Can anyone explain the vinyl renaissance?

[restorer-john]

I wonder about this. I've heard it for so long. That some early CDs were from a vinyl master. I'm not saying it never happened, but I think it must have been not the norm. I've not run across any early CDs that sound like it was for vinyl. At one time way back I got several friends together and we listened to RTR, CD and LP of the same recordings. RTR and CD were pretty much the same, and every LP was obviously different. We did it over time on three different home systems. Made us think the RTR and CD were from the same master. LP just was colored and couldn't match either of the others.

Exactly. It's a mostly oft-repeated internet myth. They seem to forget about RTR, broadcast RTR, cassette- all of which existed before CD. Cassette was the number one format prior to the introduction of CD, not LP.

 

[Blumlein 88]

Exactly. It's a mostly oft-repeated internet myth. They seem to forget about RTR, broadcast RTR, cassette- all of which existed before CD. Cassette was the number one format prior to the introduction of CD, not LP.

Yes, cassette sold in the largest numbers for a long time. Plus many popular albums came out for a second time once cassette became mainstream. Along with any new music to cassette obviously not being for vinyl. Yet we never heard how they only kept a vinyl master and just used it for cassette.

 

[Leporello]

The biggest myth seems to be that the sound of early cds was bad due to technical problems with early ad conversion. The problem is that specific examples are never given even when requested.

 

[Blumlein 88]

The biggest myth seems to be that the sound of early cds was bad due to technical problems with early ad conversion. The problem is that specific examples are never given even when requested.

The Sony PCM-1630 For Master Recordings

The Sony PCM-1630 audio processors were widely used for the production and mastering of many of the first CDs in the early 1980s.

www.vintagedigital.com.au

Sony PCM-F 1 | hifi-wiki.com

hifi-wiki.com

Specs don't seem too shabby on these earliest 16 bit AD/DA machines.

JGH of Stereophile had a non-conformist attitude about them. As in they were better than any recording medium ever available in prior times. This was in 1982 remember.

Sony PCM F1 Digital Audio Converter

In 1978, when I reviewed Sony's first audiophile-type PCM-1 converter, I earned the undying scorn of a large segment of audiophilia by reporting that, on the basis of a rather short testing period (which did however include some live recording), I was unable to hear anything the matter with its...

www.stereophile.com

Here is a snippet of his opinion after using one.

"Much of the widespread criticism of digital recording compares it, unfavorably, with analog tape and Direct-to-Disc analog. Analog does this, digital fails to, etc, etc, etc. So, I reason, if analog is capturing things that digital is losing (or distorting), those fidelity losses should be audible when digital is used to copy one of those fabulous analog recordings, and the analog original is used to compare the digital copy.

Those of you who are already shaking your head in disagreement are urged to try for a moment to think with that head. This is an exercise in the simplest form of logic: If analog recording X retains A, B, and C, and digital recording Y reduces or eliminates A, B and C, then digital copy Y of analog original X should have less A, B and C than does X. If you can fault that reasoning, you weren't paying attention. Re-read the preceding until you can accept its truth, or go get your fortune told!"

"Well, it turned out that Y was indistinguishable from X in virtually every instance! No loss of ambience, no distortion of musical timbres, no loss of "air" at the high end."

"In other words, the PCM-Fl is the ultimate copying machine. You can feed it signal from any tape or disc and get back what is for all intents and purposes a perfect replica of it."

 

[Galliardist]

I get the impression that the survey was limited to vinyl collectors. Let's face it, collectors are usually so biased, about the thing they are collecting, that they wouldn't entertain suggestions that the thing being collected doesn't do its job very well.

The reported result, of 15% disagreeing that vinyl sounds best, sounds suspiciously high.

Bias automatically creates ill-informed opinions.

I'm not sure that it was limited to vinyl collectors, but certainly the method used to find survey respondents was biased towards certain dealers who have collectors as their customers. It doesn't make the paper completely useless, though: It just confirms a part of the story rather than all. Maybe a wider ranging PhD thesis is in the offing.

 

[Zog]

The biggest myth seems to be that the sound of early cds was bad due to technical problems with early ad conversion. The problem is that specific examples are never given even when requested.

Two good examples are (1) Sibelius Violin Concerto with Dylana Jenssen and Ormandy with the Philadelphia Orch - RCA; and (2) Le Sacre with Abbaddo conducting the LPO on DG. The CDs were just disappointing. Even dynamics where one would expect better punch.

 

[Galliardist]

Toole has described the situation when CD first came along, that a distressingly large amount of studios had only kept the so-called Vinyl Master of albums, so, when it was decided to re-release the album on CD, that was all they had to work with!

