It depends if you can read 40,000 pages of Swedish legaleze. And considering that Swedish is one of the most difficult languages to learn (according my my Swedish ex-girlfriend), you'll be up a yard-arm in no time! Arrrgh!
I DO understand all that you have said. You've made that very clear and I thank you for your clarification. My understanding now is to blame poor re-mixing for those early CDs that just don't come up to scratch to their vinyl equivalents.
RIAA eq is symmetrical - that is, boost and cut applied during record are cut and boosted exactly by your preamp on playback. This is not "optional" or something you can disable. Bear with me cause I need to know. The Sony amp I had, did have the capability of switching the RIAA EQ out. I think it was there only to reproduce records that didn't have the RIAA curve cut into it, presumably early 78s, 16rpm, 'dictaphone records' and so on. Now the higher end of the Hi-Fi consumers would want to listen to everything flat. No tone 'colouration'. All pre-amps would thus have circuitry on the phono to flatten or compensate the RIAA curve. Now there must have been variations due to heat, age of circuitry, quality of components and circuit design on the mastering recording equipment as well as the playback amps to produce tonal variations?! That fact alone would pretty much stuff up any hi-fi falutin' commentary at least of 'flat output'. So to produce good vinyl and to listen to it, you would need reference mastering/cutting equipment and playback amp.
But the masters records were made from were made to sound good on turntables, not on cds. Well said, doesn't make sense but I understand what you mean I think. In a studio using analog equipment, let's say 8 track, the resulting tape would contain 8 separate tracks, maybe with some overdubs. That master was downmixed to stereo by a recording engineer, mixer, producer or whoever. Then the downmix was used to create the cut record master (with the EQ curve added) and it was cast to a master pressing and used until it wore out, making thousands of vinyl records.
Now I found this (just now) on Wikipedia, and I'm reluctant to quote this:
The earliest days of the CD era found record companies using higher generation copies which they had used for vinyl and cassette or 8 track mastering to create their CDs, with frequently underwhelming results. An nth-generation tape equalized for vinyl frequency response might be deemed perfectly acceptable by a record company, as in the past most people buying records did not have state of the art hi-fi to notice the difference, and (importantly) might be much easier to locate than the "original" source master, and because of the value of the original master stated above. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remaster So I think that the early CDs that I've got that exhibit poor EQ is just that. However I would certainly notice a -40db lack of bass response, so some remastering must have occurred to compensate for the lack of an RIAA playback EQ.
Yes, the "downmix" of lps and cds are different. They were often different even for different lp or cd pressings. How many versions of Dark Side of the Moon or Meddle or Animals have been released? lol Too many! I probably had 3 versions of Dark Side, including the Master version, but I gave them away as I just got sick of it. I've got too much good music on vinyl that I just can't get rid of that I listen to on occassions, but I can't get rid of them cause they will never be released on CD.
Annex Mexico. You guys need another star on the flag. Revert all the spelling back to the Queen's English. Adopt the Metric system. Devalue the US$ by about 50% Tell Conan O'Brien that he's better without his writers. Dispose of the RIAA and MPAA. Have a prosecutor on-hand at every Jerry Springer show. Some of the admissions made are criminal. Rename all 'World Series' games to 'National Series' Legalize Marijuana, euthanasia. Remove the death penalty. Nationalize Microsoft. Free medical for those on Social Security. Flat Federal Tax rate with no state taxes. Remove export prohibitions based on greed. Find Osama Only prop planes for internal travel - no jets. Limit fuel consumption to 10 litre per 100km cars immediately. (Approx 30 mpg US) The President MUST HAVE a regular supply of interns selected by Hugh Hefner with culinary skills like peeling seedless grapes. States to fix their own problems as I'm too busy being fed peeled, seedless grapes. All other matters go to the Vice President.
So the other guy was wrong? Taking the quality of the playback equipment out of this, the EQ differences heard between vinyl and CD of the same masters is due to bad pressings? I've always preferred to listen to CD/vinyl flat. In fact prefer to listen with no EQ circuitry in the preamp at all. Could it be that the downmix for CD and vinyl were different?
Geez! I know what you mean! I never got that sort of imaging at home, and I heard some big Magnaplanars that tried to image, but just couldn't make it. The very best I heard was an experimental setup by a guy called Tim Vandenberg in the late 70's. He got 2 radford monos, a Scottish turntable (Fons?), some submarine battery cable for the leads (no joke) and some modified AMW ported boxes of which he took the tweeters out and realigned them on bricks on the top of the cabinets so that the base of the cones were lined up with the woofers' cones. I don't remember the cartridge setup and he had a weird little white box (English brand Quad??) for a preamp. My memory fails me. But the point of this is that he called me over one day to listen to his new setup. He put on a 60's Western Swing album (Yippee Yi Yay!) and I swear that the backup singers were standing about 6ft behind the wall! I almost jumped out of my skin! The actual image was much larger than possible for the width of the room and everything was crystal clear. To say I was stunned! The vocals and the guitar was astounding. Better than live. I couldn't say anything for a while afterwards.
