This was a great recording for comparison since the starting material is excellent to begin with- nice location/presence, attentive crowd, decent mics. So what you hear in the mastering is an attempt to make something good sound better, instead of trying to fix a bad job. We did not attend this show; it's a recording-only experience for us.

In the mastered version, the natural hall echo is mostly gone, the overall sound is punchier and much brighter. But the new brightness is its very undoing: a vital delicacy, subtlety and nuance has been stripped away from the performance. For example, the melodica loses its breathy chord layers and becomes more like a harmonica, pitch pipe or even a synthesizer. The gravelly creak of the cuica becomes screechy. These 2 instruments in particular no longer sound like their "live" selves (whereas they do in the original seed, compared to other shows we've attended). Even the piano loses dynamics, as if Medeski is hitting too many keys too hard. It's not just at the top end: the quiet bass in Your Lady loses its gentle lullaby effect.

On the plus side, this version is probably a boon to people who may have some high-end hearing loss, or even just have noisy kids at home. It should really cut through if you don't have a quiet listening environment to begin with.