Can you please check the quality of the vocal

[John Dyson]

I have had an argument with a friend (not on these forums) that there is a specific defect in the vocal part of the 30 second selection.  It is NOT a perfect decode and it is NOT a perfect recording.  However, my hearing is becoming that of an old person, and sometimes I get fooled.  Is there a prominent defect in the vocal?  Ambiance, nothing like that is the issue.  Name the defect!!!  (Truly, I don't want to bias the result, because one can trick themselves either way -- I will be honest with the critical comment that I am getting, and also the suspicion about the reason about the complaint...)  It is my position that it isn't perfect, but there isn't an extreme or disqualifying defect, but I normally trust this person.  This is a straight "--fcm=--:" decode, about as vanilla as it can be.

 

Thanks ahead of time for the feedback -- I am beside myself in believing the criticism...  Please tell me what I am missing, PLEASE!!!

 

John

JudyDemo.flac

[John Dyson]

I would still appreciate any replies -- but I got some through private email/messaging....   The answer is apparently that someone with sour grapes had been complaining about excessive sibilance.  I couldn't hear any excessive sibilance, and in fact it seems to be 'stumbling' (muted/damaged) sibilance that causes kind of a muted 's'.  (It is easy to fix, but I wanted someone to verify my opinon that the sibilance wasn't ear damaging or anything like that.)   One of the major complaints when trying to decode non-encoded material is an extreme kind of sibilance.  In this case, it seems to be the opposite problem.

 

 

[kelvinwsy]

I decided to take up your invitation to play this on my HQplayer - and then JRiver MC 26 - \

The vocals comes over the Right channel. Her vocals are 'hard sounding in the upper registers.

Even with upsampling using HQPlayer 4 there is no softening of the hard sound. It sounds hard and flat

Hope that is what you are expecting as feedback

Kelvin

[John Dyson]

1 hour ago, kelvinwsy said:

I decided to take up your invitation to play this on my HQplayer - and then JRiver MC 26 - \

The vocals comes over the Right channel. Her vocals are 'hard sounding in the upper registers.

Even with upsampling using HQPlayer 4 there is no softening of the hard sound. It sounds hard and flat

Hope that is what you are expecting as feedback

Kelvin

Yea -- her recordings aren't always great sounding, sad because she has a nice voice and I have heard a nice person...  I was getting criticism from someone about extreme sibilance, which it doesn't have.  There is a problem with the sibilance, but it has a halting/stopped-up effect because I purposefully didn't adjust it out.  I wanted to do ZERO tweaks.  The original is the same, but more compressed, woody sounding, slippery 's' sounds...  Not good, and it is sad, because I have heard she is a nice person.  This is a case of a nice history of music, but good recordings are sometimes hard to find.  In fact, in POP, no CDs (or very few) are done correctly at all!!!  Not Hi-Res, nothing, unless done by a boutique outfit.  MFSL has a track record of doing the mastering at least partially correctly.

 

I can make it sound A LOT better, but that wasn't the purpose.   I wanted feedback on the vanilla decode.

 

John

 

[John Dyson]

2 hours ago, kelvinwsy said:

I decided to take up your invitation to play this on my HQplayer - and then JRiver MC 26 - \

The vocals comes over the Right channel. Her vocals are 'hard sounding in the upper registers.

Even with upsampling using HQPlayer 4 there is no softening of the hard sound. It sounds hard and flat

Hope that is what you are expecting as feedback

Kelvin

You were right that there are problems in the recording (per myother response), but I thought it would be most fair for me to remove the decoding problems (clean up the sibilance.)  The change to the decoding parameters was small.   I don't like to do 'mastering', so the only EQ that I do is to bring the copy to a state where it accurately reflects the recording. 

 

I have included the original, direct from CD with the compression and slurpy 's' sibilance, enhanced high end, and slightly woody sound (like an over emphasized midrange.):  JudyRaw.flac  (typical damage on consumer CDs since inception.)

 

An improved version of the previous post, a little more careful about the sibilance, and the decoding parameters are built-in to the .flac file: JudyDemo1.flac (a little closer to the master tape used to produce JudyRaw).

 

The purpose of the original question was ONLY about getting secondary feedback about excessive sibilance.   This is a common complaint from nay-sayers who know enough about DolbyA to be able to make a well known technical complaint.

 

This is to demonstrate that the stumbling sibilance could be corrected.  (Sorry about the -10dB peak level, but I tend to work with headroom when possible, and I didnt' rerun to bring the levels to near clipping.)  I didn't enhance anything, so this (JudyDemo1) hasn't been mastered, just decoded.

 

John

 

JudyRaw.flac JudyDemo1.flac