Containing what is considered Marley's most defiant and politically charged statement to date, Survival (1979) concerns itself with the expressed solidarity of not only Africa, but of humanity at large. The album was controversial right down to the jacket, which contains a crude schematic of the stowage compartment of a typical transatlantic slave ship. This record was pressed using a precision technique known as half-speed mastering, in which the source master and cutting lathe run at half speed on a specially adapted Neumann VMS-80. The result is a cut with excellent high frequency response and solid stereo images. In short, half-speed mastering produces a superlative master of the highest quality.
