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List great songs that sound lousy on a good system.


Honeybadger

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13 minutes ago, Honeybadger said:

Dire Straits self title album is the same story, Sultans sound horrid, but the Lp is quite good.

 

When Sultans plays on the radio, sounds much better than my cd. I assume the radio stations eq as well.

 

HB

Oh yea! Stations love to turn up the LF to make car stereos sound......well....better.

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On 10/2/2016 at 1:46 PM, teaman said:

I think any of the original releases of Led Zeppelin on cd suck. Great music of course but so much horrible tape hiss on the original recordings. The latest remastered offerings however sound much better. -Tim

 

I Hate tape hiss.  Capital "H."  :angry:  At one time I was copying albums to mp3.  You can use the software to completely eliminate tape hiss automatically.

 

Bliss.  :)

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3 minutes ago, Mighty Favog said:
15 minutes ago, wvu80 said:

 

Remember when dbx was supposed to fix that! ☺

 

Oh yes, Dolby as well.  It killed all the highs, made everything sound lifeless and dull.

 

CD's for all their deficits, got rid of the hiss.  Wow and flutter, too.

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On 10/2/2016 at 3:23 AM, Chris A said:

 

Recalling other CDs that sound pretty awful as-received:

 

Songs From the Big Chair by Tears for Fears

Beatles albums (really strident and odd mastering EQ that's applied)

The Who's greatest hits

The Rolling Stone's greatest hits

Journey's greatest hits

The Moody Blues' greatest hits

Creedence Clearwater Revival's greatest hits

Genesis eponymous album (1983)

Selling England by the Pound by Genesis (virtually all Genesis albums are very strident...)

38 Special's greatest hits

Bachman-Turner Overdrive's greatest hits

The Electric Light Orchestra's greatest hits

Supernatural by Carlos Santana

Heart's greatest hits

American Beauty and Live/Dead by the Grateful Dead

Night Moves by Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band

 

I could go on...but you get the picture.  The above is just the rock genre but there are many more examples from jazz, movie soundtracks, classical recordings, etc.

 

Chris

 

Talk about a "who's who" of good songs that sound like krap!  I have all of these except the Tears for Fears.  Did you have much luck with these? 

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Yes, in widely varying degrees. 

 

The Beatles albums all turned out good to excellent.

 

The Who's greatest hits turned out so-so.

 

The Rolling Stones turned out better, but the lower fidelity of the recordings are still very apparent.  The stridency and lack of bass were corrected.

 

Journey's hits were a bit difficult to balance with fidelity (IIRC), but I unmastered those tracks early in 2015, so it may be easier to get better results now if I try again.  These tracks were on the edge between listenable and unlistenable, even after unmastering.

 

The Moody Blues turned out good and excellent, respectively, based on the year of original release of the song.  Earlier tracks have significantly lower fidelity and harshness, later tracks are much better.

 

CCW turned out okay: all of their tracks from the early 1970s were extremely strident and tended toward lower fidelity.

 

Genesis/Genesis turned out to be outstanding.  This was always a difficult album to listen to from the standpoint of harshness.  Now, it sounds really good and "musical" throughout, with no harshness and good balance.

 

Selling England by the Pound didn't turn out very well--it's still flat and a bit uninteresting (but I find that album to be less than thrilling relative to the earlier and later albums).  That's on my queue of "do again's" since I did that one early in 2015.

 

38 Special's greatest hits is very good, although I tinkered with each track over the span of about a month to get them all pretty much on listenable (it was truly awful when I started).  I listen to that album about every other week or so--lots of times since I unmastered it.

 

BTO is okay, but I really don't listen to them to be honest.  This was two CDs, and there were many tracks that I didn't care for.

 

ELO turned out much better than I though it would, but it is still far from being "hi-fi".  I can listen to the whole album now without hearing any stridency, and the bass is solid (something missing completely on the CD). 

 

Supernatural turned out really good, but the tracks are still highly compressed, so I don't listen as much as I would if the tracks were in the range of "12" on the DR rating scale.  The compression used (versus the limiting/clipping) creates listening fatigue after a few tracks: that's permanent.  But there are a few outstanding numbers on this album that are great to listen to.

 

EDIT: Supernatural turned out to be "13" on the DR rating scale, with some tracks scoring "15", but even those scores don't tell the whole story of the amount of compression that was used.

