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Confession time. I've been a fan of the band for over thirty years, and until recently I owned precisely two albums: Powerslave and the 2 CD Best of the Beast. I dabbled with other albums as a kid, and remember being nonplussed by live albums and Brave New World, and by their later direction in general. I unashamedly like best of albums and compilations, and Iron Maiden have released a fair few of them. Plus they've had a lot of official live albums, with performances of some songs considered to be definitive enough to be selected for the best of albums rather than the studio album versions, particularly to focus on Bruce as a vocalist.

Their release strategy for compilations is still annoying decades later. There are two versions of the 1995 Best of the Beast, a single disc and the double (at the time, the double disc seemed hard to get hold of until it was re-released without the book and slipcase). Most collections omit one of my favourite tracks, Holy Smoke, which is about corrupt televangelist preachers (one or two band members are or have been Christian and there's commentary on people exploiting people with religion in the lyrics of some albums). There are also two versions of the later Edward the Great single disc best of collection, released in 2002 and 2005, and absolutely no bloody difference in the cover artwork to differentiate the two. The second release cuts Holy Smoke in favour of newer material and was obviously the first copy ordered off eBay before realising the later one exists. Although in a positive twist when they turned up both were the 2002 version, because it confuses everybody.

The band got some flak for the album, released quite soon after the Best of the Beast albums and an Ed Hunter video game tie-in best of collection, with Steve Harris noting it was aimed at casual incoming fans. Possibly this is why there was a second release by EMI with no title change. Most of Maiden's best known and loved songs, even thirty years on, are from the early 90s and earlier period. I've never felt much need to see how they were getting along, nor double back to the source albums for more songs that didn't make the cut, time after time, for collections. But as intermittent inclusions of Holy Smoke demonstrate, they're one of those bands with enough solid material to pick from that one disc compilations are always a compromise.

The situation is further complicated by remasters. I assume that Best of the Beast got an ad hoc remaster of at least some tracks. In around 1998 most of the albums up to that point got re-released with CD-ROM content and some questionable decisions with volume compression and things like the very atmospheric introduction to Powerslave being chopped off the track and stuck onto the end of the track before it. More remasters happened in 2015, and fans are divided over which sound better, accusing the latter of being done with streaming platforms in mind. There's some fan consensus that if you can get the original release albums, whether CD or vinyl, that's preferable.

"the 80s and 90s masters are very similar, with the 90s being a little more brickwalled thanks to the loudness wars. That's still miles better than the tonal undermining of the 2015 mix."

https://www.reddit.com/r/ironmaiden/comments/kz6nnw/wow_i_just_now_realizing_how_bad_the_remastered/
https://www.reddit.com/r/ironmaiden/comments/puslvd/1998_vs_2015_remasters/

Usual disclaimer... I don't consider myself an audiophile (I still have an old Winamp plugin called Vlevel installed in Foobar for when I really don't care about dynamic range and want on-the-fly volume levelling) but previous experiences with the 1998 Powerslave compared to the earlier CD copy a local library had definitely put me off remasters a bit. As I say, despite that whopping two albums in the collection, and despite being happy with default Lame MP3 encoder settings over FLAC (and there's a 90s/00s rabbit hole to go down) because I can hear relatively high frequencies and like decent even if value for money equipment, I've always been bothered about production.

The 2015 'remaster' of Powerslave has bass rumble and less distinct high end: https://youtu.be/XqJvd3tfGDw ...basically it's more like putting in stuff that wasn't in the original recording and taking out a bit that was, than what I think of as mastering. That's not an uncommon approach with forty year old metal albums, but it sounds really bad to my ears and after thirty-ish years listening to something close to the original.

So, having decided I'd like to go back and listen to the albums up to, say, 2000 in order, rather than best of picks, I think I'll avoid the 2015 versions.

I get the impression most box sets on eBay are bootlegs of the 1998 editions, and therefore a lot of 1998 individual releases on there probably are too. https://www.reddit.com/r/ironmaiden/comments/87rae4/has_anyone_bought_one_of_these_box_sets/
https://www.discogs.com/release/4691085-Iron-Maiden-Iron-Maiden
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_kExPVMyzo

1998 versions are also available on YouTube. If and when I get around to this (I have various other read/listen/watch retrospectives and reviews in stages of progress or abandonment) I'll probably write it up.

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