Weird french Achtung Baby edition

[manu0872]

hi, I just found this in a used cd shop, a french edition of Achtung baby, different because it has transparent plastic cd holder instead of the usual black one, and below the cd is the B&W photo of the 2 cars, on one side bono with a mercedes benz, on the other larry with an east german car.
The booklet is also different, it has the naked Adam and the lyrics are printed over the photographs, with fewer pages than usual.
The page with all the credits and staff photos is gone.
The sound of the cd is great, I noticed some slight differences, probably because this is the European edition and the one I've been listening to is the american version.
anyone familiar with this version, could it be a fake? It doesn't like one.

 

[Aardvark747]

Unfamiliar with that one myself

I found a digipack version a few years bk at a car boot sale which I had to snap up!

 

[morgan1098]

It's got to be a bootleg.

 

[ahittle]

What differences did you hear? I can't imagine they would have different mixes for different countries...

 

[manu0872]

the differences are mainly in the packaging but I did notice a difference in the overall sound, the bass sounds louder than on my old canadian edition and notably at the start of Who's gonna ride your wild horses, there's something there that sounds different, I think it's a tambourine. I would have to do a test to figure out if it's not just my imagination.

I have an Argentinian, Canadian, German, and now French edition of the album, plus a Brazilian version on vinyl, so far the best sounding is this new one which says Made in France on it.

 

[Popmartijn]

What differences did you hear? I can't imagine they would have different mixes for different countries...

They don't. I believe it is the task of Cheryl Engels (who's listed as Quality Control person in the booklet) to ensure that every copy of U2 albums sounds the same, no matter where they are pressed.
Also, the description of the package doesn't match any description on the U2Wanderer discography site (http://www.u2wanderer.org/disco/alb008.html).

So all of this also leads me to conclude that this is a bootleg/counterfeit/pirated copy.

 

[morgan1098]

It's possible that whoever made the illegal copy of the CD tried to tweak the sound in order to improve it. But again, there is no way this is anything other than a bootleg, for the reasons mentioned above.

 

[ahittle]

notably at the start of Who's gonna ride your wild horses, there's something there that sounds different, I think it's a tambourine.

That tambourine on the beginning of Wild Horses is crazy. You can hear them noticing how loud it is and yanking it back down.

 

[officeman120]

Yes that's crazy indeed.