 

Heart's greatest hits were really bad as-received, so I've got a second or third update planned for the finishing touches.  All of Heart's albums I find to be quite difficult to listen to--even the phonograph records.  It's really nice to listen to now, without the music going for your jugular...like it did before.

 

I'm not really a grateful Dead fan, but the change in listenability of the two above-mentioned albums went up considerably after unmastering.  If I liked their music more, I'd be listening to the unmastered tracks more.  I got these two albums because Mark F. (mark1101) is such a fan, and I've never really tried listening to GD before.

 

The Night Moves CD by Seger is still very entertaining and brings back a lot of memories from dorm life in the 1970s.  Listening to it now no longer requires a middle-ear blood donation now.  I really like listening to it when the spirit of the occasion allows (I'm not your died-in-the-wool rock fan...I'm more of a classical/jazz/folk type of listener nowadays.)

 

Chris

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One thing that I should mention:  most of the above albums were known issues when I started unmastering in January 2015, and I focused on fixing those albums first, before learning all that I have learned about unmastering up to the present.  So many of these "problem child" albums aren't up to the standards that I expect them to be if I unmastered them today. 

 

I've gone back and redone a few of the first albums that I unmastered, but so far the number of albums that I've updated is probably less than 50.  I'm still focusing on unmastering all of my CDs for the first time, and going back to revisit these early albums dilutes that effort. 

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On ‎10‎/‎3‎/‎2016 at 7:57 PM, Chris A said:

 

Chris, thank for the music demo.

When I heard it at work, I thought is sounded flat and uninvolving, so I tried it at home, the results didn't vary much.

I then listened to the painful re-mastered version and gained some respect for what you are doing.

Finally I played my original vinyl white album and by comparison, your un mastered version is much closer to the original.

 

How much music has been clipped and unrecoverable from the re-mastered disk?

 

HB

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9 hours ago, Honeybadger said:

When I heard it at work, I thought is sounded flat and uninvolving, so I tried it at home, the results didn't vary much.

I then listened to the painful re-mastered version and gained some respect for what you are doing.  Finally I played my original vinyl white album and by comparison, your unmastered version is much closer to the original.

 

One characteristic of the best recordings that I own: they all sound rather dull when played back at lower SPLs.  It's the "mastering EQ" that oftentimes cranks in large amounts of high frequency SPL--for those that typically only play their music back below about 70-80 dBC.  But it's way too strident at higher volumes.  See the origin of the "loudness" button found on older preamplifiers.

 

I learned about this when I was looking at the MFSL tracks for Steely Dan's Aja: they sound fairly uninvolving, but turn it up and they "come to life".  These were the tracks that clearly showed the target plot-spectrum curves were very much straight and descending in SPL with increasing frequency.  Here is the plot-spectrum view from Audacity for the title track, Aja, that revealed this most important insight.  When I saw this curve and listened to the track at volumes above and below 80 dBC, I found that the best tracks sounded dull at lower volumes below 70-80 dBC, and truly spectacular above those levels:

 

Aja - plot spectrum view.GIF

 

 

Note that the CD version that I used for the Martha My Dear track was Parlophone CDP 7 46443 2, which isn't advertised as "remastered".  The following equalization curve is close to the one that I applied to the Martha My Dear track...which it isn't subtle at all:

 

White Album EQ curve.GIF

 

_________________________________________________________________________________

 

I've found that correcting my setup of the following two issues brings me significantly greater enjoyment and a sense of realism in listening to music played on it.  In order to hear the difference between the unmastered and released CD (or vinyl) versions, the following must be true:

 

1) There should be no bass boost applied above ~70 Hz: CD or vinyl versions (above the RIAA curve)...especially the vinyl.   I've found that many vinyl enthusiasts effectively use mid-bass and bass boost--usually without knowing it or measuring it end-to-end using an up-sweep from a test record and an audio measurement tool--such as REW with calibration microphone. This is required to show show overall end-to-end phono response.

