Old CD's on New Hardware

[Mart68]

I am not "you guys". I am just me. That was my experience of a 1st generation Marantz CD player. It had very rolled off treble. It's also true that a lot of early CDs were horribly bright as they were from the same masters as the vinyl releases, which were mastered to compensate for the LP's intrinsic warmth. This is not complicated stuff, it's well known, and to try to make an issue out of it is tedious.

CDs were made from vinyl masters? Evidence?

I have plenty of early CDs none of them sound 'bright'

Some CD players do not have flat FR though, that is true.

 

[ThatM1key]

CDs were made from vinyl masters? Evidence?

I have plenty of early CDs none of them sound 'bright'

Some CD players do not have flat FR though, that is true.

No he meant the CDs and Vinyls came from the same source. There is some CDs that use vinyl sources (1950s and below). A good example would be Hank Williams.

Some companies are cynical and they'll use vinyl sources even when tape masters are offered (Even if its generational). I'm certain the original terrible "Oldies But Goodies" CDs used Vinyl sources.

 

[Mart68]

No he meant the CDs and Vinyls came from the same source. There is some CDs that use vinyl sources (1950s and below). A good example would be Hank Williams.

Some companies are cynical and they'll use vinyl sources even when tape masters are offered (Even if its generational). I'm certain the original terrible "Oldies But Goodies" CDs used Vinyl sources.

Yes, using a vinyl pressing to make a CD if the master is unavailable/lost/destroyed, that happens.

But the claim was that some early CDs were 'made from the same masters as the vinyl releases'.

Seen that claimed before, never seen any evidence for the claim.

There would be no need to do that as there would be a production master as well as a vinyl master.

When CD came out compact cassette was the best-selling format, did they use vinyl masters to make the cassette release? Highly unlikely.

 

[ThatM1key]

Yes, using a vinyl pressing to make a CD if the master is unavailable/lost/destroyed, that happens.

But the claim was that some early CDs were 'made from the same masters as the vinyl releases'.

Seen that claimed before, never seen any evidence for the claim.

There would be no need to do that as there would be a production master as well as a vinyl master.

When CD came out compact cassette was the best-selling format, did they use vinyl masters to make the cassette release? Highly unlikely.

Time Life's "Rock N Roll Era" used Digital Remasters for there records, CDs and cassettes.

 

[restorer-john]

Where 'masters' were recordings made primarily to extol the virtues of vinyl and less compact cassette, of course when these supposed flat transfers were used for CD, the results were strident.

Nothing wrong with the CD format at all. It was merely exposing the deficiencies in the source content and production. Plenty of CD liner notes acknowledge that fact.

 

[ThatM1key]

That's thing I like about old CDs. The AAD/ADD/DDD ratings and the messages about how good CD was.

 

[Mart68]

Where 'masters' were recordings made primarily to extol the virtues of vinyl and less compact cassette, of course when these supposed flat transfers were used for CD, the results were strident.

Nothing wrong with the CD format at all. It was merely exposing the deficiencies in the source content and production. Plenty of CD liner notes acknowledge that fact.

They acknowledge that you may get some hiss from the analogue tape, and that other aberrations in the recording process may be shown up.

But for vinyl a production master has to be made from the original master tape to accommodate the limitations of the format.

I don't see why they would use that mastering to make the CD when they could just use the original master.

Maybe that did happen but until I see some evidence of it I'll remain sceptical.

 

[restorer-john]

They acknowledge that you may get some hiss from the analogue tape, and that other aberrations in the recording process may be shown up.

But for vinyl a production master has to be made from the original master tape to accommodate the limitations of the format.

I don't see why they would use that mastering to make the CD when they could just use the original master.

Maybe that did happen but until I see some evidence of it I'll remain sceptical.

The 'master' was made for the pre-eminent formats and the requirement for archival storage at the time. There was no 'perfectly flat' master back then. Digital turned the whole thing on its head.

 

[Mart68]

The 'master' was made for the pre-eminent formats and the requirement for archival storage at the time. There was no 'perfectly flat' master back then. Digital turned the whole thing on its head.

so the master for the compact cassette release would not have been a flat master?
What if the recording was released on reel to reel? They'd use the vinyl master for that?
This is all contrary to what I thought I knew.
By the time I was going in studios it was all digital.

 

[jsrtheta]

The 'master' was made for the pre-eminent formats and the requirement for archival storage at the time. There was no 'perfectly flat' master back then. Digital turned the whole thing on its head.

There's also the issue of preemphasis, which I have not seen addressed here. Vinyl used preemphasis because of the loss of high frequency response. My question is to what extent did CDs do this, since preemphasis was irrelevant to digital recording and could only do harm?

Years ago I had a Behringer SRC2496 sample rate converter. It would recognize when preemphasis had been used in the digital signal, and would allow you to play (and record) it with or without preemphasis. I do recall writers in the '90s who pointed this out as a flaw in early CDs, specifically Peter Aczel. IIRC, some DACs of the era had preemphasis detection, too.

I had a friend in Chicago who recorded local bands like Smashing Pumpkins. When he started recording digitally, I asked him if he was boosting the highs as he did with analog recording, and he said yes. I then pointed out that this was unnecessary (and harmful) since digital didn't suffer the same loss of high and low frequencies that analog tape did. (Some of the highs were really painful!)

 

[krabapple]

What is his ADC front end for his test rig?

If it's not identified in his article, go there and ask him.

 

[ThatM1key]

There's also the issue of preemphasis, which I have not seen addressed here. Vinyl used preemphasis because of the loss of high frequency response. My question is to what extent did CDs do this, since preemphasis was irrelevant to digital recording and could only do harm?

Years ago I had a Behringer SRC2496 sample rate converter. It would recognize when preemphasis had been used in the digital signal, and would allow you to play (and record) it with or without preemphasis. I do recall writers in the '90s who pointed this out as a flaw in early CDs, specifically Peter Aczel. IIRC, some DACs of the era had preemphasis detection, too.

I had a friend in Chicago who recorded local bands like Smashing Pumpkins. When he started recording digitally, I asked him if he was boosting the highs as he did with analog recording, and he said yes. I then pointed out that this was unnecessary (and harmful) since digital didn't suffer the same loss of high and low frequencies that analog tape did. (Some of the highs were really painful!)

Is that why the Smashing Pumpkins "1979" sounds so distorted?

 

[krabapple]

I am not "you guys". I am just me. That was my experience of a 1st generation Marantz CD player. It had very rolled off treble.

Surely a 'very rolled off treble' FR would show up in measurements (as tipped up treble does in this one). What Marantz are you talking about? I'll see if I can find some FR data.

It's also true that a lot of early CDs were horribly bright as they were from the same masters as the vinyl releases, which were mastered to compensate for the LP's intrinsic warmth. This is not complicated stuff, it's well known, and to try to make an issue out of it is tedious.

Yes, but that was the software, not the hardware... and you aren't telling me anything new.

Btw, warm & syrupy CDP + horribly bright CD should have put the final sound somewhere closer to correct, no?

 

[krabapple]

CDs were made from vinyl masters? Evidence?

CDs sourced from a production master tape (typically, an LP production tape, i.e. a copy of the master with all the EQ and cutting moves added to make it sound good on vinyl) versus the original mixdown master tape.

It was the common explanation given by mastering engineers and spokespersons back when CDS began to be rereleased as 'remastered' (late 80s, early 90s) in outlets such as ICE magazine. Grabbing whatever tape was most readily available (versus going back into the vaults to get the OMTs) in response to high demand for CDs, was the given rationale for that early practice.

Here's a case I read about just yesterday, where an analog 'demo' copy (made for cassette, in the instance) of a 3M digital recording was used for the first CD release of an 'audiophile' album (Donald Fagen's The Nightfly). It was soon recalled/ replaced by a CD properly sourced from the digital master tape.

I have plenty of early CDs none of them sound 'bright'

Some CD players do not have flat FR though, that is true.

Deviation from flat only matters if it's enough to be audible in that frequency range.

 

[krabapple]

View attachment 178731
That's thing I like about old CDs. The AAD/ADD/DDD ratings and the messages about how good CD was.

This did not tell you whether the first "A" was the original master tape, or a later generational copy tape. It was simply ass-covering text in case listeners heard tape hiss or dropouts or objectionable EQ from whatever source was used.

 

[krabapple]

There's also the issue of preemphasis, which I have not seen addressed here. Vinyl used preemphasis because of the loss of high frequency response. My question is to what extent did CDs do this, since preemphasis was irrelevant to digital recording and could only do harm?

it was certainly used on some releases, its use is indicated in the CDs' metadata, and could thus be detected by (and compensated for) in some (most?) standalone CDPs. (And now, in some software like dbpoweramp and foobar2k). But sometimes it was applied *without* also being indicated in the metadata. That's a problem.

Pre-emphasis - Hydrogenaudio Knowledgebase

wiki.hydrogenaud.io

Pre-emphasis on audio CD
Some early digital recording & playback equipment, including CD players, used 14-bit converters, even though they were dealing with 16-bit audio. Some also used noisy "brick wall" filters to remove frequencies higher than the Nyquist frequency (22050 Hz). The resulting noise introduced by these converters and filters could be made relatively quiet by using pre-emphasis: boosting the signal (especially the higher frequencies) in the recording before it was put onto CD, and embedding flags in the disc's subcode to tell a CD player to apply de-emphasis on playback. Some CD players even had a de-emphasis button that could be used to manually apply de-emphasis, but now it's just a built-in feature of the analog outputs of nearly all dedicated audio CD players. By the late 1980s, pre-emphasis stopped being used because reliable 16-bit DACs with oversampling and other technologies minimized the conversion & filtering noise without the need for pre-processing the recording.

Most major-label CDs with pre-emphasis were manufactured in Japan in the early and mid-1980s. Relatively recent forum posts indicate that pre-emphasis is still used on newly manufactured CDs by some indie labels, mainly for classical titles.

A pre-emphasis flag for each track is normally stored in the subcode along with the audio data. It's also supposed to be stored in the table of contents (TOC), but many CDs have TOCs that say there's no pre-emphasis when in fact the subcode says there is. There are also some CDs which people believe were mastered with pre-emphasis, but which have no pre-emphasis flags set at all.

 

[sq225917]

Cd rot was a thi g, no doubt about it. I had several discs that's went brown on the edge and then proceeded to oxidise towards the centre before becoming unplayable. The first I ever encountered was the mini cd single of Fake Zid by a band called The Indian Givers. AIUI this was limited to a couple of pressing plants only.

I have a cd 104, it sounds nothing like my audiolab transport into my Gustard A18. I'm entirely prepared to accept its down to component aging though.

Worth considering our memories of 35 year old cds are tinted by the recording and mastering hardware limitations of the time.

 

[Mart68]

CDs sourced from a production master tape (typically, an LP production tape, i.e. a copy of the master with all the EQ and cutting moves added to make it sound good on vinyl) versus the original mixdown master tape.

It was the common explanation given by mastering engineers and spokespersons back when CDS began to be rereleased as 'remastered' (late 80s, early 90s) in outlets such as ICE magazine. Grabbing whatever tape was most readily available (versus going back into the vaults to get the OMTs) in response to high demand for CDs, was the given rationale for that early practice.

Here's a case I read about just yesterday, where an analog 'demo' copy (made for cassette, in the instance) of a 3M digital recording was used for the first CD release of an 'audiophile' album (Donald Fagen's The Nightfly). It was soon recalled/ replaced by a CD properly sourced from the digital master tape.





Deviation from flat only matters if it's enough to be audible in that frequency range.

Read that. Good article. In that case though the tape was sent accidentally. Must check the matirix number on my 'Nightfly' CD.

Still not evidence or even anecdote about vinyl masters being used to make CDs though.

Regarding CD player FR - there are some players with an audible shelf in response. Off the top of my head I can think of one by Carver, can't recall if it had shelved up bass or rolled off top but it was blind-tested and was reliably distinguishable from a player with flat. It did have a button to turn the effect off.

You don't need much of a lift in dB to be audible if you do it across a wide enough band of frequencies, as I'm sure you know.

 

[Robin L]

They acknowledge that you may get some hiss from the analogue tape, and that other aberrations in the recording process may be shown up.

But for vinyl a production master has to be made from the original master tape to accommodate the limitations of the format.

I don't see why they would use that mastering to make the CD when they could just use the original master.

Maybe that did happen but until I see some evidence of it I'll remain sceptical.

It happened because titles were rushed to market. Sometimes the company grabbed the first tapes they could find and some of those tapes were back-up copies of back-up copies. The notions of Digitally remastering for Digital playback evolved as the format took hold; it's now been taken as far the revisionist remasterings of Giles Martin and inducing a kind of historical fog/artistic uncanny valley. I have owned, listened to and discarded many early masterings in favor of later ones. It's a crapshoot, to be honest. Sometimes, the first appearance on CD far outstrips previous editions on vinyl. Sometimes, a third-generation copy was used for the CD reissue, resulting in a foggy, lackluster presentation. And some early remasters were too bright, working from sources with tweaked treble or deafened techies. Who know? Maybe the analog playback machines weren't properly calibrated, wouldn't be the first time that's happened.

Digital done right can be great and many early CDs are great. However, some aren't.

 

[somebodyelse]

Cd rot was a thi g, no doubt about it. I had several discs that's went brown on the edge and then proceeded to oxidise towards the centre before becoming unplayable. The first I ever encountered was the mini cd single of Fake Zid by a band called The Indian Givers. AIUI this was limited to a couple of pressing plants only.

I remember the PDO Blackburn plant being fingered for most of the dodgy ones in the UK. It seems an Italian plant may have had the same issue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_disc_bronzing