I personally don't agree - I don't think there's all that much between any of the final four Jam LPs. This was punk-pop of the highest mark, and it was "Pretty Green" that caught me off guard, the bass riff urging everyone to dance. The original sounds much more dynamic, the sound is rich and full, each instrument and vocal track is clean and sounds great.

The cover art is a pastiche of the artwork used on various Sound Effects records produced by the BBC during the 1970s. Not only are all the dynamics fully retained in this wonderful new remaster, but there has been a careful amount of re-equalization to correct from the midrange-heavy remaster from 2000. Instrumental track “Music For The Last Couple” has similarities to the sound of David Bowie's Low album. I rotate what I own, always adding or taking away a spice from the sauce - or simply give them away for the youngins' to enjoy. While I enjoyed many tracks on that album as well, I still find `Sound Affects' to be the most consistent album.

As an audiophile, the first thing I have to say about this package is that the remastering has to be one of the best I've ever heard. Ended up selling my copy of this, and the also-not-nice vinyl remaster, and picking up the original UK. One of the most popular bands to emerge from the English punk rock scene of 1977; The Jam had a phenomenal impact on pop music and wider youth culture.

This 2010 deluxe edition is a good release - my personal feeling is that with a bit more effort, Polydor/Universal could and should have made this an absolute killer release. It’s regarded by critics and fans (as well as Weller) as their most adventurous and experimental collection of material, drawing musical influences from the ‘post-punk’ groups of the late-70s - Wire, Gang Of Four and Joy Division as well as neo-psychedelic touches from The Beatles and The Zombies etc. Scrape Away is a classic for those desperate to leave it all behind, and Monday – thankfully far less depressing than its namesake – combines the melancholy of Embarrassment-era Madness with Byrds jangle. It is the only Jam album to be co-produced by the band themselves, and contains the only album track co-written by the entire band, "Music for the Last Couple".Got this on vinyl as soon as I heard it was out in 1980, it reflects a more expansive and confident band, using horn section, backward tapes and heavy on the Rickenbacker approaches, that give the the whole set a swagger as it paces about the room with assured self belief a plenty.

Sound Affects was reissued on 8 November 2010 as a two-CD deluxe edition to celebrate its 30th anniversary. This involved consulting a few of the band's friends as to what they thought the best release would be. Tellingly, when Weller came to record 2010’s Wake Up The Nation, it was Sound Affects that his collaborator and producer Simon Dine held up as a model. The back cover of the album features an excerpt from Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem The Masque of Anarchy.

Paul Weller has freely admitted that the Beatles' Revolver was a major influence on much of the material on Sound Affects. If `The Gift' and `Setting Sons' are given the deluxe treatment, and remastered by the same engineer, I'll happily re-purchase those as well. With extensive finagling I was able to extract the record from the way-too-tight inner sleeve without resorting to Caesarean surgery! The vinyl was one of the very first ones in my collection, after kids records and the obligatory Electric Light Orchestra, Sweet, and - lo and behold - Public Image, Ltd.

The distinctive cover art is a pastiche of the artwork used on various BBC sound effects records of the 1970s, incorporating ‘pop-art’ imagery. That was the sort of sound he imagined we should be going for: hard, metallic, quite stripped-down… jagged. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. The 80 Greatest Albums of 1980 What came out of all this was, arguably, the greatest year for great albums ever".Weller's poetic and sarcastic wit combine with edgy but poppy tunes to really make this the jam's standout album. Of the countless songs about working class British life released in the last three decades, it’s strange one so ostensibly slight is so breathtaking. Whilst this new edition of Sound Affects is undoubtedly better than the standard CD edition, it's not quite as impressive as previous Jam/TSC/Weller re-issues. At the time of its release, he said that he considered the album a cross between Off the Wall and Revolver.