 

2) There should be very flat response in the 100-200 Hz region...the region where most Klipsch Heritage loudspeakers usually have 3-12 dB of peaking SPL response.  Uneven response in this band is due to the truncated horn mouth sizes of the K-horn, Jubilee, La Scala or Belle, which produces peaks and dips in response. In the direct-radiating versions of Heritage loudspeakers (Cornwall, Heresy), most of the issues with uneven 100-200 Hz response is due to room acoustics and loudspeaker placement.  I've corrected these issues because I've found that they will significantly distort the listening experience: human listening sensitivity in this band (70-200 Hz) is well within 3 dB. 

 

The Martha My Dear track is one of thousands that I've unmastered, most of which display significantly more sound improvement than the above track: the hi-fi state of Beatles tracks is typically not very good. 

 

Chris

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11 hours ago, Honeybadger said:

How much music has been clipped and unrecoverable from the re-mastered disk?

 

As I mentioned above, I didn't use a "remastered" version for this track but rather a 1994 Parlophone release before heavy-handed "remastering" (compression and clipping) practices began to become the norm.

 

In general, all music tracks are EQed to significantly attenuate bass and to partially or fully accentuate frequencies above 1 kHz. All of them.  Since 1991, the percentage of recordings that also have significant clipping is quite high - probably in the 95-99% range. 

 

One other observation: all music tracks have compression that has been used to some degree.  In the best tracks, it's only used sparingly.  In most popular music tracks available today, the amount of compression used is on the order of 20-25 dB, resulting in tracks with less than 10 dB of dynamic range (crest factor)--and sometimes even less than 6 dB, where the original tracks before compression had over 30 db of dynamic range.

 

Chris

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7 hours ago, Chris A said:

There should be very flat response in the 100-200 Hz region...the region where most Klipsch Heritage loudspeakers usually have 3-12 dB of peaking SPL response.  Uneven response in this band is due to the truncated horn mouth sizes of the K-horn, Jubilee, La Scala or Belle, which produces peaks and dips in response

In the SPL vs Frequency graphs I've seen, presumably done in the Klipsch revolving door anechoic chamber, both the AK4 and the AK5 upgrades of the K-horn show an overall midline elevation for the frequencies between 100 and 400 Hz of about 2.5 dB above the midline SPL of the frequencies from 400 on up to he top.  The peak/trough from 100 to 200 is about 3.75 dB.

 

In my room, Audyssey reduces the peaks, and fixes a couple of dips elsewhere, at least at the main listening position.  I haven't had the energy to try replicating Audyssey's 8 mic positions with REW, and then that would only produce an average, rather than Audyssey's "fuzzy logic" assessment of the overall listening area.  Classical and Jazz tend to sound good with a few clinkers, and a few that are excellent; the little Rock and Metal I listen to tend to sound crappy.  Blu-ray movies tend to sound very good to excellent.  Do movie people tend to master without ruining the music?  I ran the movie The Commitments last night and the band sounded fine at near reference level.

 

7 hours ago, Chris A said:

In general, all music tracks are EQed to significantly attenuate bass and to partially or fully accentuate frequencies above 1 kHz. All of them.  Since 1991, the percentage of recordings that also have significant clipping is quite high - probably in the 95-99% range. 

 

I still can't fathom why they do that!  The driving beat was such an important aspect of music at the old Fillmore, Winterland, and even in Provo Park or Golden Gate Park.  Why would they want to remove it?  

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2 minutes ago, garyrc said:

Why would they want to remove it?

That's fairly clear what the intent is: to make the overall loudness of the recording even louder.

 

There is some BS (the formal definition of the term) that I read about "how the recording companies are concerned about devices that can't reproduce low frequencies" (if that were true, the loudspeaker manufacturers would build-in high pass filters to "protect" their woofers). 

 

The truth is that the industry has been trying to make their recordings louder from the very beginning of recorded music, way before CDs and even 33 RPM LPs.

 

9 minutes ago, garyrc said:

The peak/trough from 100 to 200 is about 3.75 dB.

Yes, but that's anechoic.  When you get to a real room that's not anechoic at those frequencies, it typically gets quite a bit worse in my experience.  It also gets more complicated with the problems of direct vs. near-field reflected energy in the midbass region.

 

I've seen plots where Khorns and Jubs have a fair amount of 100-250 Hz peaks in real rooms--some quite large. PWK pointed out that it's the one thing that can be fixed (implying that the other forms of distortion experienced by direct-radiating loudspeaker drivers, not the least of which is modulation distortion, cannot be corrected). 

 

Chris

 

 

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