Californication on CD is gash

FTFY, etc.

How does it sound if you copy it to a PC at 24bit?

1 Seeing as a CD is 16 bit, using 24 bit is pointless.
2 It will sound exactly the same.

Unfortunately, you can’t “fix” the dynamic range problems of a recording by playing it back on a different medium – you need to go back into the studio with all the separate parts and make a new master…

IMO modern productions, generally;

if its mainstream getting played to radio 1 listeners, its being aimed at car stereos, and is mastered hot with very little dynamics; if its yoof music, its aimed at ipods with turd quality dr dre brand headphones, and is mastered hot with very little dynamics

find music outside those markets, and you stick a fair chance of finding decent recordings that have a good range

Are you expecting George Martin or Geoff Emerick to be a STW forum users? Suggest you start with there books for starters, good read.

I don’t think equippment was better quality in the old days. But hi-fi was the thing to aim for back then, whereas now it’s popular ipod listening.

A quality analogue recording will hold all the same data as a quality digital recording

I bet it won’t, not these days. I bet the frequency range of modern equippment is greater than 60s or 70s stuff.

No mrmonkfinger, I don’t want him to copy a CD to the PC, good grief.

I was asking if he could run me a copy, at 24/96 of the Vinyl if I send a memory stick.

C’mon 🙄 vs 😆

I bet it won’t, not these days. I bet the frequency range of modern equippment is greater than 60s or 70s stuff.

is that extra data needed? questionable, I’d say.

@gofasterstripes, sorry, I was having a bit of a special moment there!

Unfortunately, you can’t “fix” the dynamic range problems of a recording by playing it back on a different medium – you need to go back into the studio with all the separate parts and make a new master…

It is mastered differently, I believe. If it was brick walled like the CD it wouldn’t play!

I was asking if he could run me a copy, at 24/96 of the Vinyl if I send a memory stick.

Not got a computer with a decent soundcard I’m afraid, otherwise I’d have no problem doing it for you. I believe that some off the less salubrious parts of the internet have High Res FLAC files. Not that I’d condone that or anything, but as you already own the CD…. 😉

find music outside those markets, and you stick a fair chance of finding decent recordings that have a good range

Pity the Arcade Fire don’t follow this. Given their creativity and wide range of instruments, you’d hope that they didn’t record their albums in a biscuit tin! Alas not.

http://archive.org/details/audio

Pity the Arcade Fire don’t follow this. Given their creativity and wide range of instruments, you’d hope that they didn’t record their albums in a biscuit tin! Alas not.

See, that’s what I find a bit odd. I’ve read this before, on here, I think, and I don’t think their albums sound that bad, although I do think that The Suburbs is less well recorded than Funeral, or Neon Bible, Intervention is magnificent, but it was recorded in an old church in Montreal

seems like pre-1970’s, the drums were given less ‘space’ in the mix.

Stereo was still an object for experimentation as the Beatles records demonstrate so there wasn’t the orthodoxy we get nowadays of miking up every part of the drum kit and putting that centre stage before any other instruments.

Nowadays, regardless of the musical style (except jazz!) the drums just sound overblown and intrude on the other instruments.

If you take your Ipod, etc and record 10 mins from ‘jazz fm’ and then compare it to a 10 min recording of daytime radio 6, or even radio 2 , you will be surprised at just how ‘bombastic’ most modern music is.

Seems like overdoing the volume of the drums is a substitute for interesting percussion.

Not that over-emphasising the drums is always a bad thing as our heavy metal records attest, but to do it properly takes real skill.

I’m always surprised at the quality of the recording process in general from the 1950’s to 70’s …bands making classics in 1 take…and I guess it was down to the personnel.

In the aftermath of ww2 the Americans not only got their hands on magnetic tape recorders from the Nazi’s but I guess a lot of scientists and engineers (liberated from slave work, etc) who may have found employment in Americas fledgling post-war recording and creative industries. 8)

There are lots of terrible recordings out there, often Rick Rubin is involved. The clipping at the climax of Johnny Cash’s cover of Hurt is shocking and ruins the performance.

Yes that’s him. Bearded git!

This is all rubbish. It’s all snake oil. None of you can really hear the difference between anything. It’s all snake oil. One system sounds just like another. It’s all snake oil.

