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Smiling Phases (two discs, 1991) or Feelin' Alright: The Very Best of Traffic (one disc, 77 minutes, 2000)?

According to All Music, the latter is produced by Bill Levenson and mastered by Tom 'Curly' Ruff. No mastering credit on the former.

The former is purportedly a FLAT TRANSFER.

I'd have to pull both out again, but I think this is a case of them sounding a bit *different*, but not really "better" or "worse".

So I pulled both out, along with the "Traffic" remaster from 2001. I guess the differences are a bit more than I remember them. The interesting thing is that the differences vary from song to song. On You Can All Join In and Feelin' Alright, for example, FA:TVBOT certainly has a more "modern" sound to it, for better or worse - a bit more top, a bit less mids. Yet the Barleycorn songs seem to be just the opposite - the newer disc almost seems muffled in comparison to Smiling Phases.

I don't know what the two sets are going for these days, but SP sure is a nice set of songs in one place.

FYI, here's the info on the discs:

Feelin' Alright: The Very Best of Traffic
C 2000 Island Records, Ltd
Compliation produced by Bill Levenson
Mastered by Tom Ruff at Universal Music Studios East, Edison, New Jersey

Smiling Phases
C 1991 Island Records, Inc
Compiled by Kevin Patrick
[no mastering credit]

Traffic
C 2001 Universal-Island Records Ltd.
Reissue supervised by Bill Levenson
Mastered by Jeff Willens at Universal Mastering Studios-East.
Analog to digital transfers by Gary Moore, Alan Leeming and Keiron McGarry at Universal Digital Mastering Studios, London.

Give me a little time and I'll throw up a few MP3s.

Here are a few MP3s. In all cases, Smiling Phases is first, followed by FA:TVBOT. In the case of You Can All Join In, the "Traffic" version is third.

Heaven Is In Your Mind
You Can All Join In
Empty Pages

There's no processing, other than the MP3 encoding (obviously) and fades at the end of each. Keep in mind some samples are louder than others...