Starship - "Sara"

Played my blue-vinyl 45 for the occasion. (RCA was having fun with these at the time, along with Mr. Mister's purple 45 for "Kyrie".) It runs 4:17, and runs at 100.2 BPM throughout.

The first appearance on CD of the 45 edit that I know of was on Time-Life's 2-CD Rock Dreams (1993), where it runs 4:16 and also runs at 100.2 BPM throughout. JCI's 18 Rock Classics (1994) uses the same analog transfer, and sounds extremely close to Rock Dreams. Unfortunately, the left and right channels are reversed on both of them, compared to the 45.

For Rhino's Billboard Top Hits 1986 (1994), Bill Inglot got a new analog transfer, and it had a bit of tape drift on it. Not enough to really stand out (like early versions of "Le Freak"), but enough for me to measure. It begins at 99.7 BPM and ends at 99.5 BPM. The song runs 4:20, with most of the length difference coming from a later fade point than the others.

There are digital clones of Billboard on Time-Life's Sounds Of The Eighties Vol. 4 1986 (1994), Time-Life's 2-CD Body Talk Vol. 12 By Candlelight (1997), and Time-Life's 1-CD Body Talk Hearts Together (1998). Another CD that uses the same analog transfer is JCI's Only Love 1985-1989 (1996), which shortens the fade by a few seconds in order to cram 20 songs on the disc.

None of these discs sound awful, and I think for my own library I may just manually reverse the L/R channels on Rock Dreams. (Now that I know there's a tiny amount of tape drag on the Billboard disc, I can't unhear it, even if I can't hear it.)

And a question for the vinyl experts:

I'm still a little hung up on the difference between vinyl and styrene. Correct me if any of the following sentences are incorrect:

I think the blue 45 is vinyl, since it has an irregular, sorta-jagged circumferential edge, and it looks like the label was molded onto the record. I think my black-colored 45 for the same song is styrene, since it has a very well-defined circumferential edge, and it looks like the labels was glued on after the record was pressed. I've heard that styrene pressings tend to wear out faster, and can get pretty well chewed up by the wrong shape of stylus.

Is all that more-or-less correct?

Edited by crapfromthepast