Pet Sounds, as beautiful as it is, was originally released in mono. It was mastered to be listened to in mono, at a time when stereo was mostly just a novelty.

It wasn't until much more recently that they've taken those masters and created "real" stereo mixes from them. While they can often sound pretty good, they never quite reach the level of the best sounding mono mixes of the same material.

Just my opinion of course.

[–] Fox@pawb.social 2 points 2 months ago

That may be a thing with some releases, but I'm convinced that the original pet sounds and even the MFSL mono release are very inferior to that one HDCD stereo release. Still I'm listening to in 16bit/44kHz form, but to me it sounds way higher fidelity and likely is closer to the source. I can pick out instruments and sounds that I didn't hear in the other version.

In general though I find modern 'remasters' are horrible and compressed and I think it's lame that services like Spotify usually have only the most recent (and therefore worst) version of a given album.

May the source be with you