With the development of polyvinylchloride, microgroove cutting technology and different speeds (16,33&1/3, 45) made possible a choice of formats for vinyl replay. While Freddie could no longer tour, Queen remained a band of staggering creative resourcefulness. As John Deacon implied, they instead channelled their live chemistry into the studio: “In the first few weeks of recording we did a lot of live material, a lot of songs, some jamming, and ideas came up.” Just as revealing – and sure to be prized by the Queen hardcore – are the spoken exchanges between the four members at the Townhouse, Olympic and Mountain Studios, giving listeners a unique snapshot of their friendship and working dynamic. A couple of the sleeves seem pretty cheap. Not so much the actual material it was made out of, but good God some of the scans are poor. The Miracle looks horrible, I have no idea how somehow said it was good for production. The pictures of the band members in the gatefold of ANATO are horribly pixilated as well. In terms of percussion, the original had a bloated, boomy lower end. Now, the percussion had a focused and tighter presentation that removed the swollen lower frequency aspect but did provide a series of clean strikes. Moving to A Day at the Races and playing the 1999 release from the 1998 remaster of Somebody To Love, I was beginning to see a trend because the new master benefitted again from that open and airy suite of upper mids and treble that gave the overall presentation a rich, deep, spacious aspect that allowed the vocal to sound simple and pure while cymbal strikes had a welcoming fragility. Percussion, from Roger Taylor roamed around the wider and more fulsome soundstage while the bass from John Deacon was sharper and rounder.

Includes ’The Miracle Sessions’, containing over an hour of unreleased studio recordings including six previously unheard songs – plus intimate fly-on-the-wall audio of the band at work (and play) in the studio A Kind Of Magic - Originally released in June 1986. Recorded mainly at The Townhouse Studios, London, Musicland Studios, Munich and Mountain Studios, Montreux. X1 recorded at Abbey Road Studios. Gatefold sleeve with lyric/picture inner sleeve, published by Queen Music Ltd. / EMI Music Publishing Ltd. - Orange vinyl. Joan Armatrading appears courtesy of A&M Records. Some songs on this album appear in different form in the film "Highlander". The Cut: Of course, with the vinyl process, everything depends on the final stage – the physical cut – one continuous modulated spiral groove on each side, carrying all the sound information which will eventually reach our ears. Queen’s writing also reflected their personal circumstances. The torn-from-the-headlines drama of ‘Scandal’ was May’s personal swipe at the press intrusion into the bandmembers’ respective personal affairs. Singled out by Deacon for praise, Freddie’s soaring album closer, ‘Was It All Worth It’, has in retrospect been interpreted as a reflection on the singer’s health.The hugely prolific sessions for The Miracle began in December 1987 and stretched out to March 1989. It was to be one of the most consequential periods in Queen’s history. Fifteen months previously, on August 9, 1986, Queen’s mighty Europe Magic Tour had ended on a high, before an estimated audience of more than 160,000 at Knebworth Park in Britain. As the band left the stage that night – toasting the flagship show of their biggest tour to date – they could hardly have foreseen that Knebworth marked a line in the sand. This would be Queen’s final live show with Freddie and the first in a chain of pivotal moments that would lead towards a lengthy separation for the band. News Of The World - Originally released in October 1977. Gatefold sleeve with lyric/picture inner sleeve, published by Queen Music Ltd./ EMI Music Publishing Ltd. - Green vinyl. Said Roger: “D ecisions are made on artistic merit, so ‘Everybody wrote everything’ is the line, rather than ego or anything else getting in the way. We seem to work together better now than we did before. We’re fairly up-and-down characters. We have different tastes in many ways. We used to have lots of arguments in the studio, but this time we decided to share all the songwriting, which I think was very democratic and a good idea.” This feature contains behind the scenes footage of ‘I Want It All’, ‘Scandal’, ‘The Miracle’ and ‘Breakthru’ videos. The album as originally released on CD, remastered by Bob Ludwig in 2011 from the original first-generation master mixes.

The set is housed in a gold coloured box with a flip-open lid. The box has the Queen name in logo form on the front and STUDIO COLLECTION just beneath, along with the Queen crest near the bottom. In between the Single and Long Play (usually up to about 22 mins per side) came the Extended Play (EP) used for playing times over a few minutes but not sufficient to fill a full length LP, typically around 10 to 15 mins per side. These were often 7″ discs playing at 33&1/3 rpm or also 10″. Said Roger: “Decisions are made on artistic merit, so ‘Everybody wrote everything’ is the line, rather than ego or anything else getting in the way. We seem to work together better now than we did before. We’re fairly up-and-down characters. We have different tastes in many ways. We used to have lots of arguments in the studio, but this time we decided to share all the songwriting, which I think was very democratic and a good idea.”QUEEN Greatest Hits III’, rarely available on vinyl, features their latter-day songs, the band members’ solo hits and the band’s collaborations with other artists including Elton John, Montserrat Caballé, George Michael and Wyclef Jean. The sixth album, ‘News of The World’, features a robot image gatefold sleeve, with a reproduction of the original inner sleeve (minus the di-cut hole which has been replaced with an image of the robot’s face). The album is pressed on opaque green vinyl, similar to the 1978 French release. The twelfth album, A Kind of Magic’, features a reproduction of the original gatefold sleeve, an inner lyric sleeve with extended liner notes, and a transparent orange vinyl; a lighter shade of vinyl than the original 1986 New Zealand pressing. Finally, the 13th album ‘The Miracle’ features an inner lyric sleeve and a turquoise green vinyl pressing. Universal Music will issue Studio Collection, a new Queen 18LP vinyl box set this September. It will contain all 15 studio albums released by the band pressed on vibrant 180g coloured vinyl in hues sympathetic to the original artwork.

The “single” self explanatory 7″ 45 rpm (12″ singles came later, actually invented in Jamaica to allow extended dub mixes to be presented uninterrupted) The Miracle Videos includes the five promotional music videos and bonus content on both Blu-ray and DVD formats. The set contains Queen’s 15 studio albums, spread across 18 180-gram coloured discs. The colours are in keeping with the theme of each album, some of which bear similarities to the colours of some of the early european pressings. The reproduction artwork, for the most part, remains faithful to the original UK album releases with 1 or 2 minor revisions as noted below. The records themselves are encased in high quality poly-lined inner sleeves. Queen on Vinyl: This is how listeners first heard the now legendary Queen in the 1970’s when vinyl was the predominant format for recorded music. This September Queen will hit the crest of an already massive wave – a world-wide renaissance of vinyl and record players – with the ultimate set of vinyl LPs, the complete collection of Queen studio albums, re-mastered to the highest standards of quality in both audio and artwork.Are the Studio Collection remasters better than the original pressings? The answer is a resounding yes. Though the original pressings are some of the best-sounding vinyl I own, they do suffer from a certain harshness and exhibit a higher noise floor due to the nature of them being heavily mass-produced and therefore of lower quality. And of course this is the first time Innuendo and Made in Heaven have been pressed to vinyl in their entirety, and to me being 2 of the best Queen albums the set is worth it for them alone. The Works - Originally released in February 1984. Recorded at The Record Plant, Los Angeles, California, USA and Musicland Studios, Munich, Germany, August 83 - January 84. Lyric inner sleeve, published by Queen Music Ltd. / EMI Music Publishing Ltd. - Red vinyl. "This is the first album to come to you through the EMI-CAPITOL Organisation worldwide."