Is the dynamic range of CD sufficient?

[Mark (Basspig) Weiss]

Because everyone who loves LPs are basically very stupid people who just don't understand how much better CDs sound than LPs. Maybe one of these days all of the idiots that love LPs will come to their senses and realize how wrong we are for preferring the sound of LPs over their digital third cousin who is twice removed.

It must be about what sounds pleasant, rather than what's accurate. Granted, the first CDs were mastered from RIAA-equalized masters and sounded shrill and I think that left a too long lasting negative impression on folks who listened to CD once in 1983, hated the sibilance and returned to LP, never to reinvestigate in the future. While the volume wars in the 1990s served to earn much negative opinions, properly produced digital audio with no compression sounds amazing. Even old analog masters from the '50-70s sound amazingly better than their LP counterparts. I have several remastered classic albums that were so-so in vinyl, but knock my socks off as digital remastered from the original tapes.

 

[Julf]

SACD, like other forms of PCM, requires no decoder. Delta mod (be it one bit or otherwise) does require a decoder.

Uh, yes... You are right - SACD is the direct output of the delta-sigma modulator. I stand corrected.

Thanks for reminding me that while reading something is good, understanding it is even better...

 

[Al M.]

While the volume wars in the 1990s served to earn much negative opinions, properly produced digital audio with no compression sounds amazing.

Yes, since I listen mostly to classical and classical avantgarde where there is hardly ever any compression applied I have plently of opportunity to enjoy this.

Even old analog masters from the '50-70s sound amazingly better than their LP counterparts. I have several remastered classic albums that were so-so in vinyl, but knock my socks off as digital remastered from the original tapes.

I already wanted to reply, that depends on the quality of the turntable used, but then I realized this is not true, and you are right with your observations. A friend of mine has a 20 grand turntable (Nottingham table/arm with Benz cartridge) on which great recordings and pressings sound amazing. Yet a lot of the stuff, especially pop/rock, sounds just mediocre. I think it's not just the mastering of the recordings, it's the common bad-quality pressings too that appear to be the culprit (and that's not just a recent problem, it holds for '60s pressings too). With CDs pressings are much less of an issue (and the problem should be virtually eliminated if reading the information from hard drive rather than from optical disc). I guess that is why vinyl audiophiles are always on the hunt for the best pressings they can get. A lot of the time any old average production run just doesn't cut it.

On the other hand, there also are remasterings of old tapes on CD that just don't sound very good.

 

[Mark (Basspig) Weiss]

Yes, since I listen mostly to classical and classical avantgarde where there is hardly ever any compression applied I have plently of opportunity to enjoy this.



I already wanted to reply, that depends on the quality of the turntable used, but then I realized this is not true, and you are right with your observations. A friend of mine has a 20 grand turntable (Nottingham table/arm with Benz cartridge) on which great recordings and pressings sound amazing. Yet a lot of the stuff, especially pop/rock, sounds just mediocre. I think it's not just the mastering of the recordings, it's the common bad-quality pressings too that appear to be the culprit (and that's not just a recent problem, it holds for '60s pressings too). With CDs pressings are much less of an issue (and the problem should be virtually eliminated if reading the information from hard drive rather than from optical disc). I guess that is why vinyl audiophiles are always on the hunt for the best pressings they can get. A lot of the time any old average production run just doesn't cut it.

On the other hand, there also are remasterings of old tapes on CD that just don't sound very good.

It's true that mastering engineers can take a decent master and totally screw it up. That said, all things being equal on the mastering side, a good digital recording eliminates the mechanical noise and tracking distortion of a rock that's scraping through a groove. THere's no getting around the imperfections of vinyl, no matter how expensive the turntable and cartridge.

 

[Al M.]

It's true that mastering engineers can take a decent master and totally screw it up. That said, all things being equal on the mastering side, a good digital recording eliminates the mechanical noise and tracking distortion of a rock that's scraping through a groove. THere's no getting around the imperfections of vinyl, no matter how expensive the turntable and cartridge.

That is why I gave up on vinyl as CDs became widely available. I just couldn't stand the clicks and pops and noise -- I had not liked vinyl long before the CD came out. When your obsession becomes cleaning records instead of listening to the music, as at some point it did for me, you just know that the medium doesn't work for you.

I can enjoy listening to my friend's system, but vinyl for me? No thanks.

 

[Julf]

That is why I gave up on vinyl as CDs became widely available. I just couldn't stand the clicks and pops and noise.

For me it was also the slightly obsessive knowledge that every time I was playing a LP, I was actually wearing it down and damaging it. As someone pointed out, the "perfect sound forever" marketing slogan for CD wasn't so much about the sound being supposedly perfect, but about how it would stay exactly the same, no matter how many times you played it.

