Post Description

Who's Next is the fifth album by the English rock band The Who. It was released on 31 July 1971 by Decca and MCA in the United States and 25 August 1971 in the United Kingdom through Track and Polydor. The album has origins in a rock opera conceived by Pete Townshend called Lifehouse. The ambitious, complex project did not come to fruition at the time and instead, many of the songs written for the project were compiled onto Who's Next as a collection of unrelated songs. Who's Next was a critical and commercial success when it was released, and has been certified 3x platinum by the RIAA.
 
The album has its roots in the Lifehouse project, which The Who's leader Pete Townshend has variously described as intended to be a futuristic rock opera, a live-recorded concept album and as the music for a scripted film project. The project proved to be intractable on several levels and caused stress within the band as well as a major falling out between Townshend and The Who's producer Kit Lambert. Years later, in the liner notes to the remastered Who's Next CD, Townshend wrote that the failure of the project led him to the verge of a suicidal nervous breakdown.
 
After giving up on recording some of the Lifehouse tracks in New York, The Who went back into the studio with new producer Glyn Johns and started over. Although the Lifehouse concept was abandoned, scraps of the project remained present in the final album. The introductory line to "Pure and Easy" — which Townshend has described as "the central pivot of Lifehouse" — shows up in the closing bars of "The Song Is Over". An early concept for Lifehouse featured the feeding of personal data from audience members into the controller of an early analog synthesizer to create musical tracks. It was widely believed that inputting the vital statistics of Meher Baba into a synthesizer generated the backing track on "Baba O'Riley", but in actuality it was Townshend playing a Lowrey organ.[3] A primary result of the abandonment of the original project, however, was a newfound freedom; the very absence of an overriding musical theme or storyline (which had been the basis of several previous Who projects) allowed the band to concentrate on maximizing the impact of individual tracks.
 
Although he gave up his original intentions for the Lifehouse project, Townshend continued to develop the concepts, revisiting them in later albums. In 2006 he opened a website called The Lifehouse Method to accept personal input from applicants which would be turned into musical portraits.
 
The album was immediately recognized for its dynamic and unique sound. The album fortuitously fell at a time when great advances had been made in sound engineering over the previous decade, and also shortly after the widespread availability of synthesizers.
 
Townshend used the early synthesizers and modified keyboard sounds in several modes: as a drone effect on several songs, notably "Baba O'Riley" and "Won't Get Fooled Again", and as a playful noisemaker, sounding almost like a tea kettle whistle on "The Song Is Over". Townshend also used an envelope follower to modulate the spectrum of his guitar on "Going Mobile", giving it a distinctive squawking sound that degenerates into a bubbling noise at the end of the song.
 
The album opened with "Baba O'Riley", featuring piano by Townshend and a violin solo by Dave Arbus. The song's title pays homage to Townshend's guru Meher Baba and influential minimalist composer Terry Riley (and is informally known by the line "Teenage Wasteland" ). Other signature tracks include the rock ballad "Behind Blue Eyes", and the album's epic closing song, "Won't Get Fooled Again".
 
Track Listing
1. Baba O'Riley 5:07
2. Bargain 5:44
3. Love Ain't for Keeping 2:19
4. My Wife 3:35
5. Song is Over 6:23
6. Getting in Tune 4:51
7. Going Mobile 3:51
8. Behind Blue Eyes 3:49
9. Won't Get Fooled Again 8:47
 
Released 31 July 1971 (2010 Remaster)
Recorded March–May 1971, Olympic Studios, London
Length 43:38
Language English
Label Polydor UIGY 9022
Producer The Who, Glyn Johns (associate producer)
 
SACD Ripping Notes
A 5-star album, and a 5-star sounding SACD.
This is how all SACD should be mastered !!
No Brickwalls and No Compression
 
This SACD rip was created using the following process:
1) DSD internally converted to a 24bit/88.2KHz PCM stream by the Oppo DV-980H player
2) The PCM stream is conveyed into a high-quality HDMI 1.3 cable
3) The HDMI is connected to an Octava 1x2 HDMI Distribution Amp with Toslink Out
4) The PCM stream is split into a toslink cable
5) The toslink cable is connected to a M-Audio Transit USB adapter
6) The PCM stream is captured by Cockos Reaper 3.1x using the M-Audio ASIO drivers.
7) Final track splitting (no other editing is involved) is done in Reaper. 
 
The 24bit/88.2KHz Wav files were converted to a CDDA compatible format using the following SOX command-line:
"sox.exe -V "%%k" -b 16 "converted/%%k" rate -v 44100 gain -1 dither -s"
Gapless cue was created with EAC.