The most authentic sound is the 2013 mastering. All versions have exactly the same recording date and original release date as posted above and those dates do not in anyway imply that that was the master used. The original studio master, mixed down from the original master tapes, most likely does not exist anymore and you wouldn’t want it as it would be worn out and as three of the tracks were taken from a faulty recorder and are a 1/3 of a note sharp. This was fixed in 1997, but a complete resurrection and hand tweaked mastering was created from the best known original master tapes in 2013.
Musickid, you may be lucky in that the one above is actually from the 2013 mastering, as the modern Columbia releases all default to that. But seeking a version only from that original faulty master will only be worse. This has nothing to do with Dolby, as Dolby would have only been used for dupes or ‘remasters’ where additional reverb was added and even digitally denoised, prior to the 1997 release. If you internet search you might even find articles about the forensic 2013 mastering effort by Mark Wilder This wasn’t a dodgy remaster (usually done by duping and affecting the same old studio master), but a complete recreation of the studio master.
Note that a mono version was created, a stereo version was created and were transferred to new analog tapes AND directly to a 24bit 192KHZ master. So the best digital version will be that 24/192 version. Any 16bit or 96khz versions will be downsamples of that.