They were dreadful because they were vinyl masters, not because the copying (A/D digitising) was dreadful. It's a myth that early A/D conversion for CD was audibly problematic.

This keeps on surfacing. A couple of concrete examples would be nice to have listed. I have one or two CDs of 1970s albums that are candidates - for example the self-titled LP by Jan Akkerman, which sounds terrible on both formats, by the way. However, I've always felt rather that the problem discs came from early attempts that tried and failed to make the CD sound like the vinyl using a straight master.

I also suspect that some masters of British albums transferred to CD in the Netherlands were from copy masters.

 

[Galliardist]

Two good examples are (1) Sibelius Violin Concerto with Dylana Jenssen and Ormandy with the Philadelphia Orch - RCA; and (2) Le Sacre with Abbaddo conducting the LPO on DG. The CDs were just disappointing. Even dynamics where one would expect better punch.

Poor conversion may have nothing to do with the ADC though. After all, we never get poor conversions from analogue masters with more modern remasters, do we?

 

[Blumlein 88]

This keeps on surfacing. A couple of concrete examples would be nice to have listed. I have one or two CDs of 1970s albums that are candidates - for example the self-titled LP by Jan Akkerman, which sounds terrible on both formats, by the way. However, I've always felt rather that the problem discs came from early attempts that tried and failed to make the CD sound like the vinyl using a straight master.

I also suspect that some masters of British albums transferred to CD in the Netherlands were from copy masters.

See you are thinking the people doing this at the time considered vinyl the reference. They didn't. RTR, especially high speed RTR was the reference. If CD could sound like a perfect copy of the RTR mix, that was what they wanted. Vinyl and making something sound like vinyl would not have entered their mind at all. If someone at the time had asked them about making it sound like vinyl they would have been dumbfounded as to why you would do that.

 

[Blumlein 88]

Two good examples are (1) Sibelius Violin Concerto with Dylana Jenssen and Ormandy with the Philadelphia Orch - RCA; and (2) Le Sacre with Abbaddo conducting the LPO on DG. The CDs were just disappointing. Even dynamics where one would expect better punch.

A little compression was often needed to fit recordings like that to LP. Counter-intuitively a little compression sounds more dynamic than not having it. A CD straight from tape without compression would sound perhaps less punchy as a result.

 

[copperblue]

This keeps on surfacing. A couple of concrete examples would be nice to have listed. I have one or two CDs of 1970s albums that are candidates - for example the self-titled LP by Jan Akkerman, which sounds terrible on both formats, by the way. However, I've always felt rather that the problem discs came from early attempts that tried and failed to make the CD sound like the vinyl using a straight master.

I also suspect that some masters of British albums transferred to CD in the Netherlands were from copy masters.

The original CD release of Fleetwood Mac's Then Play On contained the running order of the (shorter) US version - the UK version is the Canonical one. Also it was sourced from an utterly terrible copy master with clearly audible tape hiss and saturation (analogue tape) distortion.
The current reissue of this has all the above fixed - original tape master, restored with sympathetic dynamic range (not brick walled), UK version sequencing with extra material added on the end.

 

[Leporello]

Two good examples are (1) Sibelius Violin Concerto with Dylana Jenssen and Ormandy with the Philadelphia Orch - RCA; and (2) Le Sacre with Abbaddo conducting the LPO on DG. The CDs were just disappointing. Even dynamics where one would expect better punch.

Sure, those may be bad sounding. But there have always been better and worse sounding recordings. There still are. On the other hand there are many great sounding digital recordings from the early digital era. How do we know that the bad sound of your examples results from bad ad conversion?

 

[Galliardist]

See you are thinking the people doing this at the time considered vinyl the reference. They didn't. RTR, especially high speed RTR was the reference. If CD could sound like a perfect copy of the RTR mix, that was what they wanted. Vinyl and making something sound like vinyl would not have entered their mind at all. If someone at the time had asked them about making it sound like vinyl they would have been dumbfounded as to why you would do that.

I've looked for evidence either way for this and never found anything really useful outside of the classical space (where your comments seem to hold - the master is mildly domesticated with compression because, well, who does really want a full on orchestral recording in their living room - but otherwise a straight transfer. There are some documented exceptions IIRC - weren't some of the Mercury Living Presence CDs balanced for a system a long way from neutral?

I'm thinking more though of rock albums created in the studio, where this could be a matter of fashion then as now. What mastering engineer doesn't think they can improve the sound, and I'm sure it was the same forty years ago. I do believe though that some of the modern remasters that are so heavily decried these days are actually closer to the original recordings, though to know you would have to have the original tape, as it was at the time of the first CD release before deterioration, or an actual straight copy of the original two track master.

Maybe someone around here has just that and could elucidate.

