Interesting crackles on famous recording.

[John Dyson]

I have cross-checked from multiple pipelines to my archives -- this recording has crackles in it.  I had previously been fooled by misrepresentation that some ABBA recordings were digital, when actually they were derived from vinyl.  Vinyl can be THAT good -- of course, vinyl DOES have 'tells' that if you actually look for them, it can sometimes be determined with a very high degree of accuracy whether vinyl is in the pipeline or not.

 

Anyway -- this recording raised my concens about vinyl   Listen carefully -- I provided two snippet versions -- one a high res that had been downconverted for space reasons, and a second apparently less molested version, from a non-high-res collection -- but FA decoded...   Can you hear the 'ticks and pops' in the background?   Does the recording *almost* seem like it might be vinyl?

 

Well, both technically and by other means (supposedly trustworthy sources), my belief is biased  that these are NOT vinyl, but they just might be.  Some other cuts from the same album -- both versions, different mastering, appear to have similar defects.  *this is the first time that I have noticed it.*

 

Actually, these are the first example of 1/f^2 & worse noise (popcorn) that I have noticed in a commercial recording...  Strange indeed.  Maybe recorded on early transistor equipment?

Listening to the next cut, the ticks & pops are much more strong, but do NOT seem to sound like a vinyl tick to me.  Almost sounds like a dropout, severe semiconductor surface noise, or a bad connector?

 

On some of the cuts with ticks/pops, there is ZERO rumble that would be on even the best vinyl copies...  Even the best vinyl has a detectable rumble with the right spectogram settings.   Some of the recordings have enough rumble that they MIGHT be from vinyl...

 

For those worried about perfect wiring and perfect connectors -- the little problems that we worry about today are NOTHING like in the past!!!

(sorry about the snippets being so many bytes, still time-wise short, but I wanted the detail to be unobscured or no concerns about lack of transparency.)

 

Vinyl or not?

 

John

 

Bridge-static-frmcollectionDECODED.flac Bridge-static-frmhighresRAW.flac

[NOMBEDES]

Recording Engineers sometime add pop and crackles just for fun.  (Or the artist tells them to add some "vinyl" ambiance.  Who knows what lurks in the heart of the studio?

 

 

[gmgraves]

1 hour ago, NOMBEDES said:

Recording Engineers sometime add pop and crackles just for fun.  (Or the artist tells them to add some "vinyl" ambiance.  Who knows what lurks in the heart of the studio?

 

 

Huh! I’ve heard of this “practice“, but except for some early ‘40’s 16-inch broadcast transcriptions transferred to vinyl, I’ve never come across it on more modern recordings.

[fas42]

I have a budget copy of that album, and have frequently noticed, going years back, that it's relatively noisy, compared to other pop recordings from that time; doesn't get in the way of enjoying the tracks - I see it as an aspect of its 'character'. Perhaps the master tape was in poor shape, or only a multi generation copy was available to do the mastering.

[astrotoy]

I just listened to the two samples.  I noticed some crackles, but in particular, in the DECODED version, the second word of the song "you're" is missing or edited out.  It is there in the RAW version.  I pulled out my tape version (15ips 2 track 1/4" dub of a safety master copy - so second generation after the safety) and there are no crackles.  However, there is a faint tick on the word "you're", so I assume that is on the master tape.  My tape version sounds really good. 

 

Larry

[John Dyson]

4 hours ago, astrotoy said:

I just listened to the two samples.  I noticed some crackles, but in particular, in the DECODED version, the second word of the song "you're" is missing or edited out.  It is there in the RAW version.  I pulled out my tape version (15ips 2 track 1/4" dub of a safety master copy - so second generation after the safety) and there are no crackles.  However, there is a faint tick on the word "you're", so I assume that is on the master tape.  My tape version sounds really good. 

 

Larry

Yea -- the original version was from the HDtracks type verison.  The decoded version was decoded from the released collection (I think that the metadata is partially intact.)  I did notice that both versions (decoded or not) have the ticks and pops -- I only demoed cross versions to show that it is on both of the normally available versions today (actually on the whole albums), and decoding doesn't fix it.  (DA doesn't help ticks and pops.)   To be as reasonably transparent, I left the examples at high res, and didn't want to take up more space for such a transient issue -- no sense in demoing 4 copies, when 2 was sufficient.

 

Why be silly and add the ticks and pops?  I find them to be distracting -- the other albums do NOT have the ticks and pops.

Frankly, they don't sound like vinyl pops to me, rather sound like connector problems...  IMO -- STUPID.

 

John

 

[John Dyson]

4 hours ago, astrotoy said:

I just listened to the two samples.  I noticed some crackles, but in particular, in the DECODED version, the second word of the song "you're" is missing or edited out.  It is there in the RAW version.  I pulled out my tape version (15ips 2 track 1/4" dub of a safety master copy - so second generation after the safety) and there are no crackles.  However, there is a faint tick on the word "you're", so I assume that is on the master tape.  My tape version sounds really good. 

