His job demands uncontrolled listening and hes done it all day everyday at work for years. So not like any other human except other engineers. Ild bet real money if you played him the same thing but one is 2db hotter he would tell you the only difference is one is a little louder.
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How much did ADCs in the 80s affect the sound quality of CDs?
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On Steve Hoffman forum you could find lots of info regarding vinyl masters (LP masters/tapes) also used for CD's thought this was in the proffesional an high end audio well known. It's like to put a vw golf engine in a Testarossa
Old CD's With LP Mastering
Lately I've been buying nothing but old CD's pressed in the 1980's and very early 1990's, in order to not get crappy limited (if not brickwalled)...
forums.stevehoffman.tv
I would say you have more LP-tapes on your CDs than you could imagine, simply the CD mastering engineer knew how to do his work. I am pretty sure for instance that Barry Diament used LP-eq tapes for the original Led Zeppelin CDs, and however those are very well regarded. I think this was very common.
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Most Steve Wilsons Yes etc are not remasters there remixes. Remasters use the original 2 channel mix, remixes use the original multitrack as in all 24 tracks. This is a totally different process, where he can "fix" every individual track before combining them. It takes 10 times longer than remastering.
If you realy want to know how complicated this is read: https://www.soundonsound.com/people/steven-wilson-remixing-classic-albums
And you guys really think he has to do all the comparisons to the original album level matched and blind?
Ok let's focus on a artifact that is clearly on the digital DAT tape an after years gone on the analog mastertape or barly noticble. You still think he imaginging that right?.
Early analog anti aliasing ADC filters were poor, with horrible phase response.
Everybody has bad days at work but when your job depends on noticing small differences in sound, imagining differences will get you fired. Have you heard what he could do with 70s gear, Steely Dan?
Tape is a lossy medium, subject to all kinds of problems like fading, increased noise, print-through, and so forth.
Early ADCs definitely had their issues, especially compared to today's, but in my limited experience much of the problem arose from mixing and mastering engineers unfamiliar with the medium. For example, it was commonplace to run the levels "hot" on tape to capture as much of the dynamic range as possible, and some soft saturation of the tape was acceptable and relatively benign. Clip an ADC, however, and the effect is immediately noticeable, and there were issues with ADC front ends having poor (and extended) overload recovery. Dither, though known, was not always included, anti-alias filters were sometimes not (nearly) as sharp as they needed to be (usually analog with ringing and phase issues since oversampling was hard to achieve in the early days), ping-ponging (multiplexing) ADC channels led to channel-channel time artifacts, etc. I think most of that was recognized and dealt with fairly early on, and became part of the learning process for design and sound engineers.
All that aside, some of those early CDs were still great, before the loudness wars alienated a generation on the technology.
IME/IMO - Don
Early ADCs definitely had their issues, especially compared to today's, but in my limited experience much of the problem arose from mixing and mastering engineers unfamiliar with the medium. For example, it was commonplace to run the levels "hot" on tape to capture as much of the dynamic range as possible, and some soft saturation of the tape was acceptable and relatively benign. Clip an ADC, however, and the effect is immediately noticeable, and there were issues with ADC front ends having poor (and extended) overload recovery. Dither, though known, was not always included, anti-alias filters were sometimes not (nearly) as sharp as they needed to be (usually analog with ringing and phase issues since oversampling was hard to achieve in the early days), ping-ponging (multiplexing) ADC channels led to channel-channel time artifacts, etc. I think most of that was recognized and dealt with fairly early on, and became part of the learning process for design and sound engineers.
All that aside, some of those early CDs were still great, before the loudness wars alienated a generation on the technology.
IME/IMO - Don
Yes but how about resurrecting a 50 year old analog tape would not digital gremlins pale in comparison ? I imagine there could be some frontier early adopter problems in the early 80’s with digital but it could not be that many years before the pros got the hang of it ?
Similar thing was done:
Antonín Dvořák - Symphony No.9
www.dvorakvinyl.cz
You may need a google translator from Czech. I have both the vinyl issue and 192/24 resurrected from the tape.
It might be worth noting that the analog master tapes they were ADCing from had an SNR of 60-70dB, so..
Yes if he can get hold of the original multitrack tape he will use that. An with today's DAW like Pro Tools and/or added VST's you can cleanup a lot.
I use Ableton (more used for live performance) but quite handy DAW also for remixing. Have for my own use lots of fun remixing/Re-Edit tracks did few weeks ago "Girls on Film". Done in 30 minutes Bass & Percussion only have fun.
DD - GOF (Snarfies Re-Edit)
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But the vinyl master tape wouldn't necessarily sound identical to the vinyl product itself. Because: vinyl playback
This tale, that vinyl production masters were used on some/many 1st generation CDs, was retailed repeatedly by industry liaisons who spoke to the press (ICE Magazine back then, the only publication that really cared) and by some at least some contemporary mastering engineers (e.g. Barry Diament, one of Atlantic's two in house CD masterers.)
Verification? Nothing objective. So that's all we have to go on, unless someone can get hold of
- an actual vinyl production master tape
- its analogous mixdown master tape
and digitize both, and compare to each other and to CD issues.
You can't go by the CDs alone, because who knows what different CD mastering moves were applied to them to yield the final consumer product?
Quite so. But if the differnece is simply overall level, that's something psychoacoustics predicts too. It's something to be controlled for.
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Have you ever heard the first digital music recording? If I remember correctly this was recorded back in 1971 but didn't get released until a few years later for some reason. Can you guess the bitrate? Have a listen for a few minutes and then press the spoiler 
It was recorded at 13bit and 32khz. Might not be perfect, but I still think it sounds damn fine! And just imagine how much digital audio has been improved since then ^^
On Steve Hoffman forum you could find lots of info regarding vinyl masters (LP masters/tapes) also used for CD's thought this was in the proffesional an high end audio well known. It's like to put a vw golf engine in a Testarossa
Old CD's With LP Mastering
Lately I've been buying nothing but old CD's pressed in the 1980's and very early 1990's, in order to not get crappy limited (if not brickwalled)...
That, again, is testimony, but not objective proof, which we'll likely never get.
ALL Steven Wilson work for classic bands is remixes. He doesn't do remastering; if that is ever involved, someone else does it.
And of course a remix typically is different enough in multiple ways that DBT for difference is superfluous.
That's not what we are talking about with vinyl production source vs original master source. There, the differences would be confined essentially to different EQ of the same two-track recording.
But an artifact that is still after years exactly the same on a DAT tapen an practicly gone on a analog mastertape has nothing to do with imagination or psychoacoustics. It's plain laws of physics. The detoriation of analog tapes is commonly known.
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