Black Sabbath are releasing an upcoming splatter vinyl box set of their entire original first run of albums with Ozzy Osbourne performing vocals. Sound quality does not seem to be the name of the game for The Ten Year War as everyone with any experience listening to LPs on a big boy turntable setup knows that splatter vinyl almost always sounds terrible. Rather The Ten Year War is a collectible for obsessive-compulsive Sabbath maniacs and hipsters who will play and probably ruin the not very high-fidelity splatter discs on some cheap turntable from Amazon or Target.

The box also comes with a USB stick with some shitty MP3 derivative called Mastering Quality Authenticated (MQA), which is another attempt by the failing mainstream record labels to sell you copy-protected crap that sounds worse than what you already own just like Sony’s Super Audio CD that actually sounded worse than a regular CD and Apple’s AAC which sounded slightly better than your typical 320 kbps MP3 but still sounded like dogshit compared to a lossless CD rip to WAV or FLAC. MQA is a bullshit proprietary audio format that is less high-fidelity than the simple tried, true, and reliable 16-bit, 44100 KHz pulse code modulation (PCM) Red Book audio on CDs and FLAC rips of such.

“Mastering quality authenticated” is a god damn lie as everything recorded now is digitized into PCM, mixed in PCM, and simply down-sampled and dithered in mastering to the also PCM CD Red Book standard, which is perfectly fine and covers the dynamic range and the audible frequency spectrum for listening purposes. Who wants to buy a copy-protected MP3 type thing? The same fools who bought everything again on Itunes as they were stupid. Stick to your old Black Sabbath CDs and LPs and avoid this cash grab.

From Black Sabbath’s Funbook page:

‘The Ten Year War’ limited edition vinyl box set, bringing together Black Sabbath’s eight Ozzy fronted albums, plus a swathe of other rarities, all housed within exclusive artwork created by renowned street artist Shepard Fairey. Unique to this release is the metal crucifix shaped Black Sabbath USB stick, which can be worn round the neck and contains MQA high definition audio of the eight albums. The extremely rare The Ten Year War brochure, reproduced from the original publication gives its name to this super deluxe box set. Pre-order now at:

www.tenyearwar.com

www.pledgemusic.com/blacksabbath #tenyearwar

Tags: anthology, black sabbath, cash grab, Doom Metal, Heavy Metal, mqa, ozzy osbourne, scam, vinyl