 

[microstrip]

It's true that mastering engineers can take a decent master and totally screw it up. That said, all things being equal on the mastering side, a good digital recording eliminates the mechanical noise and tracking distortion of a rock that's scraping through a groove. THere's no getting around the imperfections of vinyl, no matter how expensive the turntable and cartridge.

Surely. If man could fly, they would surely avoid the imperfections of the pathway.

 

[microstrip]

It must be about what sounds pleasant, rather than what's accurate. Granted, the first CDs were mastered from RIAA-equalized masters and sounded shrill and I think that left a too long lasting negative impression on folks who listened to CD once in 1983, hated the sibilance and returned to LP, never to reinvestigate in the future. While the volume wars in the 1990s served to earn much negative opinions, properly produced digital audio with no compression sounds amazing. Even old analog masters from the '50-70s sound amazingly better than their LP counterparts. I have several remastered classic albums that were so-so in vinyl, but knock my socks off as digital remastered from the original tapes.

An often used and abused misleading argument. This happened with a few exceptional CD releases - the numbers were so small that no one can remember their names - and has been used to explain all the inferior sounding CDs.

Can you tell us the names of these classic recordings you are referring? Although they can not be used as evidence, as they have been remastered, I would be very pleased to listen to them. BTW, I am not a fundamentalist - if a CD recording sounds better than LP I am happy with that. Unfortunately, in my music collection this happens too seldom.

 

[Phelonious Ponk]

An often used and abused misleading argument. This happened with a few exceptional CD releases - the numbers were so small that no one can remember their names - and has been used to explain all the inferior sounding CDs.

Can you tell us the names of these classic recordings you are referring? Although they can not be used as evidence, as they have been remastered, I would be very pleased to listen to them. BTW, I am not a fundamentalist - if a CD recording sounds better than LP I am happy with that. Unfortunately, in my music collection this happens too seldom.

I don't have any inside track to the record industry that could tell me what was wrong with them, but Led Zepplin I, II and III seem likely candidates. Honestly, I didn't hear a lot of this legendary problem, because I didn't start to switch over until '92, and didn't start buying CD titles I already owned on vinyl until much later. But LZ was a band I had admired, but not collected (I had IV and Houses of the Holy on vinyl), so I filled out my budding CD collection with their fisrt 3 albums. I still have them; they're very flat and bright. I have no idea if that was RIAA eq on the master or just shoddy work in general. I do know that it wasn't the media, because I have th re-masters, and because the new releases I bought on CD at the time did not have that problem. They didn't sound like vinyl, but they didn't have that problem. When I began to switch my collection over to CD years later, the issue was, for the most part, gone. One exception would be the Beatles CDs. Those are pretty flat and thin. The re-masters from a few years ago are very nice. Again, they don't sound like vinyl, but they shouldn't. That would be wrong.

Micro can you refer us to any experts who've said that RIAA equalized masters were used to make CDs was a very small number? Where did you get this idea that this only happened to "a few exceptional CD releases?" I have no idea, myself. But it's not at all hard to imagine an industry driven by money, trying to convert their customer base to a whole new format, cranking out that new format from the old one without going through re-mastering every title. In fact, it's a bit hard to imagine that a lot of that didn't happen.

Tim

 

[microstrip]

(...) Micro can you refer us to any experts who've said that RIAA equalized masters were used to make CDs was a very small number? Where did you get this idea that this only happened to "a few exceptional CD releases?" I have no idea, myself. But it's not at all hard to imagine an industry driven by money, trying to convert their customer base to a whole new format, cranking out that new format from the old one without going through re-mastering every title. In fact, it's a bit hard to imagine that a lot of that didn't happen.

Tim

Tim,

Unfortunately I do not have signed reports from experts to please you. However what I read is that in a few cases, where the original master tapes were no more available, the recording companies released CD from masters prepared for LP manufacturing. BTW, one of the sources for this information is the F. Toole book Sound Reproduction, another was an old article of Gramophone about the birth of CD.

I think that most of the WBF digital supporters that claim that CD was excellent since day one will also consider that the number of early poor digital recording is relatively low.

 

[MylesBAstor]

An often used and abused misleading argument. This happened with a few exceptional CD releases - the numbers were so small that no one can remember their names - and has been used to explain all the inferior sounding CDs.

Can you tell us the names of these classic recordings you are referring? Although they can not be used as evidence, as they have been remastered, I would be very pleased to listen to them. BTW, I am not a fundamentalist - if a CD recording sounds better than LP I am happy with that. Unfortunately, in my music collection this happens too seldom.

