And the winner is: Compact disc release, due to the limitations of the cassette format. Looking at the waveforms, it's clear that the "brickwalling" philosophy was not followed with the cassette release as compared to the compact disc, where it was very definitely applied. This seems consistent with the overall trend of pushing recording levels on digital media higher and higher due to the absence of the physical limitations of analog formats, which tend to restrict how powerful a recording can be while still being considered listenable (or, in fact, playable when it comes to vinyl records). Without these restrictions, it has been possible to escalate the loudness wars to truly ridiculous extremes on compact disc, while leaving the true analog formats comparatively unscathed. That being said, while it's clear that the cassette transfer is less compressed than that employed for the CD, I can't honestly recommend this hard to find version of the album over the far more common digital version. Despite its more dynamic transfer, there's just no escaping the fact that the limitations of the cassette tape format simply make it uncompetitive from an audio standpoint. In the mid to late 90s I used to get excellent, very high quality audio out of the deck in my car using home recorded cassettes, but that was due to using a combination of expensive metal bias, type IV cassettes recorded on a good home stereo with carefully set recording levels and Dolby noise reduction, played in a high end car stereo that was loaded with features you just don't find anymore (auto reverse, a chrome/metal bias switch, etc.). The fact is, your typical type I or type II cassette employing ordinary Dolby B noise reduction just isn't capable of reproducing that same kind of quality. If it were, I'd be more open to recommending the cassette version of this release, but as things stand, the compact disc version is the winner here.

As a side note, this CD is technically HDCD encoded, though not labeled as such. Decoding of the tracks, however, yields no improvement in dynamics.