Just thought I’d be the first… 😉

From the Wikipedia article on RR

“Producer Dr. Dre once stated that Rick was, “hands down, the dopest producer ever that anyone would ever want to be, ever”

…explains a lot, on both fronts.

Nowadays, regardless of the musical style (except jazz!) the drums just sound overblown and intrude on the other instruments.

If you take your Ipod, etc and record 10 mins from ‘jazz fm’ and then compare it to a 10 min recording of daytime radio 6, or even radio 2 , you will be surprised at just how ‘bombastic’ most modern music is.
So, jazz is the only music style exempt from overblown drums, is it? Bollocks, you’re obviously one of those jazz obsessives who look down on any other form of music as inferior.
There are many, many recordings out there which have well-recorded, properly balanced drums that are not intrusive.
I return to several artists I mentioned earlier, like Laura Marling, Paper Aeroplanes, Beth Orton, Calexico, Elbow, Emmylou Harris, Patty Griffin, Joan As Policewoman, Donald Fagen…
Your second point is even more bogus; you wouldn’t be using an iPod, and you’re comparing a specialist station that only plays the sort of music that you seem to feel is superior in quality with a digital station that has somewhat reduced bandwidth, playing at 128Kb, which is pretty compressed, and plays music that you already consider to be compromised musically, same with Radio 2.
How about a comparison with Cerys’s show on a Sunday; she plays a wide variety of music that often has no drums at all, recordings dating back to early last century.
Sorry, but you’re making far too narrow a comparison to take it in any way seriously. You’re guilty of making a ‘bombastic’ statement that can be easily refuted.
Jazz, my arse. 🙄

There’s an awful lot to be said for live rooms with great acoustics, really nice mics, desks with lovely preamps, wide magnetic tape running fast and engineers that know how to make the most of all the gear. And most critically, musicians that can play well enough to get a great take quickly before the magic is lost.

Modern mastering is very frustrating too…

@chiefgrooveguru: well done! if only I could be so very succinct. 🙂

@Countzero…Yes I was making a sweeping generalisation and you are definitely right to point out that Jazz is not the only genre to avoid ‘bombasticness’, not least Folk, Classical and Ambient for example.

However, what I was trying to illustrate is the general excessive-loudness, identified by other members that I experience when listening to daytime ‘pop’ music, in general.

To illustrate this, I find that if I use my ipod/ mp3 players voice recorder to record daytime pop music and jazz then there is a clear difference in the extent to which the drums saturate the audio ‘mix’.

In all cases I am listening to a Tesco’s dab radio plugged into the aux input of my hi-fi and comparing ‘jazz fm’ on dab with other dab stations.

Granted, the microphone on the mp3 player may exaggerate the low frequencies, but try it yourself and you may be amazed at just excessively ‘loud’ most daytime radio is…not to mention the tv, but that’s another story!

Far from being a jazz-snob my preference is towards most music from the 1960’s not least the Beatles and Beach boys. 🙂

Other reasons I believe for the changes to production on final copies is not only because of the prevalence of mp3 stuff, it is also to assist in “promotion” of the music by proxy. In otherwords you can hear and identify the baseline/drumbeat more readily from a distance, say when someone goes by in their car or you pass by a shop playing music.

torsoinalake – Member

I like that you can hear the bass drum pedal squeaking on Led Zeppelin’s ‘Since I’ve been loving you’.

Also on good copies of Sir Duke by Stevie Wonder apparently…

Sadly I gave up all my good hi fi stuff and am really regretting it now. 🙁

Summary:

How was music that was recorded 40 odd years ago sound so good ?

Cos everything is crap now, and was much better in the good old days 🙂

‘bombasticness’

The word is ‘bombast’

fifo – i want to learn more about this 192 flac business. what hardware do i need, and where do i get the files from?

and iyo is it much better than a cd?

Good thread!

Not all old vinyl sounds great – as has been said above, a lot of the heavier stuff is poor due to the limitations of the medium.

And much of the vinyl I bought in the 80’s sounds bad due to the poor quality & dodgy pressing of the vinyl used then – the secondhand stuff I bought from the 60’s and 70’s is miles better.
The 60′ & 70’s records are much thicker and heavier too, which I’m sure must make a difference, if only to vertical tracking. 🙂

Well mastered, sympathetically produced music sounds excellent on later CD recordings.
Conversely, much of the early CD stuff, especially classical, acoustic & jazz is appalling – terrible, ragged distortion, and a complete lack of understanding of the new medium.

