Physical
Overview
Olivia's finest moment and commercial peak as a singer was the 1981 Physical album, originally released on vinyl. We have several copies of this for your consideration. Although I have tried to be agnostic on which one is better, it is fair to say the Physical CD in the Japanese Box Set has problems and would benefit from being dropped back 1dB. Anecdotally, some fans have had problems with distortion on that, others not, which would agree with the issues raised in the AES paper in footnote 1.
Version 1 - the Japanese early release CDP35-3065
The Japanese black triangle edition of Physical, CP35-3065, from 1984, two years after the commercial debut of the CD medium, and three years after the album's release. The smash hit album was one of the early priorities to get out on CD, and Olivia has had a lot of success in Japan. Clearly for the domestic market, the back cover has no English subtitles for the Japanese character song titles.
Japan CP35-3065
| Track | Title | True Peak | LUFS Integrated |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Landslide | -0.02 dB | -16.61 dB |
| 02 | Stranger’s Touch | -1.40 dB | -18.78 dB |
| 03 | Make a Move on Me | +0.01 dB | -15.94 dB |
| 04 | Falling | -3.57 dB | -19.88 dB |
| 05 | Love Make Me Strong | +0.20 dB | -16.46 dB |
| 06 | Physical | -0.02 dB | -17.00 dB |
| 07 | Silvery Rain | -0.25 dB | -19.35 dB |
| 08 | Carried Away | -2.55 dB | -19.52 dB |
| 09 | Recovery | -0.76 dB | -19.00 dB |
| 10 | The Promise (The Dolphin Song) | -3.99 dB | -23.41 dB |
Version 2 - the MCA release
In an ideal world I'd use the earlier MCA release of Physical in 1985, MCAD-5229 rather than this budget release MCAD-31110, but this is the CD I have. It a rerelease from 2003
US MCA MCAD-31110
| Track | Title | True Peak | LUFS Integrated |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Landslide | -1.69 dB | -15.81 dB |
| 02 | Stranger's Touch | -0.24 dB | -16.92 dB |
| 03 | Make a Move on Me | -2.93 dB | -16.44 dB |
| 04 | Falling | -4.25 dB | -18.67 dB |
| 05 | Love Make Me Strong | -2.08 dB | -17.51 dB |
| 06 | Physical | -1.17 dB | -14.97 dB |
| 07 | Silvery Rain | -0.94 dB | -17.62 dB |
| 08 | Carried Away | -1.77 dB | -16.95 dB |
| 09 | Recovery | -1.97 dB | -17.69 dB |
| 10 | The Promise (The Dolphin Song) | -2.30 dB | -20.22 dB |
Version 3 - the 2010 Japanese Box Set
This is what you get in the Japanese Box Set from 2010
JP UICX-1377
The true peak levels of greater than 0dB are not a typo1.
| Track | Title | True Peak | LUFS Integrated |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Landslide | +0.85 dB | -8.21 dB |
| 02 | Strangers Touch | +0.51 dB | -10.45 dB |
| 03 | Make A Move On Me | +0.50 dB | -8.62 dB |
| 04 | Falling | +0.28 dB | -11.48 dB |
| 05 | Love Make Me Strong | +0.67 dB | -9.97 dB |
| 06 | Physical | +0.68 dB | -8.75 dB |
| 07 | Silvery Rain | +0.66 dB | -11.36 dB |
| 08 | Carried Away | +0.49 dB | -10.76 dB |
| 09 | Recovery | +0.70 dB | -10.65 dB |
| 10 | The Promise (The Dolphin Song) | +0.29 dB | -14.74 dB |
| 11 | Heart Attack | +0.73 dB | -10.08 dB |
| 12 | Tied Up | +0.85 dB | -9.87 dB |
Version 4 - the Primary Wave release
This is the latest and greatest remastered deluxe edition of Physical from Primary Wave, which comes with a bonus disc of lots of goodies
ONJ9021
The true peak levels of greater than 0dB are small and may be rounding errors.2.
| Track | Title | True Peak | LUFS Integrated |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Landslide (Remastered 2021) | +0.07 dB | -11.05 dB |
| 02 | Stranger's Touch (Remastered 2021) | +0.05 dB | -13.08 dB |
| 03 | Make A Move On Me (Remastered 2021) | +0.07 dB | -10.69 dB |
| 04 | Falling (Remastered 2021) | +0.01 dB | -13.28 dB |
| 05 | Love Make Me Strong (Remastered 2021) | +0.12 dB | -10.91 dB |
| 06 | Physical (Remastered 2021) | +0.09 dB | -10.97 dB |
| 07 | Silvery Rain (Remastered 2021) | +0.08 dB | -13.22 dB |
| 08 | Carried Away (Remastered 2021) | +0.05 dB | -12.37 dB |
| 09 | Recovery (Remastered 2021) | +0.14 dB | -13.51 dB |
| 10 | The Promise (The Dolphin Song) (Remastered 2021) | -1.64 dB | -13.08 dB |
| 11 | Landslide (Edited Version / Remastered 2021) | +0.06 dB | -10.68 dB |
| 12 | Heart Attack (Remastered 2021) | +0.10 dB | -11.23 dB |
| 13 | Tied Up (Edited Version / Remastered 2021) | +0.06 dB | -11.55 dB |
| 14 | Twist Of Fate (Remastered 2021) | -0.88 dB | -11.89 dB |
| 15 | (Livin' In) Desperate Times (Re-mixed Version / Remastered 2021) | +0.05 dB | -11.94 dB |
| 16 | Take A Chance (Remastered 2021) | -0.00 dB | -12.89 dB |
DR9 (album tracks only) - album tracks only all tracks TT DR Offline results
back to the CD sound quality index of albums
back to the four waves of digitally remastered Olivia CDs
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It is possible for the output of a digital system to go beyond 0dBFS under certain circumstances. If you don't believe that, a more technical reference is 0dBFS+ Levels in Digital Mastering, Nielsen and Lund, TC Electronic A/S, Risskov, Denmark presented at AES 109. A copy can be found here as of Nov 2022. The autors' observation All of the domestic CD players investigated have shown difficulty dealing with 0dBFS+ levels that can
easily occur on modern CDs. New models are actually worse than older types relying less on
oversampling and more on analog filters.
We have not investigated how seriously audio quality is subjectively affected, nor have we made any listening fatigue tests concerning 0dBFS+ levels. However, modern CDs contain these kind of signals and modern CD players are not designed to reproduce them without distortion. may explain the anecdotal observation that some Olivia fans complain of distortion on the Japanese boxset Physical CD where others don't. ↩ -
I used this method with Foobar2k to derive True Peak, it oversamples by 4 times. This is a tradeoff between runtime and precision, many CD player reconstruction filters oversample more than 4 times. All the errors are small, < 0.15dB. I could believe that is rounding error compared to the high true peaks of UICX-1377. If you inspect the peak levels on MasVis for the Primary Wave release it doesn't show the sustained clipping and distortion visible on the UICX-1377 MasVis peak levels. We haven't heard distortion complaints about the Primary Wave release like we did about the Box Set, where the problem did seem to specifically affect the Physical album.↩