I haven't heard anything like that since either! I reckon it was just know-how and the right bits of equipment. Pure magic. Thanks for the regression!
Leak were good. Mind you, I set up the turntable in the room next door. Double brick house, with internal brick walls. The Decca was built with a linen thread holding the diamond in place, so it tracked well. The problem with loud music and turntables was that anything too loud would vibrate the plinth of the turntable which was picked up by the cartridge. causing a mechanical feedback making the needle jump. The JBL speaker cones probably travelled (in and out)at about an inch or so, trying to pop out of its voice coils! It was crazy! By the time I took them back, they sounded a bit scratchy; the voice coils swollen, rubbing on the magnets. I reckon if you would of tried the 30" Warfdales, it would have stuffed them! Mind you, Warfdales were built for LOUD music!:)
Thank you very much for that. A suspicion that has been bugging me for years. I had a Sony TA series amp that could switch out the RIAA curve (on phono only), so I couldn't experiment with a CD in the Aux input and didn't have the technical know how to get it to work properly through the phono inputs to try it out. In particular, Japan's "Tin Drum" of which I only had a worn cassette copy of the vinyl, still sounded superb compared to the CD that I immediately bought as soon as I could lay my hands on it. The CD was a real disappointment.
Don't forget that the master tape is the zero-th generation. The vinyl and cd are both first generation.
You actually get a sense of realism when you listen to 78 recordings of blues around the 20's and 30s, especially the rare direct cuts. In those early days, they would record via a megaphone directly cutting into the bakelite. Talk about realistic!
No-one has raised psycho-acoustics, or how analogue to analogue wave transmissions are heard as opposed to fractured wave forms. Let's just say that analogue is more 'organic':)
So is the RIAA EQ recorded off analog masters transferred onto a Cd as well? Or is the mix flat? I ask because I've experienced really bad CD versions of vinyl records. Eg Lack of bass.
You're right. Any physicist would agree that you cannot digitize an analogue waveform. It's impossible to do. It's like approaching the speed of light. A digitized waveform is not an exact representation of the real waveform.
"Now try and tell the young ones that, and they won't believe you!"
Yup. I've got it. I ran it on a Rega Planar 3 turntable with a Decca cartridge (cranked up to 2.5 grams) into a Radford amp and (at the time), some JBL 55 speakers that I borrowed from the local hi-fi shop for a free "in home demo". I took the covers off the JBL's, pointed them in my direction, sat on a bean bag about 8ft away, warmed the tubes and dropped the arm gently about 3 mins before the cannons. BOOM! I felt the puffs of air from the enclosure ports about a sec after the sound - BOOM! More puffs of air.. HISS CRACK BOOOM! The woofers were really trying to loose their cones on that one! I took them back and bought some Warfdales instead. Nice speakers while they lasted.;)
Uhh... The low and top end are cut more in mp3 than wav. Less dynamic range on some tracks too (audio compression). Clarity suffers, although that could be equipment playback related in some of my experience. It all depends on how much the track was compressed initially. High compression sounds crap with small file size, but low compression sounds a whole lot better. Do you know what compresion of mp3 you were listening to?
By the way, I have a stack of scratched mp3 disks!
But your right. CDs (pressed), have survived extraordinarily well.
I think you fully miss the other meaning for "date". In some of the more civilized countries (like Australia), 'The Date' is another word for 'Arsehole * '
I must admit falling in lust with 99. Shows my age.
Don't forget that the whole premise was built on the early James Bond movies that also spawned James Coburn "In Like Flint" and Dean Martin's "The Silencers", but Get Smart beat them all by about a year I think.
I've got a better one. It's called "The Stinger Splash" 'The Stinger' was a WWF Wrestler. His trademark move was to dive and belly flop on his almost unconscious opponent.
So my wife is slouching on the couch, unaware of my intention... A run-up, then a scream then a Stinger Splash! Wham! A perfect Stinger Splash!
Slashdot Mirror
So is this party http://www.ldp.org.au/
lol That was very ept of you to notice!
I'm so gruntled now!
It depends if you can read 40,000 pages of Swedish legaleze.
And considering that Swedish is one of the most difficult languages to learn (according my my Swedish ex-girlfriend), you'll be up a yard-arm in no time!
Arrrgh!
I DO understand all that you have said. You've made that very clear and I thank you for your clarification.
My understanding now is to blame poor re-mixing for those early CDs that just don't come up to scratch to their vinyl equivalents.