Interesting interview with Mick Jones of The Clash on R4 recently – he said that when remastering the original tapes for a new release, they had to be baked first to stop the oxide crumbling & falling away, taking much of the original info with it.
He also said he’s hearing stuff on the masters that he can’t remember hearing before, due to the advances in modern tape heads.

Fascinating stuff.

And much of the vinyl I bought in the 80’s sounds bad due to the poor quality & dodgy pressing of the vinyl used then – the secondhand stuff I bought from the 60’s and 70’s is miles better.

Very, very true. A lot of vinyl in the 80’s was recycled, and I used to regularly find little bits of paper embedded in the plastic, often breaking through the surface in the grooves, causing jumps, thumps and other crap.
The end for me came when I bought Peter Gabriel’s then new album, PG4.
I went through five copies, having to take them back to the shop in Bath, because the surface noise was intolerable, just a continual frying sound from beginning to end.
Bought the CD, one of the very first releases in’82, and recorded it onto a Metal TDK cassette, and used the CD as a demo disc in the hifi shop I worked in on Saturdays, until I could afford a CD player.
The difference was astounding; silky silence between tracks, massive amounts of bass, it was a world apart from the cruddy vinyl I’d been buying up to then.
And I was playing it on around 2k’s worth of turntable, too. Logik DM101/Zeta/ AudioTechnica MC cartridge.
When vinyl’s good, it can be very good, but far too often its badly compromised, and there’s no way I’ll pay £20-25 for a vinyl version of a new album.

Regarding the earlier mention of Bonzo’s old-style squeaky “metal-link” Ludwig bass drum pedal on “Since I’ve Been Loving You”, I would imagine that the band wouldn’t have let the track through if they could have heard it back in 1972 and I certainly don’t remember hearing it first time around in Ye Olde Anciente Analogue Era.

I guess this must mean that the recording equipment was far superior to the playback gear, at the time.

I don’t know if I’ve just got a duff copy of Metallica, Death Magnetic but it is pretty much unlistenable. It sounds like they’ve pushed all the sliders up to 11 and it just sounds crackly and awful.

Quite a few albums like that actually that I have bought and put them on with a real anticipation only to be disappointed because the sound quality is rubbish.

EDIT. A quick Google search would make it seem I’m not alone in thinking Death Magnetic sounds rubbish:

FROM WIKIPEDIA regarding Death Magnetic:

Criticism regarding production[edit source | editbeta]
As this waveform shows, the CD version of Death Magnetic (top) is far more compressed (less dynamic) than the Guitar Hero downloadable release (bottom).The album has been criticized for having compromised sound quality, due to an overly compressed dynamic range, during a process called peak limiting leading to audible distortion.[72] Sean Michaels of The Guardian explains that “the sound issues are a result of the ‘loudness war’ – an ongoing industry effort to make recordings as loud as possible”.[73] A Rolling Stone article states that Rubin was “overseeing mixes in Los Angeles while the band is in Europe, headlining shows” and only communicated with him by conference calls.[74] Fans have noted that these sonic problems are not present in the Guitar Hero version of the album, where the tracks are present separately because of the game mechanics and the tracks were sent to the game publishers before the process was made.[75][76] MusicRadar and Rolling Stone attribute a quote to the album’s mastering engineer Ted Jensen in which he claims that “mixes were already brick-walled before they arrived” for mastering[77][78] and cite a petition from fans to remix or remaster the album.

Metallica and Rubin initially declined to comment on the issue, while the band’s co-manager Cliff Burnstein stated that complainers were in a minority and that response to the album had otherwise been “overwhelmingly positive”.[79] Ulrich later confirmed in an interview with Blender, that some creative control regarding the album’s production had indeed been transferred to Rubin but also stressed his satisfaction with the final product.[80][81]

… and now it seems the situation has gone into reverse…

Regarding the earlier mention of Bonzo’s old-style squeaky “metal-link” Ludwig bass drum pedal on “Since I’ve Been Loving You”, I would imagine that the band wouldn’t have let the track through if they could have heard it back in 1972 and I certainly don’t remember hearing it first time around in Ye Olde Anciente Analogue Era.

I guess this must mean that the recording equipment was far superior to the playback gear, at the time.

