i don't listen to reggae, never have, so i don't know anything about the genre. but i have a friend who loves it, and i got him a collection of reggae music. it includes multiple CDs and claims to be 'the best of reggae music'. the artists on the compilation include such names as Bob Marley (Soul Rebel, Touch Me, Don't Rock the Boat), Delroy Williams, Manifest, Don Carlos, The Heptunes, Dennis Brown, Mystic, etc). my problem is, a lot of the songs are extremely low quality. at least i'm not used to such low quality on professionally released albums. some songs have pops, cracks, hissing, whatever in them. in one you can hear as the artist turns away from the mic and then turns back toward it....a couple of songs actually seem to skip.....only dubstep gets away with this sort of thing. is this normal to reggae music? i'm aware the genre was started by artists who didn't have much means and didn't have access to professional recording studios and standards of the western music industry, but is it really supposed to sound like this? i'm thinking of returning the album, but i wanted to ask people who know about reggae first. maybe it's just me being spoiled by high fidelity sound quality that makes it sound even worse for me. some songs sound just fine, by the way. but others (a huge number of them) are just crap in sound quality.
Yeah, best of Reggae albums can be pretty shoddy - Maybe take a list of artists you recognize, search them in allmusic.com and use the star ratings and reviews to put together your own compilation. Maybe stick to a best of one artist but you need to be careful you get a good one. allmusic.com - use it all the time :2thumbsup:
