The Hidden Fidelity of Classic Albums

[EMRR]

On 11/7/2016 at 5:33 PM, Chris A said:

Woodstock unmastering curve from Deja Vu - (CSN&Y):

 

 

 

This one is interesting.  I can state that no one does this amount of equalization in a recording session, and definitely not in a mastering session.   It'd still be a real stretch to suggest half was done in the mix and the other half in the mastering, or 2/3 1/3.  At the time that record was made, there were hardly any EQ's available to studios that would make shapes like this, on average they made family broad curves.  Later remastering, for sure would be possible, but mastering does not make drastic moves like this suggests.  So I'm curious what the correction sounds like.  This honestly looks more like a room correction EQ setting in terms of extremity and narrowness of some of the processing points, possibly somewhat correction for the room it was recorded in.   Have you compared every iteration of the release to determine how the EQ has varied over time?  Some case studies like that would be interesting, and give us something more concrete to assess.   Maybe there are some in one of the other long threads?  

 

 

[EMRR]

Quote

I've found that most other CDs of that time period that were recorded using the exact same techniques used for producing vinyl disks, i.e., already reduced dynamic range due to signal compression being used during the recording process. In other words, the record giants systematically never used the advantages of the CD format.

 

Dragging this one over from the other thread.   Compression has been used as a purposeful effect in recording back into the '60's.  With analog tape machines lacking noise reduction (common), you have roughly 55dB S/N to work with and compression was used during recording to maximize that S/N.  Digital recording was not common until well into the '90's, long after the volume wars heated up, so there was no easy way for most to exploit the higher dynamic range.  Processes in any industry become informal standards and are carried forward.  Car radio is still the principal audio marketplace driver.  There was a short while that it looked like car audio might be the savior of surround sound for music, yet not enough players adopted it.  You have the rare cases like Steve Albini who work in rock music and refuse to compress anything, while making some great sounding recordings.  His thoughts have been well publicized for decades now, lauded, yet not made much impact.  If anything, heavy compression has become more common as more and more affordable compressors have hit the market.   A 1979 studio would not have a lot of outboard processing, a few select channels.   A lot of artists and engineers now expect to have a compressor available for every channel, and may compress the same sound multiple times before the mix occurs; the computer makes this easy to do.  In some cases it's the hallmark of a hack, in others some new creative breakthroughs are achieved.  It fatigues my mind and ears to think about or listen to much of such, but it is a reality I wouldn't begin know how to suggest countering in a broad cultural manner.   As someone who occasionally designs my own custom equipment and repairs/modifies pro audio for other engineers, I've noticed a new trend that every new engineer thinks any microphone preamp must be able to 'saturate' (distort), and thus needs both a gain control AND an output attenuator so you can turn back down that which you've turned up too much.  Many can't possibly believe anyone ever worked without this 'flexibility'.   It looks more like it's only going to get worse.  

[Chris A]

I invite you to read the threads that you've stated that you haven't read.  Understand that the Missing Octave thread and the Loudness War thread were both started with no prior information, especially the Missing Octave thread.  So there is a steep learning curve that you get to see in both of those threads.  I make no apologies for learning as I was going.  It happens to everyone, all the time...

 

If you don't wish to "waste your time" on reading those two threads, then you can skip forward to about one year ago (January 2016) on the Missing Octave thread to see the techniques a bit more refined and producing much more consistent results.  Another shift occurred when I inserted my new Xilica XP8080 having more biquads per input and output channel (thus replacing three other loudspeaker processors that I was using at that time) into the setup to further refine the lower bass frequencies.  I don't determine the shape of the demastering curves--rather the shapes that appear are constructed iteratively until the 1/f resulting curve (actually more like -5.5 dB/octave) is achieved (subject to musical orchestration/instrumentation differences of the recordings), and the spectrogram plot shows no systematic emphasis of any 1/3 or less octave bands laterally.  This technique works so well that someone needs to patent it and make money on it (...just joking of course...).