Thanks again.
Star Trek vs Klingons on an IBM mainframe at uni in 1974
Beat that!
And I re-wrote it for the Vic 20 cause I could! ''
The Sony amp I had, did have the capability of switching the RIAA EQ out. I think it was there only to reproduce records that didn't have the RIAA curve cut into it, presumably early 78s, 16rpm, 'dictaphone records' and so on.
Now the higher end of the Hi-Fi consumers would want to listen to everything flat. No tone 'colouration'. All pre-amps would thus have circuitry on the phono to flatten or compensate the RIAA curve.
Now there must have been variations due to heat, age of circuitry, quality of components and circuit design on the mastering recording equipment as well as the playback amps to produce tonal variations?!
That fact alone would pretty much stuff up any hi-fi falutin' commentary at least of 'flat output'.
So to produce good vinyl and to listen to it, you would need reference mastering/cutting equipment and playback amp. But the masters records were made from were made to sound good on turntables, not on cds. Well said, doesn't make sense but I understand what you mean I think. In a studio using analog equipment, let's say 8 track, the resulting tape would contain 8 separate tracks, maybe with some overdubs. That master was downmixed to stereo by a recording engineer, mixer, producer or whoever.
Then the downmix was used to create the cut record master (with the EQ curve added) and it was cast to a master pressing and used until it wore out, making thousands of vinyl records.
Now I found this (just now) on Wikipedia, and I'm reluctant to quote this: The earliest days of the CD era found record companies using higher generation copies which they had used for vinyl and cassette or 8 track mastering to create their CDs, with frequently underwhelming results. An nth-generation tape equalized for vinyl frequency response might be deemed perfectly acceptable by a record company, as in the past most people buying records did not have state of the art hi-fi to notice the difference, and (importantly) might be much easier to locate than the "original" source master, and because of the value of the original master stated above. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remaster So I think that the early CDs that I've got that exhibit poor EQ is just that. However I would certainly notice a -40db lack of bass response, so some remastering must have occurred to compensate for the lack of an RIAA playback EQ. Yes, the "downmix" of lps and cds are different. They were often different even for different lp or cd pressings. How many versions of Dark Side of the Moon or Meddle or Animals have been released? lol Too many! I probably had 3 versions of Dark Side, including the Master version, but I gave them away as I just got sick of it.
I've got too much good music on vinyl that I just can't get rid of that I listen to on occassions, but I can't get rid of them cause they will never be released on CD.
Thanks
Just proves that the Americans aren't too original are they!
I would of liked to have seen Mr Crabtree in action!
Thank you for the post.
Annex Mexico. You guys need another star on the flag.
Revert all the spelling back to the Queen's English.
Adopt the Metric system.
Devalue the US$ by about 50%
Tell Conan O'Brien that he's better without his writers.
Dispose of the RIAA and MPAA.
Have a prosecutor on-hand at every Jerry Springer show. Some of the admissions made are criminal.
Rename all 'World Series' games to 'National Series'
Legalize Marijuana, euthanasia.
Remove the death penalty.
Nationalize Microsoft.
Free medical for those on Social Security.
Flat Federal Tax rate with no state taxes.
Remove export prohibitions based on greed.
Find Osama
Only prop planes for internal travel - no jets.
Limit fuel consumption to 10 litre per 100km cars immediately. (Approx 30 mpg US)
The President MUST HAVE a regular supply of interns selected by Hugh Hefner with culinary skills like peeling seedless grapes.
States to fix their own problems as I'm too busy being fed peeled, seedless grapes.
All other matters go to the Vice President.
So the other guy was wrong?
Taking the quality of the playback equipment out of this, the EQ differences heard between vinyl and CD of the same masters is due to bad pressings?
I've always preferred to listen to CD/vinyl flat. In fact prefer to listen with no EQ circuitry in the preamp at all.
Could it be that the downmix for CD and vinyl were different?
Geez! I know what you mean!
I never got that sort of imaging at home, and I heard some big Magnaplanars that tried to image, but just couldn't make it.
The very best I heard was an experimental setup by a guy called Tim Vandenberg in the late 70's. He got 2 radford monos, a Scottish turntable (Fons?), some submarine battery cable for the leads (no joke) and some modified AMW ported boxes of which he took the tweeters out and realigned them on bricks on the top of the cabinets so that the base of the cones were lined up with the woofers' cones. I don't remember the cartridge setup and he had a weird little white box (English brand Quad??) for a preamp. My memory fails me.
But the point of this is that he called me over one day to listen to his new setup.
He put on a 60's Western Swing album (Yippee Yi Yay!) and I swear that the backup singers were standing about 6ft behind the wall! I almost jumped out of my skin!
