Sector 3 vs 90's remasters?

[treeduck]

The original vinyls probably trump everything.

[DJLightray]

I've been re-ripping my Rush collection (and digitizing my laserdiscs). I hadn't heard of the Sector sets the other day, but my friend has Sector 3. When doing Big Money off of ASOH I noticed that the Sector version ran at a different version than the original CD and 97 remaster, but also didn't line up well with the DVD/laserdisc version even though the length from opening drum hit to final drum hit was the same.

So I grabbed Subdivisions  and compared the '97 to the MFSL Gold to the Sector version. There is very little difference between the MFSL Gold and the 97 remaster, other than the volume is a little louder on the '97. The Sector version definitely has more multi-band compression and a low mid boost. The odd thing is, once again, the Sector version is not running at the same speed as the '97 or MFSL gold version, and the speed difference is NOT linear. In Ableton I manually marked the first and last transients and using the "re-pitch" warping method I lined them up with the corresponding transients in the '97 remaster. To me this seems to indicate that when they went back to the tape for the Sector version, either the tape machine they used was not running at a consistent speed, or the tape has stretched out in places. It's not really noticeable to the ear but it is interesting. Hopefully they have a 'pure' digital copy of the original session tracks archived somewhere, in case the original session tape is degrading.

Anyway, as far as Sector vs '97, I think it depends on your listening environment. I would think the Sector versions would sound better in a car or cheaper earbuds. The '97s probably sounds better on a really home system or over-the-ear headphones like Sony MDR 7506's or higher end earbuds like the Sony XMRs.  In any case if you are happy if with the version you have the difference probably isn't great enough to justify the cost, IMO.