 

The 1/f target curve was found empirically, and the light really turned on when examining one of the more famous CDs made (MFSL UDCD 515 Steely Dan's Aja, remastered from the original mixes by Gary Katz--a well-known name in the business), and there is was on every track--big as Dallas (...a local colloquialism).

 

Doug, if you are wanting to hear any examples of this, then shoot me a PM, please, instead of arguing that "it can't work" and that it otherwise "can't be right".  That's fairly presumptuous without hearing them first, and actually appears to be unfriendly and contentious for a forum such as the Klipsch forum (i.e., not a professional mastering forum). 

 

In your particular case, I think it would be prudent for you to supply some sort of listening position FR+ phase plots for your room (10-20000 Hz), and perhaps polar plots.  I'll do the same in return so we can compare notes before starting your (clearly) professional auditioning process.

 

Chris

[Chris A]

One more thing--I invite you to post in those other threads as this one is really on a more specialized and limited subject related to the general audience that I've found in this forum so as not to completely bury the average reader in the depths of mastering practices and theory.  It's been difficult enough to spread the wealth of free information as is, so I'd like to keep this thread relatively unscathed by more and deeper technical jargon...if you don't mind terribly.

 

Chris

[EMRR]

I'm not at all saying or implying it can't work. Really, it's more of a case of speaking different languages and having different customs, making one sided observations in an attempt to share POV and get some feedback, bridge the gap if possible.  If anything, I'm suggesting it's possible you are creating a personal remix that serves your ears and systems, as much as 'correcting' anything mastering ever did.  Nothing wrong with that.  

 

Makes sense on thread veer.   I've started working through those.  

 

One bit in my lost post concerned room EQ.  I occasionally run IK Multimedia ARC2 room correction EQ.  It sounds incredibly weird, and if used has to be on for all of the session.  You can't turn it on and off without disorienting yourself.  It can't be used while recording because it's not something that can be placed inline as natural flow, and if flow was adjusted to do so, you'd still have system latency disturbing musician timing.  It's really only good for spot checks and mixing.  I tend to leave it off more than on these days, as a natural room sound interacting with personal knowledge of room translation generally serves better.   I don't believe I have plots available, as the setup process is automatic.   Studios generally seem to be split between those that use some sort of room correction EQ and tolerate the negative sonic aspects of the EQ, and those that don't in favor of a better sounding system which they have to drive through learned muscle memory (long process).  

 

I run Spectrafoo Complete for assessing input channel responses, particularly low frequency instruments, and keep a Dorrough loudness meter on the mix output.  Spectrafoo will let me take long response captures and compare plots, if testing equipment or comparing before/after from Mastering processing.  

 

One mastering process I see occasionally involves EQ attention to the key of the music, turning down the ranges most unused so as to emphasize the note values most predominate in the arrangement.  This is effective with rock and pop music in reducing mud and emphasizing immediacy/presence.   If you think about the curve of any piece with regards to key, you would expect to see hills and valleys in response.  As well the instrumentation and it's predominate harmonic spread will affect where energy lies.   The turning down tends to be in the sub-1dB range, 2dB would be a lot unless there's a significant problem to correct in a mix.   A few years ago I converted a broad curve Langevin program EQ from 2dB/step to 1dB/step for a mastering house that wanted tighter control.  After conversion it's greatest possible change was +/-6dB.   A lot of modern mastering EQ's have their range divided into 1/3rd dB steps with a fairly limited overall range.  

 

This may interest you, external link about the effects of phase rotation on clipped signals.  This in in a discussion about vinyl mastering equalizer design.  

http://www.proaudiodesignforum.com/forum/php/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=828&start=20#p10016

 

PM coming.  

 

[JohnA]

On 1/27/2017 at 0:18 PM, EMRR said:

................  If anything, I'm suggesting it's possible you are creating a personal remix that serves your ears and systems, as much as 'correcting' anything mastering ever did.  Nothing wrong with that.  

 

...................................

 

In my brief conversation with Chris, this is what I concluded.  I'm not sure what I think of his process.  If it could restore a recording to a more life-like representation of an original performance, I'm 100% in his corner.  Yet, no offense meant to Chris, it seems much like personal preference.  How can I say that the artist did not want it to sound squashed and stuffed in a bag?  If I don't like the recording whether it's the music or mis-mastering, it gets tossed.  One of my greatest disappointments was the Original Master Series version of Poco's "Legend".  I used to love it and had not heard in in a while.  When I got my Thorens 125 running again with an A-T OC9 and an Aragon phono preamp, it was one of the first LPs I pulled out.  How aweful!  Dull, heavily compressed, it sounded like Yanni!!!  While Sheffield's "I've Got The Music In Me" never sounded better and to this day I can never hear it loud enough or stop the chill bumps. 

 

I, too, am offended by overprocessed commercial garbage.  I usually end up with above average car audio and don't like it there, either. 

 

I have 2 bands I mix live sound for.  I HATE reverb, except on a few guitar riffs, but I am often forced to add it to many of the channels at the insistence of one or more band members.  Explaining that I want to try to present them as if they were playing without electricity has no weight.  And now, Mr. Reverb wants compression.    Some people just want an artificial sound. 

[Chris A]

1 hour ago, John Albright said:

If it could restore a recording to a more life-like representation of an original performance, I'm 100% in his corner.  Yet, no offense meant to Chris, it seems much like personal preference.  How can I say that the artist did not want it to sound squashed and stuffed in a bag? 

Clearly the results vary from album to album in terms of the difference in sound achieved.  But even the recordings that yield smaller differences in sound, I find that it's still worth it because the results far exceed any hardware tweaking that I've done in the signal chain. If I didn't hear a large difference--I wouldn't be writing about it and spending my time.  But like most skills of value in life, it takes a little practice/effort, but in this case it requires no money to achieve recordings that exceed all other versions.  As far as trying to decide whether or not you like the idea of this technique without first listening to the results, well...

 

In terms of calibrating the bass response (which many here do with a twist of a tone control or even perhaps switching out complete amplifiers having different output impedance), the process above yields outstanding results as compared to that practice--(...trust me on this...).  All phonograph recordings and CD recordings have attenuated bass below 50-100 Hz--it's just a matter of degree.  I've found that the bass attenuation varies widely on popular recordings...from track to track.  This technique corrects that issue and the problem disappears, never having to be dealt with again.

 

One of the prerequisites is that you've tuned your setup to have flat response and have done something about near-field reflections--which changes the timbre of the sound.  If someone hasn't taken the time to do this with their setup (...and I'm not suggesting you, John...) the benefits simply vanish.  It takes a fairly well calibrated setup and then the results are overwhelmingly obvious.  This says to me that the human hearing system appreciates flat frequency response in loudspeakers, rooms...and recordings. Not too much of a revelation, it seems.

 

I see a lot of angst that is apparent on "tweaking this and that" in everyone's setup--such as which kind of capacitor materials in passive crossovers, phonograph needles, cartridges, turntable platens,etc.  But when considering something like this subject with probably 10x or greater effect on the resulting sound, it seems that those individuals fall completely silent on the subject.  Perhaps it's the shock of realizing that their recordings aren't perfect...but that they can be significantly improved.  Maybe this is a bit of a cultural shock. 

 

Chris

 

[Chris A]

A comment that I haven't made to date: the notion that "flat frequency response sounds bad" I've found is incorrect.  Instead, what I've determined is that when you achieve flat frequency response on your system and room acoustics and it sounds bad, you're actually listening to the effects of mastering that has made good recordings sound bad.

 

...

 

I find that this discovery should be quite a surprise for those that have battled with house curves, tone controls, tube amplifiers, cartridges, preamps, etc., etc. to achieve passable sound quality.  My advice: look closely at the recordings themselves, because that's where you're going to find the issues.  The good news is that you can fix it (EDIT: ...even if you choose to demaster only one track--you can fix it)

 

Chris

[JohnA]

1 hour ago, Chris A said:

A comment that I haven't made to date: the notion that "flat frequency response sounds bad" I've found is incorrect.  Instead, what I've determined is that when you achieve flat frequency response on your system and room acoustics and it sounds bad, you're actually listening to the effects of mastering that has made good recordings sound bad.

................................

Chris

 

PTL!!!!!!  This is something I have been saying for YEARS!  Get your system right in your room and if a recording sounds bad, it's bad, toss it! 

I built a room in the basement of my previous house just for my music/HT system.  It had non-parallel walls and ceiling, lots of absorbents and some cut-outs that worked as diffusers.  My system was flat +/- 4 dB from 16 Hz to 14k+ Hz in that room.  I had no gear to measure reverb time, but it was short listening to hand claps.  The X begrudgingly admitted it sounded good and I reminded her there was no talking in my "Listening Room" and no standing waves allowed, either.    It was a great place for the boys to have their friends over to play video games, too.  I would secretly turn up the subs for them and endure the carping over dishes buzzing.  ROTFL! 

[Chris A]

John, by the way (and I apologize if it appears that I'm "piling on"--that isn't the aim), another point that might be of importance as you consider the entire process, consider the following on the subject of clarity:

 

 

[parlophone1]

I admit to be no expert on the subject, which brings me to much more investigatong job to be done, of course whithin my time limitations.

 

But i would have 1 album in my mind connected to the original post - Sgt. Peppers lonely heats club 50th anniversary temasteted by Giles Martin  (son of the original master engineer).

 

As probably known, the album was mastered originally in mono. This was the first time that original master tapes were drawn up from the drawers to do it properly in stereo. 

 

I had the privilege to hear the first release in mono (from '67 release) and bouht this new one in stereo. Won't describe my opinions here as I found myself unadeqate with wording, but the difeerencies are audible, and in my opinion both versions are worthwile to own ( unfortunately it is hard to acqire the original monp album on LP). 

 

What about this perspective?

 

 

[Chris A]

So you're referring to the sound of different commercial releases or versions of the same recordings?  And I assume that you are interested in comparing these versions via subjective preference?  This is clearly a pastime by album collectors, especially phonograph records, etc.  and is something that you'll find in places like Steve Hoffman or even Discogs--those that are discussing the differences between released commercial versions.  [This is also the realm of the original Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab (MFSL) re-masters from the original master tapes.]  I've found that some versions (not demastered) sound significantly better than other versions. However, that's not really the focus of the subject of this thread.

 

One of the reasons for demastering recordings is that you can recover some of the original timbre and clarity of the mixdown tracks (2-channel...or 1-channel in the case of mono) instead of having to acquire multiple versions--sometimes at great cost and with typically very poor availability--sort of like collectors of things that are seen to be rare--and sort among them to find those that you like and dislike.  Oftentimes the differences between these versions are minimal in practice. 

 

The advantage of demastering is that you can get the maximum possible out of the recorded versions that you already own, and sometimes (especially in the case of The Beatles) you get to hear things that no version that I've heard before has revealed, i.e., the cello/viola/violin "baroque pop" accompaniments by George Martin suddenly come to life--sounding like cellos/violas/violins instead of something quite different.  Same thing for the wind instrument solis by Martin, etc., and you get to hear Paul McCartney's bass and Ringo's kick bass drum--instead of the second harmonics only of the bass and the higher harmonics of the kick drum that are apparent in the original commercial releases...due to pretty extreme bass attenuation used during that era.

 

If you like Beatles recordings, I highly recommend the demastered versions to hear those instruments and voices that were actually disguised for radio playback 50 years ago.  I think you'd be extremely impressed by what you hear.  Since my wife is a avid Beatles fan from her youth, many of those demastered recordings brought tears to her eyes...because she could hear things in those recordings that she'd never heard before. 

 

If you're interested in that sort of thing, send me a PM.

 

Chris

[Khornukopia]

I was going to ask your thoughts on the MFSL albums in general, but see that you addressed that in your most recent post.