Everyone agrees...

[iaresee]

The early Talking heads CDs are a great example of nasty, brittle, dead transfers to digital. They sucked compared to vinyl...

But that's operator error -- taking a recording that was made knowing vinyl's limitations and transferring it to digital where you didn't have those limitations to lean on without thinking you had to do more work to make it sound nice on CD.

So much of the early "now available on CD!" material was rushed out like this. And by early I'm talking up to '84 -- after '84 CDs and digital in the studio were getting well-entrenched.

 

[Ravdave]

Hmmmm....I feel that is a naive view. There can be many reasons for issuing a "Re-mastered" version of a CD, including a cynical attempt to increase sales. There are plenty of customers out there who decide to get a new "Re-mastered" version of an album thinking, "because it must be better". Re-mastered versions most certainly DO NOT always sound better than the original to all listeners ears. (They may have changed the whole EQ mix of the song. Simplistically for example, reducing a nice warm bass, and turning up the treble and changing the vocals level, because somebody (possibly the Artist) preferred it that way for whatever reason, but listeners of the original may prefer the balance of the old version.).

 

[NothingButInitials]

You laugh, but I know a dude who owns a record vacuum, and doesn't consider it insane to spend $1k on a phono cartridge. His speakers very badly lack midrange, but I keep that thought to myself so as not to ruin his day. He paid a lot of money for those speakers. :lol

Just curious, how large of a vinyl collection does this guy have?

$1k for a cartridge is apparently not that high-end... Needle Doctor - Worlds Largest Selection Of Phono Cartridges - 1-800-229-0644

My "bandmate" is a serious music junkie and had a vinyl collection that would blow your mind - not to mention his CDs, cassettes, and to a lesser extent 8-tracks and reel-to-reel. He gets his gear from thrift shops, so mostly $25 and under. There's a lot of great gear out there, you just need to look for it... people don't know what they have. The "audiophile" gear is just insane.

 

[ChrisMetal86]

Just curious, how large of a vinyl collection does this guy have?

$1k for a cartridge is apparently not that high-end... Needle Doctor - Worlds Largest Selection Of Phono Cartridges - 1-800-229-0644

My "bandmate" is a serious music junkie and had a vinyl collection that would blow your mind - not to mention his CDs, cassettes, and to a lesser extent 8-tracks and reel-to-reel. He gets his gear from thrift shops, so mostly $25 and under. There's a lot of great gear out there, you just need to look for it... people don't know what they have. The "audiophile" gear is just insane.

Woahhhhh at the price of those phonocartridges, I could own a friggin wall of FAS units and guitars... Glad that is not one of my hobbies lol

 

[plexi59]

Just curious, how large of a vinyl collection does this guy have?

$1k for a cartridge is apparently not that high-end... Needle Doctor - Worlds Largest Selection Of Phono Cartridges - 1-800-229-0644

My "bandmate" is a serious music junkie and had a vinyl collection that would blow your mind - not to mention his CDs, cassettes, and to a lesser extent 8-tracks and reel-to-reel. He gets his gear from thrift shops, so mostly $25 and under. There's a lot of great gear out there, you just need to look for it... people don't know what they have. The "audiophile" gear is just insane.

Not that much of a collection yet, he's just starting out. And $1K is because he bought it _used_. :lol

 

[Ben.Last]

I don't agree. Tape has a natural compression and loses some of the high end, which gives the audio a softer more spongy feel that many people find more appealing than digital which gives you pretty much exactly what you put in. Digital is more accurate but people don't always want accuracy. Why would Cliff spend time with the 'Preamp' emulations in the Axe Cab Block with their Tube/Tape etc types if this was not true.

There are also plugins out there like the Waves SSL one that aim to give you an emulation of the warmer/softer compression and EQ you get from a high quality analog desk, similar idea to the Preamp settings in the Axe, I've seen producers that swear by that plugin for warming up a digital recording.

