The original 'harsh' digital sound...

[fas42]

John, I had a listen to those Whittaker samples, but the sound of my current laptop is too poor to make any judgement, 😉. Yes, the remastering makes the listening easier on a rougher playback; but this isn't the approach I would use, of course.

 

Again, there is absolutely nothing intrinsically 'harsh' about digital recordings, from any era - it's less than competent playback that makes them so; because the distortion artifacts in the treble become too much for the brain to deal with.

 

If the assumption is that people will always have less capable playback systems, then it makes sense to dull the recordings down - but this is a huge project, if you consider the number of recordings out there. From my POV, it makes far more sense to develop the playback mechanism to the point where any recording in its 'natural' state is perfectly acceptable, as a listening experience.

[fas42]

21 minutes ago, sandyk said:

 

Frank

 Your brain must be rapidly wearing out from overusing it to automatically correct for all these well documented problems for you " on the fly" You must be throwing an awful lot of Processing power at these recordings to make them sound acceptable to you.

 

People who suffer from this on normal audio rigs call it, "listener fatigue" ... 😜

 

The beauty of making the rig competent enough is that the "bad stuff" is now so low in its subjective impact that the brain finds it trivially easy to discard - I have so many recordings that sound staggeringly execrable on normal hifis, which then come up trumps when the rig is adequately, yes, 'sorted' ... my poor ol' brain don't know nuthin' about these terrible technical problems those recordings have - it just says, to me,  "I likee ... or, that sounds awful!!" 😄

[fas42]

1 hour ago, John Dyson said:

I have moved from the mindset that 'many' of the old CDs were poorly handled, to the FACT that 'most' of the old pop material was poorly mastered onto CD (and even today, onto other digital realms.)   As I have become more and more confident of the DA decoder (here, speaking as a tool, not pushing it at all), and able to do more and more precisely accurate decodes, I am able to support the idea that the current digital presentation of the '60s through early 90's music is fairly badly corrupted.  That is, it is almost impossible to reproduce the actual and expected sound of that old music.

 

John, you are getting rather extreme here ... "the current digital presentation of the '60s through early 90's music is fairly badly corrupted" - so, you're saying a whole industry has made a mess of things, for 30 years ... and no-one else has noticed ... interesting, 🤨.

[fas42]

3 hours ago, John Dyson said:

Yes, that is what I am saying.  Just on random chance, a friend asked me for a decoded copy of  ONJ Soul Kiss...  Of course, I had to search thourgh my collection -- I found two copies...   One was the original DolbyA NON-DECODED CD as originally sold (and it decodes nicely, by the way), and also one of those EVIL recent remasters, with very little dynamic range.   This seems to happen on every recent sample.   Note that I have found SOME CDs done correctly, but those are fewer given my selection set of purchases in the midwest USA or in my cherry picking of 'elite' non-USA copies.   (That was back when I would willy-nilly spend money on recordings...)

 

If you have an old CD, very likely it is DolbyA undecoded, a new CD is either over compressed or hyper compressed.

 

John

 

 

Agree with you about the current style of dynamic compression - and, remasters. But that is a different issue from the original CD releases, back in the 80's and 90's.

 

'Killer' test tracks for me are 60's Motown - in the sense that these were recorded with probably the worst combination of technology of the time, instrumentation, and mastering decisions ... getting one of these to present well is hard work, and something I only try after major tweaking has been done.