How much did ADCs in the 80s affect the sound quality of CDs?

[krabapple]

Remixing and remastering, as someone already mentioned, are decidedly two different things. Compare the original Japanese pressing of Hot For Teacher from the Van Halen disc, 1984 (the "Target" disc) with the 2000 HDCD "remaster":

View attachment 392463

They pumped up the jam on the HDCD version and all of the instrument placement—especially EVH's guitar—are all different on the HDCD version. Some of it is so bad that it's unrecognizable if you knew the original.

But wait, that is the UNDECODED HDCD view!

Surely decoding the HDCD makes it better?

Hah, no. All decoding does in this case is lower the peak level by a dB or so

This was one of the many funny cases where HDCD was pointless. They *could have* mastered this with a nice dynamic range, then used the "Peak extension" option to smash it for playback on non-decoding players. Then it would play compressed like this in a nondecoding machine, but uncompressed in an HDCD player...leading some listeners to conclude that HDCD intrinsically sounds better.*

For the VH releases, no one bothered with Peak Extension. They just expected people to believe HDCD=better (in this case, it was just LOUDER than previous masterings)**


(* analogous to what happened on some SACDs, most famously Dark Side of the Moon-- the CD layer was more compressed than the DSD layer...et voila, DSD sounds better to the audiophile ear!)


(**the other selling point of HDCD was then-SOTA ADC used to make them. But who cares when the transfer is smashed like this?)



FWIW, the 192/24 HDtracks VH downloads are all uncompressed (the lower rate versions...are NOT.)

 

[restorer-john]

Have a look at the original Dire Straits CDs for how a mass market CD should be made.

Love over Gold for example. Wonderful use of dynamics and leaving plenty in reserve for that peak, just in case.

That's one of the reasons I keep banging on about needing a decent preamplifier, all these ASR guys calculating their voltage gain and ignoring >10dB on the media itself.

 

[restorer-john]

Some interesting experiences regarding production of The Night Fly from Donald Fagan digital an analog mixups difference in quality an how it is produced by Roger Nichols early 80ties. An a Spoiler alert at the end. Source: https://audiophilestyle.com/ca/the-best-version-of/the-best-version-of-donald-fagen’s-the-nightfly-r1006/

The first is the analog tape-sourced version of The Nightfly, referenced by High Fidelity’s Sutherland above, that was pulled from stores. Nichols recounted the saga in 2001 web post:

When we mixed Nightfly in the summer of 1982 there was no such thing as CD. We recorded on the 3M digital 32-track and mixed to the 3M 4-track. We mastered at Bob Ludwig’s. The record company asked for a 30ips 1/2 inch analog copy to use for advance cassettes for promotion guys.

I also printed the mixes to a Sony PCM-F1. I had the first one in the US in 1982. I gave a copy of it to Stevie Wonder.

When CDs came out in 1984, Warner Bros pressed CDs of Nightfly. So far nothing I had done was out on CD. Stevie called me up and said that he just got a copy of the Nightfly CD and it didn’t sound as good as the F1 tape. I thought “%$(&*%$# CDs are not any good, I’m a dead man!”

I went to Warner Bros and got a copy of the CD. I want home and listened. The CD sounded like it had a blanket over the vocals and horns and... well everything. I called Bob Ludwig and asked what tape he sent to Warner Bros for the CD mastering. He said “What tape? Warner Bros never ordered anything for CD production.” Uh- Oh.

Upon further investigation I found out that Warner Bros had someone make a copy of the 30ips 1/2 inch tape and sent it to the CD plant instead of ordering a digital tape from the digital original.

No wonder the vinyl sounded better. The vinyl was made from the digital original, but the CDs were made from a second-generation analog copy. It happened to a lot of artists including Blondie, Diana Ross, Billy Joel, and many others.

Bob Ludwig made a digital master and sent it to the CD plant. The CD was pressed, and the old CDs were supposed to be destroyed. Instead Warner Bros sent them to Europe to sell thinking we would not find out. Somehow they also leaked into the chain in the US and were consumed by consumers….

The bad CD was made from 30ips analog tape and the good one was made from a digital 1610 master. All of the pressings after the first one are good.