The actual image was much larger than possible for the width of the room and everything was crystal clear. To say I was stunned! The vocals and the guitar was astounding. Better than live. I couldn't say anything for a while afterwards.
I haven't heard anything like that since either! I reckon it was just know-how and the right bits of equipment. Pure magic.
Thanks for the regression!
Leak were good. :)
Mind you, I set up the turntable in the room next door. Double brick house, with internal brick walls. The Decca was built with a linen thread holding the diamond in place, so it tracked well. The problem with loud music and turntables was that anything too loud would vibrate the plinth of the turntable which was picked up by the cartridge. causing a mechanical feedback making the needle jump.
The JBL speaker cones probably travelled (in and out)at about an inch or so, trying to pop out of its voice coils! It was crazy!
By the time I took them back, they sounded a bit scratchy; the voice coils swollen, rubbing on the magnets.
I reckon if you would of tried the 30" Warfdales, it would have stuffed them!
Mind you, Warfdales were built for LOUD music!
Thank you very much for that. A suspicion that has been bugging me for years.
I had a Sony TA series amp that could switch out the RIAA curve (on phono only), so I couldn't experiment with a CD in the Aux input and didn't have the technical know how to get it to work properly through the phono inputs to try it out.
In particular, Japan's "Tin Drum" of which I only had a worn cassette copy of the vinyl, still sounded superb compared to the CD that I immediately bought as soon as I could lay my hands on it. The CD was a real disappointment.
Don't forget that the master tape is the zero-th generation.
:)
The vinyl and cd are both first generation.
You actually get a sense of realism when you listen to 78 recordings of blues around the 20's and 30s, especially the rare direct cuts.
In those early days, they would record via a megaphone directly cutting into the bakelite. Talk about realistic!
No-one has raised psycho-acoustics, or how analogue to analogue wave transmissions are heard as opposed to fractured wave forms.
Let's just say that analogue is more 'organic'
Have you got early Split Enz?
And you don't lose it when you hard drive crashes.
So is the RIAA EQ recorded off analog masters transferred onto a Cd as well? Or is the mix flat?
I ask because I've experienced really bad CD versions of vinyl records. Eg Lack of bass.
You're right.
Any physicist would agree that you cannot digitize an analogue waveform.
It's impossible to do.
It's like approaching the speed of light.
A digitized waveform is not an exact representation of the real waveform.
"Now try and tell the young ones that, and they won't believe you!"
Yup. I've got it. ;)
I ran it on a Rega Planar 3 turntable with a Decca cartridge (cranked up to 2.5 grams) into a Radford amp and (at the time), some JBL 55 speakers that I borrowed from the local hi-fi shop for a free "in home demo".
I took the covers off the JBL's, pointed them in my direction, sat on a bean bag about 8ft away, warmed the tubes and dropped the arm gently about 3 mins before the cannons.
BOOM! I felt the puffs of air from the enclosure ports about a sec after the sound -
BOOM! More puffs of air..
HISS CRACK BOOOM! The woofers were really trying to loose their cones on that one!
I took them back and bought some Warfdales instead. Nice speakers while they lasted.
Uhh...
The low and top end are cut more in mp3 than wav. Less dynamic range on some tracks too (audio compression). Clarity suffers, although that could be equipment playback related in some of my experience. It all depends on how much the track was compressed initially. High compression sounds crap with small file size, but low compression sounds a whole lot better.
Do you know what compresion of mp3 you were listening to?
By the way, I have a stack of scratched mp3 disks!
But your right. CDs (pressed), have survived extraordinarily well.
I think you fully miss the other meaning for "date".
In some of the more civilized countries (like Australia), 'The Date' is another word for 'Arsehole * '
I must admit falling in lust with 99.
Shows my age.
Don't forget that the whole premise was built on the early James Bond movies that also spawned James Coburn "In Like Flint" and Dean Martin's "The Silencers", but Get Smart beat them all by about a year I think.
Great sig and username!
LOL I Love that movie! Brilliant theme! The script! The Talent!!!!
John Smallberries! Pity there were no female berries in that lot.
Damn it that they didn't make the sequel!
The world is a poorer place....
Now I must go and watch "The Big Bus" to relive some more phantasies...
Every time my wife asks me to do something, I don't hear it.
Every time I ask her to do something, she doesn't hear me.
I've got a better one. It's called "The Stinger Splash"
'The Stinger' was a WWF Wrestler. His trademark move was to dive and belly flop on his almost unconscious opponent.
So my wife is slouching on the couch, unaware of my intention...
A run-up, then a scream then a Stinger Splash!
Wham! A perfect Stinger Splash!
Her response?
"Get off me you moron!"
lol
Hey! I'm using that pic as my desktop! :)