I'm certainly not one of the 'analog is better' crowd, but certainly it has a different quality to pure digital sound.
I'd rather use emulations to add that warmth in though rather than go back to analog and not have the fidelity and control that digital has.

Nothing about what you wrote here negates what I wrote, despite you saying you don't agree with it.

Just because digital is ABLE TO SOUND a certain way that analog potentially can't, even with current technology, that doesn't automatically mean that there is actually a "digital sound" and an "analog sound." The rest of your post speaks precisely to this, digital can sound that same way, as long as it's programmed to. Again, I'll point to the fact that it took decades for analog audio recordings to get to the "audiophile" point that I assume we're all talking about when we're using the term "analog" here. I doubt anyone would say that the first phonographs sound anywhere near as good as modern record players or CDs. So, we're, what... 2 or 3 decades into digital audio being a viable thing? It only makes sense that there would still be advances to perfect it for how human ears naturally want to hear it. Analog audio went through much the same development. Hell, if anything, the nostalgic perception that there's an "analog sound" is making that process take longer, because you have people focused on emulating old hardware, instead of focusing on the mechanics of what makes the audio actually work better.

 

[dr bonkers]

Ever wonder if they lost the master tape and rushed out the CD of that using an EQ compensated version of the album? I have.


This album was released in 1991 -- well past the CD's introduction. If it sounds like shit, it's because of the engineers, not the medium or the gear.


1988 -- also not an "early" CD.


Ditto. 1990.



Ignoring the unremastered stuff most of the things in your list were well past the "new" phase of CDs. If you'd pulled things from the very early 80's, sure, yes...digital was new. But in 1999 it was old, established, and well understood. If those albums sound bad it's not because of the medium.

Respectfully, there was a huge difference between the way CD's were mastered in say 1990 versus 1999.

The latest album I posted was 1991. Record something through mid 80's -1991 converters, then do the same with converters introduced from either 1999 or, for more amusement, from the last 5 to 10 years and you will notice a much better quality in the conversion and no tonality change with the later era converters.

Add to that fact in the late 80's and early 90's, people were still using Sony PCM-1610's and 1630's (glorified u-matic tape machines) that sounded like crap and introduced jitter IMHO. By mid to late 90's you had the last days of DAT and the beginning of affordable CD-R's being submitted for replication.

Also the Mitsubishi multi-track machine that was good in its time when it recorded "So" could be outperformed in conversion by most $100 USB boxes today. If I remember correctly, Now and Zen was also recorded on the same generation Mitsubishi machine.

It would not surprise me if Hold Your Fire was recorded on the same machine because it has the same odd EQ curve to it. Since they touted the album as being DDD, I doubt they would have re-EQ'd the master for vinyl or cassette replication to use for CD replication.

If you don't think that certain companies' converters contributed to some weird sounding CD's at the time, you never did a shoot out of gear with the same source being recorded. I remember even when the Tascam DA-88 came out and the Alesis ADAT came out, the studio I worked at recorded the same source of drums, guitar, & bass to both machines on loan to us, to try and make a decision which machines we were going to invest in, since we could not afford to own both formats. Upon playback, the Tascam had a very different EQ curve to the upper mids than the ADAT did. It was a different experience than using the converters of the last 10 to 15 years.

 

[iaresee]

Respectfully, there was a huge difference between the way CD's were mastered in say 1990 versus 1999.

The latest album I posted was 1991. Record something through mid 80's -1991 converters, then do the same with converters introduced from either 1999 or, for more amusement, from the last 5 to 10 years and you will notice a much better quality in the conversion and no tonality change with the later era converters.

And I'm saying there were benchmark CDs being recorded and released in the early 80s. Ergo the gear wasn't the problem. 1978 to be exact: Telarc’s cannons | HiFi Writer Blog -- care in your craft is paramount, not gear.

It would not surprise me if Hold Your Fire was recorded on the same machine because it has the same odd EQ curve to it. Since they touted the album as being DDD, I doubt they would have re-EQ'd the master for vinyl or cassette replication to use for CD replication.