The analog tape-sourced CD of The Nightfly is extremely hard to find. They can be spotted by checking out the CD’s matrix number. If it ends in “021 02,” it was made from the analog tape.


Spoiler alert:
Ok for the die-hard Fagan Night Fly fan who really would get this Iconic Original 1610 Digital Master it can be found on the DVD-A EDITION (2002) 2.0, 48kHz/24-bit
Marketed by Rhino but with glass manufacturing handled by Warner’s facility in Germany [8122781289], this plays only on DVD players (DVD-Audio 5.1 and 2.0, 48kHz/24-bit; Dolby Digital 5.1 and 2.0, DTS 5.1),

Tip: Extraction could be done in Windows with Audacity.
An yes it sounds quite slic.

The Nightfly digital debacle is like Chinese whispers- the story changes each time I hear it. I have several versions of Nightfly, including some very early Japanese Sanyo pressings and they're all the same- bit for bit.

 

[levimax]

Yes, one might expect that such releases would show objective evidence of typical LP production EQ moves. That, AFAIK, has never been demonstrated.

For Classical Music there is more that has to be done for LP cutting but for many popular titles, outside of mono bass, which is not a big deal as many people do that anyway with subs, and possibly some HP and LP filtering above and below where there is much if any musical information, the whole "LP master tapes sound much worse than the master tape" is over blown. The degradation that occurs during LP playback is mostly due to 2 things:

1. During the LP production process (from the cut lacquer make the father then make the mother then make the stamper then press final the LP) information is lost at every step as it is with any molding process, if you compared a fresh cut lacquer to the master tape it would be much closer than the final production LP to the master tape.

2. During LP playback, even done with a well set up TT and a clean and well pressed LP, there is information lost, for an "average" TT setup and LP it can be pretty bad.

Using a good quality LP cutting master to create a CD, especially one mastered by someone like Bob Ludwig who was hired to improve on the original master tape and may have even interacted with artists at the time, can be preferable to a transfer done decades later of the original master tapes.

While I don't know if there is an "typical EQ" during the LP mastering process, it appears to me after looking at original LP's and original CD's and later remastered CD's that there are definitely "typical moves" made during the digital transfer and digital remaster process:

1. Boost bass
2. Boost treble
3. Add compression

 

[mixsit]

Is not Ry Cooders Jazz from. 1978 also an early digital recording ?

Did a quick look around, but it's one of his I'm not familiar with. That and 'Bop is touted as his first digi'..

Hey.. A nice turn to thank you for here :>) Checking out 'Jazz, I ran into one of his I love and hadn't visited way to long. One from the album -1976
Chicken Skin -He'll Have To Go..

 

[mixsit]

What was the difference between the vinyl an all digital cd release.

I wouldn't attempt to answer for a few good reasons :>) I think I may still have the LPs, but these were CDs meant to replace LPs -mostly worn out. Tired of the 'noise pops and clicks of the format enough not to have tried.
[oops.. I had Van's in lp but non Ry's. I would be interesting to hear Ry's -if it still lasted this long with decent sound. Pretty doubtful right?

 

[NTK]

Some interesting experiences regarding production of The Night Fly from Donald Fagan digital an analog mixups difference in quality an how it is produced by Roger Nichols early 80ties. An a Spoiler alert at the end. Source: https://audiophilestyle.com/ca/the-best-version-of/the-best-version-of-donald-fagen’s-the-nightfly-r1006/

The first is the analog tape-sourced version of The Nightfly, referenced by High Fidelity’s Sutherland above, that was pulled from stores. Nichols recounted the saga in 2001 web post:

When we mixed Nightfly in the summer of 1982 there was no such thing as CD. We recorded on the 3M digital 32-track and mixed to the 3M 4-track. We mastered at Bob Ludwig’s. The record company asked for a 30ips 1/2 inch analog copy to use for advance cassettes for promotion guys.

I also printed the mixes to a Sony PCM-F1. I had the first one in the US in 1982. I gave a copy of it to Stevie Wonder.

When CDs came out in 1984, Warner Bros pressed CDs of Nightfly. So far nothing I had done was out on CD. Stevie called me up and said that he just got a copy of the Nightfly CD and it didn’t sound as good as the F1 tape. I thought “%$(&*%$# CDs are not any good, I’m a dead man!”

