I've bought some of my favorite albums in the early 90's (which I had them in cassette tape) in CD format. Got them yesterday and pop into my Oppo....and you know what? I think the recording sucks big time!

The songs are good but its totally different imaging from what I heard playing from the tape.

I knew, all equipment were different now (was using a Denon tape deck with Yamaha stereo amp with infinity speakers back then)

I thought CD is a better format than tape? Or I have better equipment and speakers now made all the bad recording show their true nature?

It ruin my thought for these albums and I felt suck!

Chances are that is exactly what is happening ... the plus side is that the really, really well recorded and mixed material sounds simply amazing.

The early 90's was notorious for the "loudness wars". Most of the albums of that generation are poorly engineered and mastered. What are the favorite albums you are talking about?

Some old Mandarin/Chinese alternative pop/rock album

Is that one album you are referring to?

I've experienced similar. One example is Disraeli Gears by Cream. The CD sucks.

I'm still not convinced that CDs sound better on the whole than vinyl. They're definitely quieter, last longer, and can sound fantastic if the recording makes optimal use of the available dynamic range, but there still seem to be more bad CD recordings than bad vinyl recordings around.

In fairness to the recording engineers, I tried ripping a bunch of my vinyl albums to CD and found that it was *very* hard to get a decent recording level without clipping on the peaks other than by adding a hefty dose of compression.

Seems like a floating-point recording format would really help here

this is the album I refer to....produce in 1990

You can sample the songs here

http://www.1ting.com/album/c2/album_12902.html

I think the vinyl analog recordings would always beat the digital CD format. Anything digital is lossy in my opinion, whereas analog doesn't take anything out.

If there were a perfect way to capture the continuously varying sound pressure levels, and store them with at least the same detail as the number of air molecules involved, then analog would be lossless. But as it is, no analog recording media is a perfect representation of the source.

Furthermore, unless you're listening to a mono recording made with one mic, or a stereo playback of only two mics, there has been some mixing involved. Mixing done in the analog domain is more lossy than modern digital gear.

Plus, unless you have the analog mix-down master tape in on your player, you're listening to a copy. The analog duplication process is lossy. Digital duplication is not. Even more so, there's no analog storage media which is not altered (how ever so slightly) by the playback process itself.

Not to mention that the magnetic grain structure of 30 ips studio tape can't store as much dynamic range as 24-bit samples, or as much detail as a 192 kHz sampling rate.

Digital is superior in real world (not some imagined perfect analog media) from initial capture, to final playback. But only as far as it is handled correctly. Digital also allows recording engineers to quickly find peak levels, maximize those, and compress the rest of the signal to the point of lossiness. So digital's same advantage, perfect mathematical transforms, is its disadvantage, that it can be transformed in ways which analog cannot.

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.