I disagree with Highway Star writer Rasmus Heide's criticism of the bonus tracks. I would not have opted for hissy, jangling rehearsal tracks instead of the remixes. I would have opted for leaving the rehearsal tracks and the remixes off the album, leaving only the original mix of Coronarias Redig as a semi-bonus track (it's available from a few other sources). I find most of the bonus tracks on the previous Deep Purple remasters eminently skippable. Less is more when it comes to altering the running order or track selection of a classic album.

The low quality of the pre-ripped files shows EMI Europe's lack of seriousness about the remaster program and their contempt for their consumer base. Fans buy remastered editions expecting the sound quality to be better than the original release. While Deep Purple's core audience consists of baby boomers who probably have CD players, their records are also bought by people now in their teens and early twenties, many of whom only play CDs (the ones that buy and play CDs at all are a highly desirable market within the youth demographic) on their computers*). If, when you sell a remastered CD to them, what they actually get for their € 19 is a much inferior sound quality than the original release, you have cheated a kid or a student out of their allowance, student loan or MacJob wages. Way to go, EMI!

My fear is that EMI will see any lack of interest in the remasters in Europe as evidence that buyers aren't interested in Deep Purple material after the Mark II era. Record companies have a habit of grabbing the wrong end of the stick when it comes to interpreting sales results. For example, the remastered editions of the second, third and fourth King Crimson albums were under-printed because Virgin concluded, based on low back catalogue sales of the previous editions of those albums, that few people would want to buy the remasters. It took them a while to find out that the reason people didn't buy the previous editions because they were waiting for those remasters, which had been in the pipeline for a year!

*). Not that this is only the case with youngsters. For a while, I was in the position of only being able to play CDs on my computer, and the DVD player I bought to replace my broken CD player has a lot of problems with Copy-Controled disks.

(extract from Reinder's blog)