Various – Traxbox

I believe this is the only place where you can find the digital version of Jungle Wonz - Time Marches On (Club Mix) 8+ Club Mix! Most version on various compilation either edit it to the 6 minute version or uses the Justin Strauss mix. #HouseMusicAllNightLong

This is a piece of musical history, a real musical snapshot of a period in time that changed everything! If you see this for sale grab it whilst you can!

The content that’s here is great, no doubt, but these tracks were probably “remastered” in Audacity. I can recognize that noise reduction setting from a mile away.

Mr. Fingers "Can You Feel It" (the “Original 12 Inch Version”) has it's opening tone fully intact—very difficult to find on CD, not even the parent album "Amnesia" features it.

What's the story with Master C&J's "When You Hold Me" on here? This version is different than what I've heard before. The one I'm familiar with starts with handclaps and sounds very much like the "Dub Love" version. But the version on here, supposedly the "original 12-inch version", starts with just a bass line and has a very different sound throughout. It does not use an 808.

Back when they were made, these tracks were all mixed to tape originally (usually reel-to-reel, maybe some cassette), and then were remastered as part of the process of preparing the 12" vinyl releases. When the master tapes sounded bad, the DJ-friendly remaster that was put onto vinyl was surely an improvement. But when the master tapes sounded good, the sound quality was inevitably degraded when the vinyl was pressed with Trax's notoriously low standards.

So, remastering these tracks from vinyl just for the street cred was really not a good idea, in my opinion. The resulting sound is really good on most tracks, but a handful are indisputably sub-par—like Jungle Wonz's "The Jungle" and Mr. Lee's "Pump Up New York", which sounds like they were played from worn-out vinyl with a dirty needle. I have some of these songs on other compilation CDs from the late '80s, and although lacking slightly in the bass, they sound so much better there, sourced from the master tapes.

Also, as you would expect, everything has been remastered unnecessarily loud, "brickwalled" as they say, with 5 to 6 dB less dynamic range than the original (DR meter reports 8 or 9, usually). Everything has also been subjected to stereo expansion, which makes the non-dead-center sounds be panned closer to the extreme left and right. This is what people are used to hearing in modern music, and it's not a big deal in loudspeakers, but in headphones it makes for "fatiguing" listening, at least for me.

I feel that between the expansion, compression, and EQ, the songs have been stripped of some of the authentic, dreamy '80s sound that depends on some instruments and vocals sounding more "distant" than others.

That said, I have heard remasters in recent years done with a much heavier hand, so the ones here are really are not worse, just different. The EQ is reasonable, especially for my aging ears. More importantly, you get many lesser-known tracks and B-sides...you're sure to like at least some of the ones you haven't heard before.

I could rave about the quality packaging, the amount of work spent on putting this together, the excellent remastering, the historic relevance of the music, the 100+ page book(let) and the business balls required to bring a 16-discs box set with the 1985-1989 A- and B-Side oeuvre of one record label to market in 2014 but instead I decided to tell you just my personal opinion on the Trax: This music didn't age well.

As already observed, this is not merely a compilation, but a complete archive of the first segment of Trax' illustrious history. It seems incredible that music of my lifeltime has to be subjected to almost archaelogical levels of research, exploration and restoration, but so it is due to the ramshackle and primitive way in which these seminal recordings were created.

Yes its true there are many weaker tracks, but they are nonetheless informative, and in many cases have a certain charm, and can bring back memories; for instance I have a 12" of Radio Fashion "What You Deserve" that I picked up in a £1 bin in Virgin Records, Oxford. When I got it home I soon found out why it was in the bargain section vs the other trax releases, but it isn't all bad, and hearing it again in the context of other releases really brought all that time back to me. (The fact that I have the entire contents of the London/Trax "House Sound of Chicago Vol II" compilation imprinted in my brain still also assisted in my reverie!)

Any downside is outweighed by the volume of good tracks, and of course there are all the alternative mixes and dubs that are never found on compilations. But if that were not enough, there is the 100 page book with an extensive history of the development of the scene in both Chicago and the UK, and comprehensive information about practically all of the 12" releases (just one or two notes disappoint but most are very enlightening)

I agree somewhat with Dubvulture's opinioon of the artwork, it seems odd that the original simple canted logotype does not appear anywhere on the outside of this package, and the style of the new artwork just doesn't seem to quite fit with the era and the sound.

But all in all an exceptional achievement and a set I am both proud to own and would recommend to anyone with an interest. Let's hope it's successful and a second volume can follow. As for the rest of the Chicago House scene, Jerome Derradji has already done a similar exercise on the smaller catalogues of Sunset and AKA Records, but we really do need DJ International to be subjected to this sort of rigour as well.

There's a download code for tx176/177/178/179 for additional 6 track, all file are .WAV

Okay, the sheer quantity of the tracks on this beautiful packaged compilation is overwhelming. And the booklet ist very informative. There are lots of classic tracks on it and the sound quality is okay. But most of the not so well known tracks sound pretty dated to todays ears. So I think sometimes it would be better to leave those musical memories untouched. But all in all it is an excellent compilation and it would be nice if Harmless Records would do a similar compilation of the influential labels DJ International and NuGroove.