Culture Club From Luxury To Heartache UHQCD

"From Luxury To Heartache" from 1986 was Culture Club's last album in the eighties before Boy George went solo. After the predecessor "Waking Up With The House On Fire" did not achieve the expected sales, they replaced their producer Steve Levine with Arif Merdin, who relied on a pronounced 80s drum beat and synthesizer; with success. The opener "Move Away" became a hit and other tracks were played on the dance floors of the world. An attempt was made to expand the target group through a visually somewhat more well-behaved presentation, but not with George; he dared to break out and continued without the "club" until the reunion in 1999.
UHQCD stands for Ultimate High Quality Compact Disc and is a joint development of the Japanese CD replication company Memory-Tech and the Audio Quality CD Company from Hong Kong. Unlike conventional CDs, UHQCDs are not pressed from polycarbonate, but are cast from a photopolymer and cured with UV light. To protect the softer photopolymer from scratching, another layer of high-purity polycarbonate is applied. The combination results in a significantly reduced reflection of the laser light inside the CD and an unrivalled precise edge transition between pits and lands of the CD. UHQCDs are 100% compatible with normal CD players. Musically, the result is a sound that is strongly reminiscent of analogue master tapes.
The discs offered by Universal Japan are additionally encoded with MQA (Master Quality Authenticated). If you output the digital signal from the digital output of your CD player or the previously ripped data stream of your music server to a corresponding MQA-DA converter, you can generate a 24-bit signal with up to 352 Khz sampling frequency from the CD data.
While the first UHQCD series of Universal Music Japan used the DSD data of previous SHM-SACD releases, albums that had not previously been released as SHM-SACD are now also being released with increasing popularity. Typically, the master tapes of the Universal Archive are converted to DSD and then post-processed with the appropriate MQA encoder. Thus, the UHQCDs are ideal for music lovers who want to get as close as possible to the sound of the recording, but do not have an SACD player.

Selections:

1. Move Away
2. I Pray
3. Work on Me Baby
4. Gusto Blusto
5. Heaven's Children
6. God Thank You Woman
7. Reasons
8. Too Bad
9. Come Clean
10. Sexuality
11. From Luxury To Heartache
Bonus Tracks
12. Move Away
13. God Thank You Woman
14. Sexuality
15. Gusto Blusto