Japanese Pressings : Whats the magic ?

Folks,
I am pretty excited about this topic.
In the last few months I have been able to acquire some Japanese pressings of my favorite albums. Most of these albums I already have, and they are all good "import" pressings either from Holland, Germany, UK or other European countries. I also have some US pressings which were also pretty nice.
However, my visit to Spore couple of months back got me into buying a few Japanese pressings. In fact in Spore there are these CD shops which specialize in stocking high quality audiophile pressings. And there too, they had a section entirely dedicated to Japanese pressings. And when you ask for an album or an artist the very first thing they do is look for the Japanese section. Thats how I got my first two CDs pressed in Japan. Thereafter I got a few more from ebay.

So, whats so special about these pressings ? Well, I am extremely amazed at the way these CDs sound. To start with they almost make you forget you are listening to anything "digital"...that word which is also a taboo in our hobby is no more there. I have little experience with vinyls so I do not want to start a direct comparison of these CDs to Vinyls. However it would be easy for me to express myself if I bring Vinyls into picture. Almost every audio forum out there is littered with posts either comparing analog versus digital playback or trying to find out the most analog sounding CDP/DAC. While no one questions the superiority of Vinyls over CDs because of well known reasons but a majority of the hobbyists are worried why CDs have a sound of its own, why cant they just sound like a stripped down version of LP...basically retaining similar levels of truth, honesty and realism to music reproduction ?
But after listening to these basic vanilla flavor Japanese pressed CDs I am more than convinced that CD is a superb medium . It has every ability to convey the realism, impact, depth, weight and honesty of top quality music reproduction without sounding a wee bit artificial .
And they do not achieve this feat by coloring the sound at all. There is absolutely no rolling off of highs, no extra emphasis on mids or rounding off of bass...typically these are few shortcuts manufacturers (of equipments and CDs) use to give a feel of smoother more analog sound...but then they are easily caught in decent hi-rez system.
Instead the Japanese take a different route all together, every little thing is taken care off without compromising any other aspects. Tonally they are totally in a different planet compared to any other pressings I have heard.
The kind of weight each and every instrument carries has to be heard, bass has such variations and textures that even on a basic PC speaker it cannot sound "one note". You no longer wonder whether it is a stick or a brush hitting the Kettle drum, rather you start hearing the different textures of the skin used on two different drums !!!! Its almost like you are there...right there. Voices are so much more in flesh and blood, you suddenly know that this is a real human singing and the other guy whom you thought real was so electronic in comparison. High frequencies are just so fluid and correct now, they no more ring or shine all the time, they just blend in the music as if they are one. The same instruments now play for much longer with the trailing edges which decay for as long as one wants to hear them, all this within the same 5 mins of the song. Timing, Rhythm, Speed everything is just so correct.

Most interestingly these are just plain Vanilla flavored CDs of some popular not very well recorded music. To name a few:

Dire Straits
Tracy Chapman,
Pink Floyd,
Fleetwood Mac

Nothing audiophile about these albums or their recordings but its the mastering and pressing where the Japanese have created the magic .
Unfortunately many so called "audiophile" labels like MoFi, XRCD (which also incidentally is from Japan), Telarc etc have sounded rather ordinary and sometimes even highly cooked to me in comparison. Its clear that there is something they are not doing correctly at the very fundamental level.

I do not know who is the star here...is it the mastering studios in Japan which have such equipments that every CD coming out of it is in a class apart ? Or is that the mastering engineers get some special kind of training which other guys around the world miss. They just seem to know and do things which no one else in the world knows.
I would not mind rebuilding my favorite collection all from scratch from here even though its gonna be expensive and time consuming.

I would love to know what others think on this topic.

Amp_Nut schrieb:

Siva, Each CD pressed is like a Rubber Stamp impression. If the Rubber Stamp itself is not pristine, the stamped image will be blurred, and therefore sound poor.

AN I do remember reading on the mastering process that each Mother is used only for 4 batches after which a new "mother" must b prepared.

also that after each batch, there is some softening of the edgess on the "mother" although it is limited to 4 batches am pretty sure ther would be some differences between the 1st and the 4th.

secondly the quality and thickness of the polycarbonate also matters. if the pits are not that clear there is going to be some error in reading. while something like an EAC may approximate the data much better due to multiple passes and hence give you a better copy than original.

Just my guess