 

[Robin L]

I've looked for evidence either way for this and never found anything really useful outside of the classical space (where your comments seem to hold - the master is mildly domesticated with compression because, well, who does really want a full on orchestral recording in their living room - but otherwise a straight transfer. There are some documented exceptions IIRC - weren't some of the Mercury Living Presence CDs balanced for a system a long way from neutral?

I'm thinking more though of rock albums created in the studio, where this could be a matter of fashion then as now. What mastering engineer doesn't think they can improve the sound, and I'm sure it was the same forty years ago. I do believe though that some of the modern remasters that are so heavily decried these days are actually closer to the original recordings, though to know you would have to have the original tape, as it was at the time of the first CD release before deterioration, or an actual straight copy of the original two track master.

Maybe someone around here has just that and could elucidate.

The best example I can think of are the Simon and Garfunkel albums in their first CD incarnation. All five of their albums ended up in a three CD set the first time around, with noticeably lackluster sonics. Turns out Sony/Columbia used copies of copies of tapes (the first tapes they could find) so these were third generation copies. Later transfers of Simon and Garfunkel sounded noticeably better. I think this also applied to other Pop titles, so some of the other early CDs were transferred from less-than-ideal work parts.

 

[Blumlein 88]

I've looked for evidence either way for this and never found anything really useful outside of the classical space (where your comments seem to hold - the master is mildly domesticated with compression because, well, who does really want a full on orchestral recording in their living room - but otherwise a straight transfer. There are some documented exceptions IIRC - weren't some of the Mercury Living Presence CDs balanced for a system a long way from neutral?

I'm thinking more though of rock albums created in the studio, where this could be a matter of fashion then as now. What mastering engineer doesn't think they can improve the sound, and I'm sure it was the same forty years ago. I do believe though that some of the modern remasters that are so heavily decried these days are actually closer to the original recordings, though to know you would have to have the original tape, as it was at the time of the first CD release before deterioration, or an actual straight copy of the original two track master.

Maybe someone around here has just that and could elucidate.

Well later you get remastered releases. At the dawn of CD they weren't remastered. CD was a goldmine just after its commercial release. So get everything out and quickly was the idea. Grab your best available straight master tape or closest copy and get it out the door.

 

[krabapple]

I wonder about this. I've heard it for so long. That some early CDs were from a vinyl master. I'm not saying it never happened, but I think it must have been not the norm. I've not run across any early CDs that sound like it was for vinyl. At one time way back I got several friends together and we listened to RTR, CD and LP of the same recordings. RTR and CD were pretty much the same, and every LP was obviously different. We did it over time on three different home systems. Made us think the RTR and CD were from the same master. LP just was colored and couldn't match either of the others.

If you were a devoted ICE magazine reader back inthe 80s and 90s, you'll recall this as a common explanation given by record company spokespeople for why they were issuing remasters.

I would expect an LP production master tape, if transferred flat, to sound identical to a CD made from it. But not necessarily to an LP made from it, because physically transferring a signal on tape onto a metal-then-plastic disc and playing it back with a needle/cart/TT is going to involve greater loss than digitization.

 

[krabapple]

See you are thinking the people doing this at the time considered vinyl the reference. They didn't. RTR, especially high speed RTR was the reference. If CD could sound like a perfect copy of the RTR mix, that was what they wanted. Vinyl and making something sound like vinyl would not have entered their mind at all. If someone at the time had asked them about making it sound like vinyl they would have been dumbfounded as to why you would do that.

But the claim was that companies used whatever was closest to hand, to meet intense demand. 'The people doing this' mainly wanted to get product out. It wasn't a decision left the to (few) CD mastering engineers around at the time (like Barry Diament and Zal Schreiber for Atlantic -- IIRC Diament verified that he at least sometimes was given LP production masters to work with, but these are my old, old memories of his posts on the Hoffman forum)

I doubt an RTR production master would be the reels closest to hand. It would more likely be the cassette or vinyl production masters.

I don't know anything about cassette production masters , what their FR would be.

 

[MAB]

Are you ever gonna come out of here and gab with us out there? Sigh*

I wonder too.

 

[MattHooper]

See you are thinking the people doing this at the time considered vinyl the reference. They didn't. RTR, especially high speed RTR was the reference. If CD could sound like a perfect copy of the RTR mix, that was what they wanted. Vinyl and making something sound like vinyl would not have entered their mind at all. If someone at the time had asked them about making it sound like vinyl they would have been dumbfounded as to why you would do that.

That makes a lot of sense.

 

[MattHooper]

maybe we need to consult Kamala Harris on this! She now has her own vinyl record holding generator:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1816791943461908700

Generator here:

Kamala Holding Vinyls