Can "bad" recordings be rescued?

[fas42]

Guilty yet again of causing dreaded thread drift, it was suggested trying out a thread along these lines: are some recording so irredeemably butchered, mutilated, hacked to death in the studio that absolutely nothing can be done to make them listenable to?

As an example, it was suggested by Jack that a high proportion of new wave pop was sufficiently mangled by ham fisted operatives at the dials, and lousy sound makers, to make them a lost cause. I beg to differ, finding that they can generate quite magnificent soundscapes if a system is sufficiently tuned. "Bad" recordings are vital food for me, to help me grow my understanding of what can be done to make a playback system better perform ...

So, in reply to the last comment by Jack in the other thread about there always being distortions in recordings, which if too great means that the recording is not worth fussing over, I say:

Everything you say is perfectly reasonable, Jack, but everytime I have thought a recording was beyond help I have always been proven wrong. I may not be able to get the playback optimal on queue, because I'm fighting the inadequacies of the HT now, as I have wrestled in the past with other setups. But I have got enough things working correctly, in a conjunction, with all the "bad" recordings, and there it is: the "big" sound, the room pressurises, the music event comes to life, and all the technical hoo-haa saying that it ain't possible means nothing at that moment ...

Yes, the distortions remain, BUT that little bit extra of the music event that was picked up at the time comes through cleanly enough to let psychoacoustics do their magic. To keep things in perspective I have an el cheapo CD of Robert Johnson, to see if I can squeeze a bit more out ...

Frank

 

[fas42]

Naughty boy, I'm replying to my own thread, but Tim asked about "the studio mastering techniques that result in a big, intense, complex sound' ", and I have at least one answer: it's called multi-tracking. If I have a 24 track tape deck and lay down some musical content in each track, with different effects and acoustic enhancement on each, all that material gets on the final 2 track user disk, unless the sound engineer goes out of his way to mess it all up. So, provided the playback system is up to it, all the captured sound information can be faithfully transmitted to the ears of the listener, and he recreates that soundscape, as envisaged by the musicians and producer, inside his head: a pretty straightforward process, really.

Frank

 

[JackD201]

Distortion is only a part of what makes a recording bad. Sure there have been recordings that I thought were bad but were actually beyond past resolution ceilings. I'm talking about the other end of the scale, where there is no stress because things were just botched. They sound stressed because the recording is. There's nothing you can do about an over loaded mic pre, over saturated tape, and there's really nothing anyone can do about bleeding from one mic to the next. There's no way you can lessen reverb and delays from a 2 track master. The list goes on and on. A dog in a tux is still a dog.

We'll never know what was in the minds of the musicians and producers. Ask them a couple of years later and they don't remember.

 

[fas42]

Talking about over loaded mics, I have some older, mono, big band recordings where there was obviously only one, reasonable for the day, mic. The vocalist, or star instrumentalist, was up close and personal with that mic, and even though that sound is meant to be the main flavour of the recording it is clearly hitting the bump stops of the mic. Yet the other musicians are layered back behind this performer, organised to fit into the recording venue, and the sound from their instruments is clearer and richer acoustically because the mic is not overloading for their contribution! And the better the system, the more detail emerges of all this quite detailed soundscape; it really is quite astonishing how competent these old mics were in picking up quite low level sound very clearly and completely.

I do note in various recordings where an obvious device was used to manipulate the sound, say the vocalist gets some electronic exaggeration of her contribution. But the effect is obvious, and stands out in clear relief from the natural sounds that are part of the recording, and doesn't detract from the overall "tone" of the track. As Tim might say, I get pleasure from being fully aware of what was going on, how the whole sound picture has been put together, and sensing very strongly the human input into the sound making.

When things are really done sloppily, this is when psychoacoustics can kick in. I have an Ike and Tina Turner cheapy, studio plus on the road, in rough and ready club venues, on a cheap tape deck, tracks. The latter are fascinating: when the system is not quite there, Tina's voice cuts through you like shredded glass, the crappy mic is so obvious. But as the replay SQ lifts, that really dodgy overlay of distortion becomes less and less relevant as your mind tunes out that element, and reacts only to the power and emotion in Tina's voice. A quite remarkable phenomenon, essentially the same thing as how surface noise on an LP fades the better the TT setup; in a sense the mind reads the sound as having two tracks, the real music content on one track and the distortion and noise on the other, and the brain knows how to slide the fader on the latter down, given half a chance.

Frank

 

[flez007]

Bad recordings of good music take a place in my second system (vintage gear) and/or at my iPhone WAV library to listen during my +1hr daily drive to work....a shame!

 

[jazdoc]

Unfortunately, a lot of current pop, rock and indie releases are horribly recorded; overloaded with no dynamic range i.e. the 'loudness wars' phenomena. I do find that system improvements generally result in improvement in the sound. Currently using the Sallie Ford & Go Outside "Dirty Radio" and Cults LPs for system tweaking and the sound is acceptable but not great. However when the music is this good who cares?...Alas some current releases are so poorly recorded that no system can rescue them, i.e. Phosphorscent "Taking It Easy" and The Raveonettes "In and Out of Control". Gave up on the vinyl and bought the CDs.

 

[mep]

Can "bad" recordings be rescued?

No.

 

[NorthStar]

A bad recording is only as good as his listener...

And no amount of EQ or bubble gum or Mickey Mouse can make it better.