That kinda flies in the face of what most people reported eg. the most listenable CDs in the early days were those reissued from analog recordings.

 

[FrantzM]

That kinda flies in the face of what most people reported eg. the most listenable CDs in the early days were those reissued from analog recordings.

Thus , doesn't that suggest that the problem is not CD/Digital but the recording/Mastering?

 

[microstrip]

Thus , doesn't that suggest that the problem is not CD/Digital but the recording/Mastering?

We will never be able to separate completely the recording/mastering from the format. We just analyze the statistics of our experiences and from there we make our opinions. It is why it the frequency of events is important. IMHO a way of avoiding these long lasting unique negative biases is just considering the top quality recordings and experiences with each media.

What really counts is the end result - and the suspension of disbelief is an important part of it. If by any reason the sound engineers did not use the fantastic technical capabilities of digital properly, it is a shame. Unfortunately the CD supporters who should help us to understand better the subjective digital features and capabilities spend most of their their time addressing the LP promoters feelings than finding any systematic in the differences between different CD playback systems and analyzing the best equipment - many of them just state that everything sounds almost the same since day one or may be day two.

 

[esldude]

While it certainly may have happened in isolated cases, I am quite dubious that bad sounding early CD was because many re-issues came from an RIAA EQ'd tape. For one thing, if you believe you have such a CD it is easily solved these days. Dump it in a sound editor and apply RIAA curves. That isn't the problem with Led Zepp's early CD's. I just tried it on a couple tracks. Way too much EQ, and it sounds not at all right then (not that it sounds all that right before doing it).

What I have heard, which is just that hearsay, is early on tapes were EQ'd for CD release by people used to the final result being rolled off. Not necessarily RIAA, just a general feeling highs got soft. CD didn't do that, and too many were released in a manner too hot. I don't even know how true that is. I can believe people took time to adjust somewhat to a new medium compared to habits of the past. Again however, none of this indicates a problem with digital audio or the CD itself. Just poor mastering technique.

 

[Phelonious Ponk]

Tim,

Unfortunately I do not have signed reports from experts to please you. However what I read is that in a few cases, where the original master tapes were no more available, the recording companies released CD from masters prepared for LP manufacturing. BTW, one of the sources for this information is the F. Toole book Sound Reproduction, another was an old article of Gramophone about the birth of CD.

I think that most of the WBF digital supporters that claim that CD was excellent since day one will also consider that the number of early poor digital recording is relatively low.

I meant no of fence, but you said the numbers were very small, and seemed so confident I thought perhaps you had a sourcetim

 

[Julf]

[Comment deleted, against the TOS of the WBF]

Somewhat surprised to see this. Not sure why the message from JJ was singled out.

 

[Orb]

Uh, yes... You are right - SACD is the direct output of the delta-sigma modulator. I stand corrected.

Thanks for reminding me that while reading something is good, understanding it is even better...

Sigh,
you could not move on could you even though you do not know those who post on here; might be surprised to know some of us do work within global PHD team and touch work with university research labs, along with other manufacturer/companies research labs and invited to participate in task forces (I have been invited onto several and also personally invited to assist with other manufacturers/software/technology development committees).
In other words do not make assumptions, ironically some on HA work for my old boss (used to post there and also DIYAudio a long time ago myself) - not naming the company so feel free to say I am BS.
Maybe we should move on eh.
And yes that post of yours was a deliberate swipe at me considering you did that a few times earlier as well.
Orb

 

[MylesBAstor]

Thus , doesn't that suggest that the problem is not CD/Digital but the recording/Mastering?

Key word is "most listenable."

 

[Julf]

you could not move on could you even though you do not know those who post on here

You have a point - if JJ's messages gets censored, but your ones not, I do think it is time for me to move on.

might be surprised to know some of us do work within global PHD team and touch work with university research labs, along with other manufacturer/companies research labs and invited to participate in task forces (I have been invited onto several and also personally invited to assist with other manufacturers/software/technology development committees).

You might be surprised to know that that applies (or has applied in the past) to both me and JJ too. I am sure my task force is bigger than your task force anyway.

In other words do not make assumptions

Indeed.

Maybe we should move on eh.

Good idea.

 

[Orb]

Changing the point I see Julf yet again as it was you who made assumptions about me - and yet again being petty with the followup "sure my task force is bigger than your task force".
The context was your post, which was petty and a swipe at me with "how wrong to provide papers for others to read and not understanding them myself" (my quote as basically that is what it comes down to), even though they were pretty clear and fit within context of the technical arguing we had and also my background....
There is a reason why some posts are censored Julf and it has nothing to do with who we are, now can we finally move on.
BTW I know who JJ is as quite a few on here do as well, along with his background.
Orb