I went to Warner Bros and got a copy of the CD. I want home and listened. The CD sounded like it had a blanket over the vocals and horns and... well everything. I called Bob Ludwig and asked what tape he sent to Warner Bros for the CD mastering. He said “What tape? Warner Bros never ordered anything for CD production.” Uh- Oh.

Upon further investigation I found out that Warner Bros had someone make a copy of the 30ips 1/2 inch tape and sent it to the CD plant instead of ordering a digital tape from the digital original.

No wonder the vinyl sounded better. The vinyl was made from the digital original, but the CDs were made from a second-generation analog copy. It happened to a lot of artists including Blondie, Diana Ross, Billy Joel, and many others.

Bob Ludwig made a digital master and sent it to the CD plant. The CD was pressed, and the old CDs were supposed to be destroyed. Instead Warner Bros sent them to Europe to sell thinking we would not find out. Somehow they also leaked into the chain in the US and were consumed by consumers….

The bad CD was made from 30ips analog tape and the good one was made from a digital 1610 master. All of the pressings after the first one are good.

The analog tape-sourced CD of The Nightfly is extremely hard to find. They can be spotted by checking out the CD’s matrix number. If it ends in “021 02,” it was made from the analog tape.


Spoiler alert:
Ok for the die-hard Fagan Night Fly fan who really would get this Iconic Original 1610 Digital Master it can be found on the DVD-A EDITION (2002) 2.0, 48kHz/24-bit
Marketed by Rhino but with glass manufacturing handled by Warner’s facility in Germany [8122781289], this plays only on DVD players (DVD-Audio 5.1 and 2.0, 48kHz/24-bit; Dolby Digital 5.1 and 2.0, DTS 5.1),

Tip: Extraction could be done in Windows with Audacity.
An yes it sounds quite slic.

@ajawamnet told the same story in this old thread of his. Purportedly it is from Roger Nichols' book.

Lou Ottens - Inventor of the Cassette and CD has died

I guess for the most part so has his inventions. Yea I know, there's still a lot of people who love the stuff. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/mar/11/lou-ottens-inventor-of-the-cassette-tape-dies-aged-94 Note: "Ottens, who died on Saturday, had little patience with the renewed popularity...

www.audiosciencereview.com

 

[AnalogSteph]

That's one of the reasons I keep banging on about needing a decent preamplifier, all these ASR guys calculating their voltage gain and ignoring >10dB on the media itself.

The thing is, as long as your DAC can comfortably drive your power amp into clipping (which they will usually do), you might just as well be applying extra gain on the digital side if need be. This is exactly what ReplayGain is for.

The real tough nuts are those recordings with super high crest factor. I think my record holder here is a recording of Mahler's 4th from 1998 (Birmingham Symphony, Simon Rattle)... album gain +7.83 dB but peak at pretty much exactly 1.00, peak / average nearly 26 dB, DR18. Reproducing that at 85 dB SPL average without clipping would take quite the system... even with 88 dB / W / m speakers you would be looking at a 250 W amp.

Anyway, I have a bit of a soft spot for early digital recordings and will pick them up whenever I happen to come across them. They can be really good - there is absolutely nothing to suggest that Beethoven's Fidelio with the Chicago Symphony under Solti dates from 1979, for example (recorded with DECCA system). Even in those days, there were machines recording at 16 bits @ 50 kHz (Soundstream, 3M) or 18 bits @ 48 kHz (DECCA). (Hence why SRCs were becoming necessary by the time the CD took off. Did I mention Denon with 47.25 kHz?) The one big classical label with rather mixed results in those days supposedly was DG... they would pick up the slack in later years and by the early '90s had highly advanced recording systems of their own. EMI seems to have had good results even with the comparatively ancient Sony PCM 1600 in the early days... a model which seems to have been quickly superseded by the 1610 or the multitrack DASH PCM 3324 (which could also do 48 kHz).

Speaking of Sony, the later PCM 1630 (1986) was the first model to explicitly generate wideband noise to dither the ADC, so if you find studio recordings using the 1610 that sound crunchy at low levels that's probably why. (The fade-in at the start of Peter Gabriel 4 ("Security") comes to mind.) Acoustic recordings tended to have plenty of analog noise by themselves, but in the studio it was a different story.

