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Posted by Phil on February 7, 2005, 3:01 pm |
Posted by Don Satz on March 20, 2006, 5:58 pm, in reply to "Good Old Recordings" Actually, the LP vs. CD issue is a moot one since new recordings are not issued on LP. I've discarded my turntables and related equipment without any regrets.
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Posted by Marc Bridle on March 29, 2006, 1:42 pm, in reply to "Re: Good Old Recordings" |
Posted by David Lee on March 20, 2006, 1:15 am, in reply to "Good Old Recordings" |
Posted by Hal Evans on March 21, 2006, 2:52 am, in reply to "Re: Good Old Recordings" |
Posted by Jim Stephens on July 22, 2006, 5:51 pm, in reply to "Re: Good Old Recordings" |
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.
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Posted by Kevin Sutton on April 16, 2006, 10:45 pm, in reply to "Re: Good Old Recordings" Call me silly. Call me nostalgic. Call me a moron, I don't care. I love my records. Archivists still state that vinyl records are the most stable form of storage around, so long may they live. Kevin
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Posted by Paul Serotsky on April 19, 2006, 10:28 pm, in reply to "Re: Good Old Recordings" The former refers to how long the medium can sit on the shelf without "rotting" (and hence losing information), whilst the latter refers to how well the medium stands up to repeated use without becoming worn (and hence losing information).
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Posted by Paul Serotsky on April 19, 2006, 10:20 pm, in reply to "Re: Good Old Recordings" I dread the day, the day that shall surely come, when all music is contained on memory cards. It's not the memory cards I dread (let's face it, a replay medium with no moving parts is an excellent idea), but the thought that all music will be imprisoned by that awful MP3 compression system, the "VHS" to ATRAC's "Betamax"!
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Posted by Kevin Sutton on April 23, 2006, 7:31 am, in reply to "Re: Good Old Recordings" When I walk into a home and see a fabulous library, or a great china collection, or anything of the sort, I know that I am in the presence of one who thinks, one who takes time to become learned about something. I don't ever want, as much as I love electronic media, to do without those things that sit on shelves for me to take down and enjoy, As for the surface noise....oh who cares. Jazz sounds better with a pop and a tick!
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Posted by Jacquie Huffman-Krisza on June 9, 2006, 7:48 pm, in reply to "Re: Good Old Recordings" |
Posted by jerry on November 1, 2006, 5:56 pm, in reply to "Re: Good Old Recordings" |
Posted by C C Watson on September 11, 2006, 2:54 pm, in reply to "Re: Good Old Recordings" Do you have any for sale?
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