[ Post a Response | The MusicWeb Message Board ]
CELEBRATING 20,000 Classical CD reviews on-line; 21,000 visitors each day.
Return to MusicWeb International
Posted by Paul Serotsky on March 27, 2006, 8:54 pm, in reply to "Re: Good Old Recordings" Neither do I miss the inevitable arrival, in spite of my best efforts, of "snap, crackle and pop" the second time a new LP went onto the turntable. I found that caring for LPs tended to be more time-consuming than listening to them. Oddly enough, now that digital sound carriers have consigned surface noise to its proper place (i.e. the dustbin), I find that I am much more tolerant of "noisy" LPs, I suppose in much the same way that I tolerated hissy 78s in the hey-days of LP. In response to Hal's comments: This "dot-to-dot" argument seems very strange. Why should the hard storage of numbers "fall apart"? At what point will digital media players, in the inscrutible wisdom of their electronic circuitry, decide to down tools and go on strike? Let's be fair. All reproduction systems comprise two components, a "recording" that stores the information and a "player" that extracts it into a usable form. The desired properties of the "recording" medium can be summed up as: it must preserve the information it contains. In my lengthy (too lengthy!) experience of both analogue and digital media, it is the former that have turned out (N.B. past tense), in this respect, to be the less reliable and robust - and by some considerable margin. It is worth noting that, in combination with the "player", a digital recording is just as much a "sine wave medium" as any analogue medium, in that it is capable of reproducing exactly the analogue signal that originally went in. I would be VERY circumspect in suggesting that people should dub their CDs onto analogue videotape - which is not only fragile and prone to shedding ("flaking") of its ageing magnetic material, but also played by the most complicated machinery of all, and moreover machinery that handles the fragile medium in a manner so singularly violent that by comparison the compact cassette is positively cossetted. Proportionately speaking, over the years I have discarded more VCR tapes through sheer wear and tear than all the other recorded media types put together. On the matter of "digital" vs. "analogue" sound, I have a couple of personal experiences that might be of interest. Firstly, not long after I got my first CD player, I happened on Michael Dutton's CD remastering of the old Pye recording of the Khachaturian Piano Concerto (Katz/LPO/Boult). I'd owned a copy of the LP for nigh on twenty years, and it was getting pretty worn, which should have scraped away quite a bit of its higher frequency information. I imagined that this would make it an ideal candidate for A/B comparison, to see if I could spot any of this (then) much-publicised "digital edge" in the CD sound. So, I fed LP and CD directly into my little mixer, carefully adjusted the faders to equalise the maximum playback volumes, then set the two going together. To my astonishment, I found that much the smoother, warmer, rounder sound was coming, not from the LP, but from the CD! Moreover, the CD sounded much less strident than I recalled the LP ever sounding, even before my love of its contents had caused any inroads into the condition of the groove. Secondly, a couple of years later, I got a copy of the CD remastering of the Barbirolli Mahler Fifth, at least partly because I had heard that Andrew Keener had cunningly restored several bars of solo horn, missing from the original LP issue due to a wrong "take" being incorporated at the editing stage. Now, I had always found the LP sound very satisfying, with a wide but well-filled stereo sound-stage. When I played the CD, what did I hear through my headphones? It sounded like one bunch of instruments ON the right, another ON the left, a third (the woodwind) IN the middle, and in between the pairs of bunches just, well, a lot of air! I was, to say the least, perplexed. I tried the LP, and there was the "full" sound-stage, exactly as I remembered it! Out came the mixer, and on with another A/B comparison. This soon showed that ALL the instruments on the CD were in exactly the same places that they occupied on the LP. The difference was that on the LP the "air" was filled with what I can only describe as "mush", and this "mush" gave the ILLUSION (for that is all that it was) of orchestral presence. Yet, again, in all other respects the CD's reproduction of the instrumental sound per se was smoother, warmer and rounder! These two experiences - since confirmed by other, similar tests - confirmed that the only inherent fault with "CD sound" is that it is too "clean" - for some reason we humans, or at least a certain subset of us, seem to insist on a bit of "mush" in our daily aural diet! Because these comparisons involved only remastered analogue material, it follows that any perceived "digital edge" must be a consequence, not of the "dot-to-dot" system itself, but of the techniques of microphony and editing used when making recordings. In other words, there's nothing wrong with the technology and we must look, for the causes of these problems, to the ARTISTRY brought to bear on its application. In all probability, this is what lies behind Dave's observation.
80.229.144.169
To Don I would say this:
Message Thread:
« Back to thread
Thank you for using the MusicWeb Message Board.
Len Mullenger - Founder of MusicWeb