 

[VientoB]

But wait, that is the UNDECODED HDCD view!

Surely decoding the HDCD makes it better?


View attachment 392520

Hah, no. All decoding does in this case is lower the peak level by a dB or so

This was one of the many funny cases where HDCD was pointless. They *could have* mastered this with a nice dynamic range, then used the "Peak extension" option to smash it for playback on non-decoding players. Then it would play compressed like this in a nondecoding machine, but uncompressed in an HDCD player...leading some listeners to conclude that HDCD intrinsically sounds better.*

For the VH releases, no one bothered with Peak Extension. They just expected people to believe HDCD=better (in this case, it was just LOUDER than previous masterings)**


(* analogous to what happened on some SACDs, most famously Dark Side of the Moon-- the CD layer was more compressed than the DSD layer...et voila, DSD sounds better to the audiophile ear!)


(**the other selling point of HDCD was then-SOTA ADC used to make them. But who cares when the transfer is smashed like this?)



FWIW, the 192/24 HDtracks VH downloads are all uncompressed (the lower rate versions...are NOT.)

I think peak extension was used on Green Day's Nimrod album.

 

[restorer-john]

The thing is, as long as your DAC can comfortably drive your power amp into clipping (which they will usually do), you might just as well be applying extra gain on the digital side if need be. This is exactly what ReplayGain is for.

Whatever works for you I guess, but homogenized music is not for me.

 

[manisandher]

**the other selling point of HDCD was then-SOTA ADC used to make them.

I never engaged any HDCD processing when I had my Model Two - it sounded fine without them.

Mani.

 

[krabapple]

Spoiler alert:
Ok for the die-hard Fagan Night Fly fan who really would get this Iconic Original 1610 Digital Master it can be found on the DVD-A EDITION (2002) 2.0, 48kHz/24-bit
Marketed by Rhino but with glass manufacturing handled by Warner’s facility in Germany [8122781289], this plays only on DVD players (DVD-Audio 5.1 and 2.0, 48kHz/24-bit; Dolby Digital 5.1 and 2.0, DTS 5.1),

Tip: Extraction could be done in Windows with Audacity.
An yes it sounds quite slic.

Eliot Scheiner's surround mix on this is fantastic too.

 

[krabapple]

The Nightfly digital debacle is like Chinese whispers- the story changes each time I hear it. I have several versions of Nightfly, including some very early Japanese Sanyo pressings and they're all the same- bit for bit.

Is the one Nichols mentioned among them?

 

[krabapple]

For Classical Music there is more that has to be done for LP cutting but for many popular titles, outside of mono bass, which is not a big deal as many people do that anyway with subs, and possibly some HP and LP filtering above and below where there is much if any musical information, the whole "LP master tapes sound much worse than the master tape" is over blown. The degradation that occurs during LP playback is mostly due to 2 things:

Well surely there can be compensation for the difference between the outer edge and inner groove. And there are albums that were legendarily difficult to cut to vinyl, e.g. (IIRC) Stevie Wonder's Fulfillingness First Finale. Not to mention the craziness Todd Rundgren indulged in (30-min LP sides of rock music).

1. During the LP production process (from the cut lacquer make the father then make the mother then make the stamper then press final the LP) information is lost at every step as it is with any molding process, if you compared a fresh cut lacquer to the master tape it would be much closer than the final production LP to the master tape.

2. During LP playback, even done with a well set up TT and a clean and well pressed LP, there is information lost, for an "average" TT setup and LP it can be pretty bad.

Using a good quality LP cutting master to create a CD, especially one mastered by someone like Bob Ludwig who was hired to improve on the original master tape and may have even interacted with artists at the time, can be preferable to a transfer done decades later of the original master tapes.

While I don't know if there is an "typical EQ" during the LP mastering process, it appears to me after looking at original LP's and original CD's and later remastered CD's that there are definitely "typical moves" made during the digital transfer and digital remaster process:

1. Boost bass
2. Boost treble
3. Add compression

Well, how do you know bass or treble is 'boosted', if you can't hear the original master tape? It could just be more faithful.