The monitoring loudspeakers of that era weren’t that bad! However the typical speakers that the listener would be using weren’t likely to be great and a great take is worth keeping even if there are sonic imperfections.

Death Magnetic (and Californication) exhibit the horrible (lack of) dynamics that occur if you apply hiphop mastering to guitar driven rock. You’re compressing something that’s already heavily compressed.

When vinyl’s good, it can be very good, but far too often its badly compromised, and there’s no way I’ll pay £20-25 for a vinyl version of a new album.

Well, if it’s pressed onto two heavy grade discs, comes in a gatefold sleeve and only sells in relatively small numbers, I’d say £20 is pretty reasonable.

porter_jamie – Member
fifo – i want to learn more about this 192 flac business. what hardware do i need, and where do i get the files from?
and iyo is it much better than a cd?
POSTED 5 HOURS AGO # REPORT-POST

IMO, yes, it does sound better. No, I’ve not done double blind tests, and no, I haven’t bothered to compress any 24/192 tracks to 16/44.1. You should bear in mind that I am using a high end naim amp/dac/streamer: the uniti2. How much better it would sound on something cheaper, I’m less sure. That said, it’s also a very good CD player, so it’s a reasonably fair, if non scientific test. Most of the mid-high end makes do streamers and dacs that can handle the files though.

As for where to get files, there are a few places on line. HD tracks has the biggest selection I’ve found, and you just need to fake a USA address. There are the usual less legitimate areas of the Internet also, but the couple of files I’ve tried from those places have been pretty poor LP conversions that sound like they were done on low quality gear. Basically, if you can find any DVD audio or SACD tracks and rip them in your PC, they’ll probably be at that resolution. More do seem to be being remastered at high res for places like Hd tracks, so worth keeping an eye out. The mp3 hasn’t quite killed hifi just yet.

“Regarding the earlier mention of Bonzo’s old-style squeaky “metal-link” Ludwig bass drum pedal on “Since I’ve Been Loving You”, I would imagine that the band wouldn’t have let the track through if they could have heard it back in 1972 and I certainly don’t remember hearing it first time around in Ye Olde Anciente Analogue Era.”

Oh i don’t know Jones and Page had been around studios a long time, they both knew how to build the charater of a track. Also they were later to “no, leave it on! with the Bron recordings.

But you are not wrong about recordings being better than play back, there was a piece on R4 a while ago saying that when remastering some tracks from one London studio you could here the tube trains passing underneath, the original engineer was present and couldn’t remember hearing the tube in the studio.

Theres a handful of YT vids about the “loudness war”. It’s really noticeable to me now – especially when you compare the ‘volume’ of Metallica’s Master of Puppets to Death Magnetic.

24/192 Music Downloads and why they make no sense.

Well, I was asked for my opinion as to whether they sound better, and to me, they do

Whether its because I want them to is an entirely different question, but as hdd space is cheap, and it feels to me that it improves my enjoyment, then ill keep holding my opinion. Intuitively, having less information means that something is lost. Whether that something is important on a graph, or just appears important to my ears is anyone’s guess

loving that link vorlich

dynamics that occur if you apply hiphop mastering to guitar driven rock

Dad, is that you?

Yes, it’s bit of an eye opener, worth a couple of reads through.

Fifo, you’re welcome to draw your own conclusions, I’ve bought some 24/192 stuff myself, but TBH doubt I will again after reading that. Can’t say I noticed any significant difference anyway, although I never ABX tested them either, not really into audio in that way.

What mogrim said. And whilst it isn’t compression, there’s some twiddling with even the ‘purest’ of sound to get it from groove to amp: RIAA equalization. And of course, some folks listening to digital sources aren’t using this amazing cable 😀

http://m.exclaim.ca/News/neil_young_to_launch_high-res_music_service_in_2013_unveils_pono_prototype

Neil young is working on a high quality digital format see link above.

I think that these days most music is optimised to sound ok on crap systems and most people just don’t care so there is not enough money in it.

The real limitation is the aural response of most listeners, as we get older we lose the top range of frequencies we can hear, vinyl and CDs operate well past this point.

A lot of the crap 60s records have lost popularity so you don’t hear garbage

Neil young is working on a high quality digital format see link above.

I’m currently reading his autobiography, he barely shuts up about it for the first quarter of the book.