Or maybe you wanted to show off with your Super HQ Sound System....;)

I transferred it to 8-track using a phonograph. I'm that fucking awesome.

The mixing is super weird, although not to the extent it ruins anything. Not for me anyway.

Pretty much all Sonic Youth these days is mastered in the red, or very near it, so that doesn't bother me much.

The hissing during the quiet moments is slightly strange, but I'm assuming they were going for that.

I'm not exactly certain I'm responding to what you're talking about, but just tonight (with my new official cd (in my still crappy headphones, but whatever)) I was reveling in that "roomy" sound at the beginning of "Massage the History," where you can actually hear the space around the music, before the music starts in full; and while I've noticed it before, tonight was the first time it felt like the very end of "Washing Machine" [which blew me away when I discovered it a couple years ago (having long owned the album)]; it just wasn't quite as lusciously gratuitous [as much as people talk about the relaxed energy of this album, it seems to be just as much about restraint, and not letting any one aspect of them (ie: "noise") get in the way of any other (which brings several things to mind, including my friend's comment about indulging in many of the "7 deadly sins," (the trick being not to let any of them overpower the others), and the underlying drug theme [see the artwork [opium poppy filtered through lsd, etc], plus the fact that "Massage" seems unnervingly personal with my own situation])].

In sum, by now I'm positive I'm not talking about the same thing you were. I don't even know if I'm talking about the same thing *I* was. But as a side-note: my vote for best use of tape hiss [this year, and of the things I've heard] goes to The Breeder's recent "Pinnacle Hollow." That song had me in tears.

I forgot to mention the cover art specifically, how when you focus on any one thing in an attempt to fix it or pin it down, other stuff starts going haywire. So you can try to keep track of everything, but you end up like a dog chasing its tail, just going in circles [though recognizing the circle as an entity in itself is a step on the path to enlightenment].

excuse my lack of knowladge but what does Richard Hell have to do with sonic nurse?