* That should say something about DSP and all type of EQs...

- Even an album (LP) where you remove the distortion caused by the scratches, from a program on your PC, you are simply removing part of the music as well, simple minute detail that comes with it.

______________________

Solution: Buy well recorded music that you enjoy the performance!

 

[Steve Williams]

And no amount of EQ or bubble gum or Mickey Mouse can make it better

you didn't mention solder which is what Frank uses to make bad recordings better

 

[Orb]

Depends on the trait in question for the bad recording.
I noticed that the recent ARC gear I listened to actually helped with poor recordings that had too much sibilance or that annoying atmosphere or ambience type reverb-phasing that makes it or can sound I guess slightly out of phase/phase shifting/reverb wrong, really annoying and heard this on various systems with many recordings (modern and old).
It had been awhile since I listened to some kind of tube related preamp, so possibly generically this comes back to tube preamps and not necessarily the ARC gear.

Cheers
Orb

 

[fas42]

I gave up years ago taking "difficult" recordings to play on other people's ambitious, expensive systems as I knew they would either sound muffled and dead, or excrutiatingly, ear piercingly obnoxious: they were obviously "bad" recordings: see, that person's very impressive setup just proved it! A bit like using a very high quality car to "prove" that some roads are very bad roads ... Oh, what did you say?? You mean that a good car allows you to drive down a poor road and not be aware of how rough the road surface is, and how bad the alignment is, that you actually enjoy the journey. Gee, those automotive engineers should wake up to themselves, and take a lesson or two of from sound equipment makers -- a BMW should transmit every slight imperfection in the road to you in a totally revealing way ...

Frank

 

[NorthStar]

you didn't mention solder which is what Frank uses to make bad recordings better

Oh really!?

 

[NorthStar]

Depends on the trait in question for the bad recording.
I noticed that the recent ARC gear I listened to actually helped with poor recordings that had too much sibilance or that annoying atmosphere or ambience type reverb-phasing that makes it or can sound I guess slightly out of phase/phase shifting/reverb wrong, really annoying and heard this on various systems with many recordings (modern and old).
It had been awhile since I listened to some kind of tube related preamp, so possibly generically this comes back to tube preamps and not necessarily the ARC gear.

Cheers
Orb

Just add a Phase switch to your Turntable, or CD player, or Open Reel-to-reel tape deck.

 

[Phelonious Ponk]

I gave up years ago taking "difficult" recordings to play on other people's ambitious, expensive systems as I knew they would either sound muffled and dead, or excrutiatingly, ear piercingly obnoxious: they were obviously "bad" recordings: see, that person's very impressive setup just proved it! A bit like using a very high quality car to "prove" that some roads are very bad roads ... Oh, what did you say?? You mean that a good car allows you to drive down a poor road and not be aware of how rough the road surface is, and how bad the alignment is, that you actually enjoy the journey. Gee, those automotive engineers should wake up to themselves, and take a lesson or two of from sound equipment makers -- a BMW should transmit every slight imperfection in the road to you in a totally revealing way ...

Frank

Excellent analogy Frank! A BMW will transmit the gross imperfections from the road to the driver in a pretty revealing way. A Lotus will respond to every pebble. What will roll down a rough road and give you a smooth ride, one that might even cover for moderately poor alignment? A Crown Victoria, perhaps. At the opposite extreme, an old Volkswagen with shot struts will amplify every bump into bone-rattling edge. Perhaps what your soldering iron is doing is turning a worn out Volkswagens into a lumbering Fords with soft tires. But I think the Lotus is parked in someone else's garage.

Tim

 

[fas42]

Just add a Phase switch to your Turntable, or CD player, or Open Reel-to reel tape deck.

You're not learning, Bob, this is a big no-no . -- the answer is to simply, simplify, simplify ...

Frank

 

[NorthStar]

Yeah but Frank, which recordings do we know that are in-phase, and the others out-of-phase?

You know, that's an important point.

 

[fas42]

A BMW will transmit the gross imperfections from the road to the driver in a pretty revealing way. A Lotus will respond to every pebble

The ideal vehicle has that finely tuned BMW suspension which allows you to be aware of the general nature of the road surface without disturbing and irritating you with the irrelevancies, the pebbles, and which allows you to explore the limits of the car's abilities. At the same the BMW is communicating to you, the driver, what the road surface allows you to do, it is still giving you a smooth ride in a relative sense, not a sloppy, marshmallow one. SET tube amplifiers, anyone?

Definitely don't have a soft tired yank tank, perhaps closer, when working well, to a Golf GTi, the original pocket rocket. You don't get the big sound, sharp performance, with rubber band suspensions ...

Frank

 

[fas42]

Yeah but Frank, which recordings do we know that are in-phase, and the others out-of-phase?

You know, that's an important point.

I've never been fussed about phase of recordings, Bob. I'm sure that there will be a clear audible difference but it doesn't get in the way of the sound quality thing for me. The ear/brain does a brilliant job of sorting everything out if you give it enough non-murky clues, which is what I worry about.

Frank

 

[NorthStar]

Well, sometimes the entire soundstage collapses, and the imaging suffers greatly.

 

[RBFC]

You're not learning, Bob, this is a big no-no . -- the answer is to simply, simplify, simplify ...

Frank

Frank, I believe we're ALL still learning here. Please stick to the thread topic.

Lee