Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Stereo Old fav recording sounded SUCKS!!!

Why is it that my old vinyls sounded better than a lot of my CD's of the same recordings? Is it just cheap and lousy encoding techniques then?

Yes, poor, CD mastering, either buy mistake (early on before a lot of the techniques had matured), or on purpose (destroying dynamic range to make the whole thing sound louder).

Many "remastered" reissues sound worse than their original CD releases too (Tear for Fears comes to mind).

Technology can be used for good or evil.

I had the same problem... some of my old Favourites are now saddening to listen to because they are flat and lack range. And it *is* just the recording/mastering.

Other CDs that I just "liked" before came to life with my M22s and are some of my new favorites. Again, simply becuase they are well mastered and sound GREAT.

snazzed

Same thing happened to me when I bought my Axioms. Almost all of the CDs I already owned sounded like crap. Originally I started buying SACDs and DVD-As to get quality recordings but after demoing a bunch of CDs at the shop I bought my headphones at I realized that well mastered standard CDs sounded just as good to me as 2-ch SACDS.

The engineers who designed the original CD specs were no dummies. It's the loudness warriors who came later that defeated all their hard work.

A 16-bit sampling depth is pretty good, that allows any real world sound pressure level to be quantified to 1 of 65536 different levels. Think about 130 reams of paper stacked on top of each other, each sheet would be a different possible level. If a recording makes use of the full dynamic range of a CD it can be really impressive.

Nyquist was also a smart guy. Humans with perfect hearing can pick up sounds into the 20kHz range. So a going out into the real world and quantifying the sound pressure level once every 1/44100 of a second--stop to think about that, 44100 times a second, that's not something you can't perceive on any level--does allow (properly aligned) signals up to 22kHz to be represented.

Well mastered CDs can sound amazing. Just as poorly mastered DVD-As can sound horrible (Flaming Lips, At War with the Mystics, I'm looking at you).

Brian, commenting on a highly technical point with an "in my opinion", isn't really helpful. It's a basic element in digital sampling technology that as long as there are at least two samples available, the analog waveform is reproduced precisely. Around 20KHz only two samples may in fact be available, but the mathematics are such that these two samples can represent only one possible frequency. If there are instead about two thousand samples(low bass)instead of two, the precision is no different. A crude "connect-the-dots" type of process, which some imagine, has nothing to do with reality.

Nothing is "taken out"; after re-conversion the original analog waveform has been reproduced with an accuracy that an obsolescent format such as the LP can't match. It can be noted that digital sampling is also used in military, industrial and scientific realms where it's a bit more crucial than in audio that what comes out conforms exactly with what went in.

Of course, individual recordings can suck, but that's the fault of the producers, not the format. Garbage in, garbage out(with precise fidelity).

FWIW, I think the worst anyone is saying about the CD format is that it is perhaps less forgiving of poor production work than vinyl...

Maybe a nicer way to say it would be that "CDs are able to show off poor production work more accurately than vinyl"

Well, the in my opinion part, you are correct, but perhaps better is, in my experience, this is the way I saw it. Regardless, I do enjoy the conversation. At least I get to learn something new.