Into the Future

[John Dyson]

1 hour ago, Rexp said:

Best of times for who? Back when 8 track was around most folks had hifi's capable of decent playback. Now most folks have dreadful sounding digital systems. 

And now we have dreadfully and purposefully mismastered CDs and digital streams.

 

[John Dyson]

I don't  think that the backwards step was BECAUSE of digital alone, but instead the worst damage occurred at the same time as digital.  Instead of starting to sell CDs with the full-quality family jewels, the distributors decided to add a kind of 'distortion' or 'encryption' that produces PLAUSIBLE recordings, but not the 'real thing'.   The Beatles examples that I am listening to now have both the FA encoding and some of the damage from the original DA noise reduction REMOVED.  The results are not perfect, but are much  more clear/clean than any other normally available version of the recordings.

The lower quality of most available CDs even nowadays has NOT been due to digital, but has been due to some choices made by the distributors.

The snippets are from 'Yesterday' -- the intent was to show that mp3 encoding can be just barely heard in very limited circumstances.  (compare the vocal undulations on the word 'Away' approx 12 seconds in.)    However, the examples shows the extreme clarity.  The FA source material has DolbyA Fog from the source tape and the woody sound of FA encoding with HF compression veil around the voice.).  The original of this (Yesterday)  is actually pretty good as FA goes, and FA gets worse as the material gets more complex.

 

Most of the audible damage has been in the mastering (or mismastering), not so much digitlal per se.

 

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/8yauhjbg3970jw8/AAAa6WPW-lwE2HXzNbPEgRE3a?dl=0

 

 

[John Dyson]

3 hours ago, Digi&Analog Fan said:

Technicalities aside, I wonder how important some of those things are if someone would play cds like that on equipment that truly adds nothing objectionable of its own to the sound. Or those who go to the effort of a pre-play ritual like audiophiles, before they actually lower the stylus onto a piece of vinyl. Years ago it used to be that it was rare when I liked the sound of a CD; now its rare when I don't like the sound of a CD. At least fairly rare. There's a couple handfuls of things that improve the sound between 6 to 8% each. It adds up to a new listening experience. In the end, distortion of some sort usualay turns out to be the culprit.

First, we all become accomodated to a certain style of sound.   I tend to prefer less processing than more, and really do not like the sound of fast compression (causes things like a veil/fuzz around vocals, emphasized ambiance, modulation distortions, etc.)   Admittedly the worst modulation distortions on compression become more apparent with the loudness wars type processing, but tends to be apparent after poor quality expansion on lesser compressed stuff (like the reversable DolbyA).   The compression creates a veil that isn't necessarily ugly -- it is something that people get used to, but the reveal of the actual high quality recordings helps us to remember something closer to the original mix.   Perhaps this is similar to everyone being used to a 10kHz limit frequency response (analoguous to the purposefully messed up CDs), vs the improved 15kHz response that is analogous to decoding the material.  There was similar resistance early on when music was first available in wider band than AM radio or worse, Victrola.   The better quality isn't always immediately recognized.

 

Early on, there was a groundswell about the bad 'digital sound' -- and I was taken in by that claim also, until I actually realized in 2012 about EXACTLY what was causing most of the damage.   Most of the damage was probably intentional or the result of lazy skipping of a decoding step (EQ is a LOT faster than decoding on electronics hardware.)

 

From an artistic standpoint, just in my opinion, the 'creativity' is mostly by the music artist and their intimate recording/mixing engineers.   Processing after that mixdown should only be for repairs, not frustrated creative mastering.   Also, processing intending to hide the 'family jewels' is more of a cheat than a protection of IP.

 

Most importantly It is all about personal preferences, but after all of these years of my excess compression polluted hearing, I couldn't forget the more clean sound of the relatively less compressed material.   No matter what, I will NOT say 'sounds better' other than 'sounds better to me'.  But, I will certainly say:  "more clean", "better ambience", "more natural stereo image"...   On the other hand, the correction DOES require about 4 different choices in most cases.  One is a choice of two (general EQ), another is a choice of two(stereo image), one is the calibration level (almost always the same), perhaps a small amount of post-EQ tone control (within 1dB.)   It isn't like it used to be -- I automated the mechnanism so that there are no longer 30 different choices.   The decoding process runs anywhere from 3X faster than realtime to about 2X slower than real time, depending on ultimate desired quality.

 

John

 

*NOTE: when I talk about the latent compression in CD releases, it doesn't quite act the same as a normal compressor in your equipment rack.  It is special purpose, very very fast attack and release, and actually DOES distort the sound to some extent, NEVER intended to be listened to even with EQ.  The super fast attack release is stealthy, but eventually you can hear the weird effects. There was similar resistance early on when music was first available in wider band than AM radio or worse, Victrola.   The better quality isn't always recognized.   They aren't the sound of 'pretty' compression, and DA specific comopression with EQ tends to make the midrange more WOODY sounding, distorts the lows, damages the stereo image, and creates veils around the sound of material (creating a fuzziness in the sound.)  Also, on older recordings, they REALLY needed the noise reduction side of DolbyA noise reduction, but without proper expansion the resulting recordings will be more hissy than they should be.  The Nat King Cole, Carpenters, Herb Alpert and others (simon and garfunkel) -- no need for them to be hissy, but they usually are.