Disco de Asia: “Best Of/20th Eco”

This is one of the greatest compilation CD's I've ever come across for any band. I am like a lot of people when it comes to such things; I only know two or three of the songs before I buy the thing, and I only listen to the others about once. This disc is different. I still only knew the first two tracks, but I grew to love the others after hearing them just once! The disc offers good coverage of the Wetton years of Asia, before all the breakups. It includes several songs from each of the early and middle albums, and puts them in order of their debut (Asia, Alpha, Astra, Then & Now). Geffen and 20th Century did an excellent job mastering the audio; it sounds excellent. Asia is never given due credit, but this band pioneered many of the aspects of music we take for granted today. This compilation offers all the songs one would ever need to hear to understand why the last sentence is 100% true. Happy listening.

While this disc contains a decent selection of Asia's songs, it doesn't actually carry the Compact Disc logo. This usually happens when labels try some bogus copy protection scheme on a disc, and this one is no exception. It looks like they have put a fake, empty data partition on the CD to trip up people who try and rip the tracks to MP3 on their computers.

It's a shame, because this is an otherwise fine collection of songs.

While it is still possible to rip the songs to MP3 (by recording the tracks one at a time and then ripping them), the annoyance involved means you are better off just buying a different greatest hits collection such as the Definitive Collection or Asia Gold.

On a personal note, I also missed the presence of the Roger Dean artwork that graced the original album covers.

If you had to buy just one ASIA best of disc, this is the one.