 

Larry

If you have a DolbyA copy of the safety master, you can correctly decode it -- with the right software, better than any DolbyA can.  If yours isn't DolbyA, I guess it is already decoded.  (I would give you a license file for it.)  I have copies of a few masters -- the difference can be very interesting, esp for vocal chorus and clean (not squshy) cymbals.   Too bad that they aren't the genre per my taste (jazz, symphony, etc.)    The symphony is pretty good though -- I do enjoy it a little.

 

John

 

[Confused]

I have to say that the high res version DOES sound to me exactly like a very high quality vinyl rip, with a touch of tape hiss on top.  Most curious. 

 

Both versions sound OK though, perfectly listenable in absolute terms.  Plus, the "vinyl rip" effect is, or whatever it actually may be, seems for more obvious to me listening on headphones.  That said, I typically find vinyl rips sound a little annoying on headphones, but not so much on speaker based systems, which again makes me wonder if it is in fact a vinyl rip.  

[John Dyson]

31 minutes ago, Confused said:

I have to say that the high res version DOES sound to me exactly like a very high quality vinyl rip, with a touch of tape hiss on top.  Most curious. 

 

Both versions sound OK though, perfectly listenable in absolute terms.  Plus, the "vinyl rip" effect is, or whatever it actually may be, seems for more obvious to me listening on headphones.  That said, I typically find vinyl rips sound a little annoying on headphones, but not so much on speaker based systems, which again makes me wonder if it is in fact a vinyl rip.  

Since the high res version wasn't decoded -- maybe the damaged stereo image because of the compression might be where the headphones don't sound right?  I know for a fact that the decoding on the 'decoded' example was in error -- I leave a lot of experiments setting around, just to compare for improvements/keeping some kind of reference -- and the purpose of the demo was NOT to talk about decoding per-se, but about the 'ticks and pops'.   The ticks really seemed strange to me -- esp when some cuts had LF rumble (could be room effects) and some recordings with the most egregious ticks 'n' pops had ZERO rumble that plausibly looked like turntable effects...

 

I use headphones 90% of the time because of the extreme precision of my project -- and stereo image damage is very obvious.  Of course, admittedly, stereo image isn't as correct in some ways, but damage to a normally expected stereo image is more intimate and therefore a little easier to detect.  This was one of my secondary motivations for my project -- getting a more natural stereo image rather than the comopressed and manipulated image with holes in it.

 

John

 

[Confused]

35 minutes ago, John Dyson said:

Since the high res version wasn't decoded -- maybe the damaged stereo image because of the compression might be where the headphones don't sound right?  I know for a fact that the decoding on the 'decoded' example was in error -- I leave a lot of experiments setting around, just to compare for improvements/keeping some kind of reference -- and the purpose of the demo was NOT to talk about decoding per-se, but about the 'ticks and pops'.   The ticks really seemed strange to me -- esp when some cuts had LF rumble (could be room effects) and some recordings with the most egregious ticks 'n' pops had ZERO rumble that plausibly looked like turntable effects...

 

I use headphones 90% of the time because of the extreme precision of my project -- and stereo image damage is very obvious.  Of course, admittedly, stereo image isn't as correct in some ways, but damage to a normally expected stereo image is more intimate and therefore a little easier to detect.  This was one of my secondary motivations for my project -- getting a more natural stereo image rather than the comopressed and manipulated image with holes in it.

 

John

 

I didn't mention anything about the stereo image, to me it is quite simple, some of the noise in the high res version does sound like a vinyl rip.

[John Dyson]

15 minutes ago, Confused said:

I didn't mention anything about the stereo image, to me it is quite simple, some of the noise in the high res version does sound like a vinyl rip.

Sorry about that -- I had inferred that -- it is actually one of the aspects of FA damage that really bothers me and was on my mind.  I was going to correct my message a little while ago, but it had already timed out!!!   (Speakers vs headphones is where the differences in damage are most apparent.)   The only saving grace of the S&G high res version (and S&G in general) is that the ambiance is sometimes strong enough to hide the damage to the stereo  image -- but it is still there.

 

Even already damaged stereo image is made worse by FA.  There are holes in certain parts of the stereo image -- it DOES depend on the variant, and there are apparently 3 variants to the image manipulation -- but agaiin -- semi off topic.

 

Bringing ABBA on this matter -- I had a really nice set of rips done by a friend, I thought that they were special 96k copies of ABBA -- and they really sounded good (after decoding), and found that they were recent vinyl copies.  The ticks and pops and VERY MINIMAL rumble eventually gave it away, but it is AMAZING how good vinyl can sound -- but the ticks and pops are always there...  (If FA encoded material is on vinyl, there IS an real NR on the rumble when decoding, but the ticks and pops pass through without much attenuation.)

 

John