If you listen to The Pod on Spotify, you are listening to a ghost. You are hearing the idea of the album through a blanket of compression. To truly understand why Dean Ween calls this their "masterpiece" and why fans spend decades chasing the original sound, you need the .
Open your FLAC file in a spectral viewer (like Spek or Audacity). A true FLAC rip from the 1991 CD will show frequencies reaching up to 22.05 kHz (Nyquist limit for CD quality). You should see a solid block of information, not a sharp cutoff at 16 kHz (which indicates an MP3 source). ween the pod 1991 flac