Why most recordings sound like crap....

[grataku]

MrFeedback thanks for bringing us back to the source of the problem. Until they will sell a copy of the original DAT I guess audiophile will always be condemned to running around in their little cage or to listen to unknown artists printed on some obscure audiophile label that sound real good. Listen to predigested and regurgitated music no matter how much stuff they pile on their racks, how many monoblock PS enclosures they have.
Who invented the 'loudness' button? Boomy bass,rice paper-thin midrange, and harsh treble that sounds soo good in the car stereo? Meanwhile, technology is evolved choices that where made back in the 50's to doctor the sound to make it better on the existing equipment no longer have a reason to be but the people are somehow 'hooked'.
Maybe there is sometype of distortion in tube equipment that give the illusion of regaining something that was lost during reprocessing of music. Two 180 deg wrong turns put you back in the right direction I guess.

[Steve Eddy]

Originally posted by grataku
Maybe there is sometype of distortion in tube equipment that give the illusion of regaining something that was lost during reprocessing of music.

So? Recorded music is nothing but illusion from the start.

Two 180 deg wrong turns put you back in the right direction I guess.

The only "right" direction is that which gives us the greatest enjoyment of music. While some take different paths than others, none are inherently more "right" than any other.

Why do you seem so threatened by those who would choose a path different from yours that you feel the need to impugn them?

se

[Brett]

Originally posted by Steve Eddy
So? Recorded music is nothing but illusion from the start.

The only "right" direction is that which gives us the greatest enjoyment of music. While some take different paths than others, none are inherently more "right" than any other.

Hear, hear.

[peranders]

I have around 700 CD's and I can count those which have excellent sound. Of some peculiar reason very few of them are from USA! Denmark, England, Sweden and Germany have very high quality on recording quality.

Ok, hit me !

To the gathered experteze: Why do we want 24 bit sound when almost none recording uses 16 bits?

[Steve Eddy]

Originally posted by peranders
Ok, hit me !

Ok boys, saddle up!

Insane Santa Posse's comin' to getcha!

Yeeeeeeeeeeeehaaawwwwwwwwwwww!

<img src="http://www.q-audio.com/images/cowboy1.gif"><img src="http://www.q-audio.com/images/cowboy1.gif"><img src="http://www.q-audio.com/images/cowboy1.gif"><img src="http://www.q-audio.com/images/cowboy1.gif"><img src="http://www.q-audio.com/images/cowboy1.gif">

To the gathered experteze: Why do we want 24 bit sound when almost none recording uses 16 bits?

What do you mean? You mean less than 16 bits?

se

[tbla]

check out the new poul halberg band "love affair" - good sound from denmark........

[grataku]

Originally posted by Steve Eddy


Why do you seem so threatened by those who would choose a path different from yours that you feel the need to impugn them?

I wish I knew what tha "F" are you talking about, actually not really.
When there is no argument to be won or lost I guess you just have to make up your own and then proclaim yourself as the winner.
What do you do for a living, what is next for you? The Nobel price? The US presidency? The title of smartest man in the universe? What is it that you need to prove, exactly?

[Da5id4Vz]

A few words about my earlier comments:

First, I enjoy the polite and familiar nature of the conversation here and greatly appreciate even-tempered responses I received to my comments yesterday. This is, I think, one of the things that set this forum apart from most others. Thank you, and I hope that I didn’t deviate too much from this genre.

I'm certainly not anti-CD. But the fact remains that when the CD format 1st went mainstream, many of the of LP's we all loved so much had really crappy re-releases as CD re-masters. These were likely the ones where there was more attention to getting title to market than there was thinking about the transfer process. These things that had been mastered on 1/2 tape machines running at 30 IPS could be phenomenal.

I’ve always wondered where the source of the failure was.
Apathy? Perhaps.

Ignorance that CD is an ostensibly different media with its own aesthetic and unique technical boundaries? Again perhaps. I think there was often an over reliance on process and equipment that may have resulted in the use of B team engineers to produce these CD's. The masters were likely blown directly onto PCM 1630 systems, P and Q tones ruffed in to simulate the LP timings and then sent out to be "pressed". To this day if I think if I were to ask 5 recording engineers the correlation between 0 Vu on an analogue recording and 100% on a digital media, I would likely get 5 different answers.

And then there is the one that seems almost relevant today to anyone who is conspiratorially minded. Did the record labels intentionally allow the CD masters to be sub standard in order to minimize or attempt to control the effects of piracy? I don’t think this is too likely, but sometimes when listening to the limited quality of a product, one has to wonder.

These are my own humble opinions.

(More post(s) on the way to mumble about dithering)

[phase_accurate]

I think we have to take every stage of the chain - from musician to listener - into account when we talk about quality.

While many scanting salesperson would insist that the loudspeaker would still be the weakest piece of the chain (and others argue about analog vs digital) me personally, I am convinced that the three weakest parts are:

-composers
-musicians
-producers

and it is mainly the fault of the last element, the "listener" !!!

I generally like (and have played by myself) many styles of music, but my listening to pop music is decreasing.
IMHO the best rock/pop music was composed, played and recorded from the sixties until the mid eighties.

How can anyone expect that crappy music can be recorded well ??

Today's mainstream pop is so boring and artificial that it is mainly usable for background sound (and for car radio, because it doesn't disturb too much).
If it is performed "life", one can only bear it due to the massive use of added optical stimulation (i.e. gigantic light-shows , and the "musicians" doing aerobic performances on-stage).

If the consumers would stop to use music as background noise (as if our environment wasn't noisy enough nowadays) and start to LISTEN to it again, then this would be the end of boring music (and maybe the end of illegal copying as well).

Regards

Charles

/being in a heretical mood

[Da5id4Vz]

Why did I swoon about DG when I have so very few DG recordings?

Back around the time I bought my 1st CD player in the mid 80's (an unrelated event) I had this cool opportunity to hang around in Riga and Yurmala Latvia with a film crew documenting a Soviet US cultural, ideological, and social exchange.

There were a couple of huge evening programs that featured from the US, Eugene Fodor, Grover Washington Jr., Dr. Billy Tailor, and a crew of other stellar jazz artists. The Latvians presented the Riga Symphony Orchestra and a crew of other equally talented performers.

The Latvians were thrilled beyond description to have these masters of the Jazz genre performing for them. I met a hand full of passionate and, highly skilled recording engineers. At some performances these guys seemed to come the woodwork with their Nagras. Me, I got to help the film crew audio recordists get feeds from the Latvian mix engineers. (I also carried boxes, logged tapes, and charged the batteries.) The performances were great and emotionally charged. The quality of the audio mix we were given was as good as it gets.

Well to truncate the rest of my ramblings, through some bits and pieces of mixed language exchange, I think that these Latvians had indicated to us that they had received their training at DG.

OK, twenty years ago... I don’t own many DG recordings... I was just very impressed with these guys who I think might have been trained there. If its not the case that they turn out a quality product, I am disappointed. Another case of lost potential, or perhaps our Russian, German, English Latvian exchanges were so bad that these guys were really trying to tell me to watch out for DG because it wasn’t that good.

A classical recording that I am particularly fond of is, "JS Bach Cello Suites" performed by Nathaniel Rosen, produced and distributed by John Marks Records. My only critique on the recordings would be that the stereo image is slightly better when listened to through cans than speakers. I believe that this is a good example of a CD product where care, craft and art were well applied throughout the production resulting in an excellent product.