Comparative Visualization
Album Information
Catalog #: CD75021
Barcode: 04497750212
Matrix: CD-70021 1A2 65
Catalog #: 44797 5021 2
Barcode: 044797502125
Matrix: 447 975 0212R1 01
Comments
I recently found Beauty and The Beat at a thrift store and it caught my eye because the CD face said Made In Japan (CD75021), although the CD wasn’t in a smooth case. Regardless, I bought it. When I got to researching the new CD against my own copy, I found out that it had a totally different catalog number than the version I had. When I got home, I discovered the CD face art was different as well. This made me wonder if the mastering was different.
To my surprise, the mastering is significantly different, although you can’t exactly say that the US mastered version is brickwalled, it is definitely louder. You can also see that with the track divider lines, there is only the slightest difference in the way a few tracks were indexed. A curiosity of this early pressing is that the matrix number is not the same as the catalog number, as usually they are the same.