.

headstar wrote: crapfromthepast wrote: My recommendation: May as well go for the source, Capitol's No Vacancy (1990), although Living In Oblivion or most of the other discs I listed will sound just fine as well. It's weird, Audiochecker detects "Only The Lonely" from the "No Vacancy" CD as lossy/MPEG sourced. But the same song from the "Back To The '80s" CD is detected as 100% CDDA/lossless. Did MP3 exist back then?

Mp3 did not exist back in 1990. The earliest known instance of an mp3 encoder release was July 7, 1994 and the extension .mp3 did not exist until July 15, 1995. It wasn't until about 1997-1998 when P2P and its popularity skyrocketed.