And it slooks like you are eliding two decades, and two diffent styles, of CD mastering, when it comes to compression. Going hard on digital compression during mixing/mastering didn't become a thing until the mid-1990s. What's the Story Morning Glory came out in 1995. From the late 80s and the mid 90s might be the golden era for CD mastering, when better sources were used for remasters, while the loudness wars hadn't kicked in.

 

[krabapple]

I think peak extension was used on Green Day's Nimrod album.

I actually ran an HDCD analyzer on my rips back in the day, and determined which ones used Peak Extension (as well as Filter Switching, an obscure option that was not carried over to Microsoft's software decoding implementation of HDCD, afaik). The ones I remember best as using PE are a handful of Yes HDCDs made in Japan in the early 2000s, where the crest factor difference between nondecoded and decoded was substantial and obvious. Others included HDCDs by John McLaughlin, Joni Mitchell, King Crimson., Weather Reports...but curiously, even when Peak Extend was *enabled*, it didn't necessarily mean it was much *used* -- sometimes the peaks weren't actually 'extended' much, and the crest factor only changed a minor amount.

But like I said, when PE wasn't enabled -- as in the Van Halen HDCD -- all decoding did was lower the peak a few dB. The dynamics (peak vs average) didn't change. IOW those were not worth decoding, unless you're worried about things like intersample overs.

 

[krabapple]

I never engaged any HDCD processing when I had my Model Two - it sounded fine without them.

Mani

It really depends on how each HDCD was mastered, in particular if Peak Extension was exploited. The difference could be substantial.

 

[VientoB]

I actually ran an HDCD analyzer on my rips back in the day, and determined which ones used Peak Extention (as well as Filter Switching, a particularly obscure option that was not carried over to Microsoft's software decoding implementation of HDCD, afaik). The ones I remember best as using PE are a handful of Yes HDCDs made in Japan in the early 2000s, where the crest factor difference between nondecoded and decoded was quite substantial and quite obvious in waveform view. Others included HDCDs by John McLaughlin, Joni Mitchell, King Crimson....but curiosuly, even when Peak Extend was *enabled*, it didn't necessarily mean it was much *used* -- the peaks weren't actually 'extended' much.

But like I said, when PE wasn't enabled -- as in the Van Halen HDCD -- all decoding did was lower the peak a few dB. The dynamics (peak vs average) didn't change. IOW those were not worth decoding, unless you're worried about things like intersample overs.

It actually makes quite a difference on the Green Day album, but the album actually sounds a bit better with the compression. The HDCD decided version is interesting, though.

 

[krabapple]

Whatever works for you I guess, but homogenized music is not for me.

If replaygain is used on an by-album basis ('album gain'), the music is not 'homogenized'.

In album-gain analysis an additional peak-value and gain-value, which will be shared by the whole album, is calculated. Using the album-gain values during playback will preserve the volume differences among tracks on an album.

ReplayGain - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Frank Dernie]

I used to make recordings, as an amateur, starting with a mono valve tape recorder in the 60s and progressing to a Revox B77 which I still have.
I tried, and then bought, a StellaDAT and this was the first digital recorder I compared.

It was always difficult to set levels on tape recorders because of the limited dymamic range for choral music.
It was easy to set levels on the StellaDAT since the dynamic range was more than the music needed.

I could always hear the difference between microphone feed and off tape, sometimes quite a big difference with a bit of loss (at high frequencies) or distortion (at high levels) and noise (at low levels).

The off tape recording of the StellaDAT was indistinguishable from the microphone feed to me then, straight away.

Reflecting back maybe there were minute differences I missed because I was so used to the shortcomings of tape but, basically, if there was a difference it was too small to be of consequence IMO.

So I would agree with @sergeauckland that ADCs were audibly transparent from early days.

Certainly they have wider dynamic range and higher frequency response nowadays, but the music is the same, and 16/44 was a wider "window" than music and our ears then and still is.

If you wanted to make a fixed level environmental sound recorder capable of recording all audible sounds the dynamic range of the original ADCs was not enough (and probably is now) but for a music recorder - plenty.

 

[Snarfie]

Eliot Scheiner's surround mix on this is fantastic too.

IMO the 1610 remaster is dynamic better full sounding not thin you notice bit more space between instruments voices so a beter reverb.