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Old fav recording sounded SUCKS!!!
#321007 09/02/10 12:29 AM
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mpyw Offline OP
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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! frown

Re: Old fav recording sounded SUCKS!!!
mpyw #321008 09/02/10 12:36 AM
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Originally Posted By: mpyw
Or I have better equipment and speakers now made all the bad recording show their true nature?


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


Rick
Our Room

smile
Re: Old fav recording sounded SUCKS!!!
mpyw #321009 09/02/10 12:36 AM
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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?


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Re: Old fav recording sounded SUCKS!!!
BlueJays1 #321014 09/02/10 01:07 AM
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Some old Mandarin/Chinese alternative pop/rock album

Re: Old fav recording sounded SUCKS!!!
mpyw #321015 09/02/10 01:12 AM
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Is that one album you are referring to?


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Re: Old fav recording sounded SUCKS!!!
BlueJays1 #321029 09/02/10 02:10 AM
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I've experienced similar. One example is Disraeli Gears by Cream. The CD sucks.

Re: Old fav recording sounded SUCKS!!!
CatBrat #321036 09/02/10 03:16 AM
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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 smile

Last edited by bridgman; 09/02/10 03:20 AM.

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Re: Old fav recording sounded SUCKS!!!
bridgman #321045 09/02/10 04:43 AM
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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

Re: Old fav recording sounded SUCKS!!!
mpyw #321061 09/02/10 11:50 AM
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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.

Re: Old fav recording sounded SUCKS!!!
CatBrat #321080 09/02/10 03:48 PM
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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.


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