I figure by now someone has ahold of a copy, and if you're willing I'd quite like for you to do a little test for me.

 

There are a couple of FLAC versions of the album hovering around, and it looks like the CD has been partially mastered in MPEG for some horrific reason. Some tracks come up as CDDA, some as MPEG.

If possible, could someone who has the CD run Audiochecker using the source "Tracks from Audio CD" with the actual CD in the drive, and then pastebin me the log? I'm extremely curious, and I'm also very worried that the album has been mastered terribly.

 

Here is a link to audiochecker;

http://www.softpedia.com/progDownload/Audiochecker-Download-43293.html

 

Thanks

Don't know if you've got your answer yet, but here's what I get when running the regular EU (Dutch) CD through Audiochecker:

 

01 AIMH - Error, could not qualify the source of the track

02 Magic - 100% CDDA

03 Ink - 95% MPEG

04 True Love - 95% MPEG

05 Midnight - 100% CDDA

06 Another's Arms - 95% MPEG

07 Oceans - 100% CDDA

08 A Sky Full Of Stars - 100% CDDA

09 O - 100% CDDA

 

So yeah, it definitely looks like something weird happened in the mastering stage... but would they really have been so careless to use MPEG-versions by accident, or would it have some kind of reasoning behind it (maybe they like the more 'compressed' sound MPEG encoding gives)?

Thanks a lot for that, that is absolutely astonishing. It mostly matches up with the version I had, except one track of mine was 87% CDDA.

 

I can't fathom it, why would anyone want the MPEG sound...