Was it DDD? Man. Yea, I stand by "it's the operator, not the tools" comment!

 

[dr bonkers]

And I'm saying there were benchmark CDs being recorded and released in the early 80s. Ergo the gear wasn't the problem. 1978 to be exact: Telarc’s cannons | HiFi Writer Blog -- care in your craft is paramount, not gear.

Was it DDD? Man. Yea, I stand by "it's the operator, not the tools" comment!

Interesting, but the only way you could make that comment was if the recording I mentioned were made with the same Soundstream equipment that Telarc used. They were not.

The argument would be like criticizing a guitarist who had a stock Fender strat that he could not get a 59 Gibson Les Paul bridge sound.

 

[iaresee]

Interesting, but the only way you could make that comment was if the recording I mentioned were made with the same Soundstream equipment that Telarc used. They were not.

The argument would be like criticizing a guitarist who had a stock Fender strat that he could not get a 59 Gibson Les Paul bridge sound.

The tools existed long before '91. You can't blame the tools. That's my point. It ain't the medium.

 

[pima1234]

Transfers of original tape to SACD sound fantastic, but not as good as DSD to SACD recordings. Yes, I'm aware of all the proof that SACD isn't all it's cracked up to be, but I've very impressed with it. I would love to compare SACD transfers/remixes to vinyl and CD. That would be interesting.

 

[iaresee]

Transfers of original tape to SACD sound fantastic, but not as good as DSD to SACD recordings. Yes, I'm aware of all the proof that SACD isn't all it's cracked up to be, but I've very impressed with it. I would love to compare SACD transfers/remixes to vinyl and CD. That would be interesting.

That actually would be interesting to compare on the same system.

 

[dr bonkers]

The tools existed long before '91. You can't blame the tools. That's my point. It ain't the medium.

If you did not see my point using the analogy of criticizing a strat for not sounding like a les paul, then we will have to agree to disagree regarding the viewpoint that different tools may get to the same endpoint in process but have different inherent sounds when arriving at that point, regardless of the operator using them.

 

[iaresee]

If you did not see my point using the analogy of criticizing a strat for not sounding like a les paul, then we will have to agree to disagree regarding the viewpoint that different tools may get to the same endpoint in process but have different inherent sounds when arriving at that point, regardless of the operator using them.

That's cool man. It'd be a boring world if we all agreed. I like you more for your distinct-from-mine thoughts on this subject.

 

[Sidivan]

If it was going for all three formats mentioned he would have needed to do three versions to get the best out of the media. iTunes needs more headroom than CD, roughly -.2db lower than 0DBFS AFAIK. Then vinyl needs it's own as discussed in the OP.

We didn't do a vinyl.

 

[BigD1977]

We didn't do a vinyl.

Makes perfect sense.

 

[trancegodz]

I have a huge collection of vinyl records I bought from the 50’s to 80’s. Nothing on vinyl from the 90’s on. I have to say that I listened to music way more when there were just records than I do now, even though I have pretty much everything I every liked most on CD also. I think CD’s sound good and I was impressed when they came out, but I don’t listen to them as much as I did vinyl.

To me the music that came out on vinyl was better and more original sounding than what is being put out today.
Bands actually sounded different from each other. The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Simon and Garfunkel, The Moody Blues, Tangerine Dream, Pink Floyd, Yes, King Crimson, Genesis, Emerson Lake and Palmer, Mahavishnu Orchestra, Chick Corea and Return to Forever, Cream, Jeff Beck, Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Eric Johnson, Jethro Tull, David Bowie, Bill Nelson, Peter Gabriel, Elvis Costello, XTC, etc, etc. The list goes on and on. Unique sounding original music. Very hard to find today.

 

[Ben.Last]

I'd say it's actually easier to find today. The buy in to releasing music is so low (a good thing) and all the old gate keepers have lost their sway (also a good thing). I personally find that, more than there not being a huge variety of great stuff out there, most people just lose the desire to find it as time goes on.