If you want to go down an audiophile rabbit hole, here's a good one

GroupDIY Audio Forum

Help Support GroupDIY Audio Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

emrr

Well-known member
Joined
Apr 12, 2006
Messages
8,525
Location
NC, USA
https://community.klipsch.com/index.php?/topic/155096-the-missing-octaves-audacity-remastering-to-restore-tracks/

Premise:  engineers and mastering houses conspire to make bad sound. 
 
I am not sure what to make of this article. A lot of what he says is true. The only debatable part is why the cut in bass. The only obvious error I found was in his misunderstanding of the RIAA curves.

Cheers

Ian
 
ruffrecords said:
I am not sure what to make of this article. A lot of what he says is true. The only debatable part is why the cut in bass. The only obvious error I found was in his misunderstanding of the RIAA curves.

Cheers

Ian

It all has to do with the low end requirements needed to cut vinyl properly and that a huge portion of "pre 1991" cd's were made from masters that were originally eq'd for vinyl.

Remember "Music fans use their equipment to listen to your music; audiophiles use your music to listen to their equipment." - old truism
 
pucho812 said:
It all has to do with the low end requirements needed to cut vinyl properly and that a huge portion of "pre 1991" cd's were made from masters that were originally eq'd for vinyl.
Ding ding ding we have a winner....  I think I addressed this back in the '80s (in my audio mythology column) when people were complaining about "harsh" early CDs where many were rushed out without any sweetening or consideration for the flatter path, just printed from existing master tapes.

Low bass was always problematic for vinyl cartridge tracking, unless forced hard center.  Consumer playback was never very strong in bottom octaves. Cassette tape was likewise weak down there.
Remember "Music fans use their equipment to listen to your music; audiophiles use your music to listen to their equipment." - old truism
Several vinyl recordings owe their popularity to being difficult and capable of showcasing a system (1812 overture comes to mind).... 8)

JR
 
Yes, the requirements of vinyl, limited frequency range of many playback systems as well as perceived loudness play a big part.

But those guys are EQing the tracks in order to get the frequency response closer to white pink noise. Which makes no sense, since pitch, artistic choice and of course the dynamic (how the music plays out over time) are what actually dictates the distribution of frequencies for a given piece of music. Phase plays a role, too it may simply sound better with a low cut applied for how the time delay changes perception.

 
pucho812 said:
too much of the boom and the needle jumps off the vinyl...
Actually it's too much left-only, or right-only bass modulation that is a tracking issue, but center panned mono bass is less problematic. Some vinyl cutting lathes have an inductor shorting L and R channels together to force mono at low frequencies.  Digital media has no such concerns and arbitrarily wide frequency response.

HF content also tends to relax during processing/handling delays in the mechanical mastering process so HFs get boosted ahead of time to compensate. Printing a master with hot HF content to a flat medium can easily end up with too much HF.

JR
 
I don't buy this. It is too pat.

1.  Nearly all records in the UK in the 60s were mono. Needles jumping out of the groove is not an issue with mono. In the 70s it was the norm to pan bass and kick to the centre for this reason.
2. Lots of people in the UK were still using valve radios in big wooden cabinets and there was plenty of bass from them.
3. Artists routinely complained their (mono) records did not have as much bass as American records - this led to a number of expeditions to find out what kit they were using.
4. Master tapes in those days were not EQ'd for vinyl cutting. That was the cutting engineers job. Master tapes were sent from the UK to the US for cutting and manufacture there. Plenty of well documented examples of cuts of the same song from opposite sides of the Atlantic sounding different.
5. I heard many master tapes in the 70s in the studios they were recorded in. They do not lack bass.

Cheers

Ian
 
It's a forum for Klipsch owners.  No company management, just hosting.  All posts are from individuals. 

Central point is the growing group of hifi audio nuts  who think music spectral content should look like pink noise, and are re-EQing ('de-mastering' as the call it) to that curve with 'breathtaking' result.  No apparent interest in studying tue reality of music production. 
 
> nuts  who think music spectral content should look like white noise

OMG!!  (I hope they mean pink noise.)

I recorded many hours actual performance on very-flat minimal equipment, and spec-analyzed a lot of that. Never never ever saw "flat" (re pink). A few tracks were flat-bass down below 60Hz (one was strong to 32). Nearly none was flat over 1KHz; if it were, it would be sizzling.
 
JohnRoberts said:
Actually it's too much left-only, or right-only bass modulation that is a tracking issue, but center panned mono bass is less problematic.
It's really poorly correlated bass that makes the needle jump out; mono bass results in lateral excursion only, out-of-phase bass results in vertical excursion only. Excessive vertical amplitude may result in zero-depth of the groove, so the needle just goes anywhere (generally to the center, due to centripetal force).
Indeed, excessive lateral excursion results in reduced possible content, because the pitch must be increased accordingly. A major improvement occured when Neumann and Studer worked out the preview head system, where the pitch was "predicted" by analysing the signal coming from the sync (record) head before the actual repro signal hit the cutting head. That way, loud passages had a larger pitch than quieter ones, often permitting 25-30% more content. Today, it is easily done using a digital delay, either in hardware or from a DAW.

Some vinyl cutting lathes have an inductor shorting L and R channels together to force mono at low frequencies. 
Commonly known in Europe as "elliptical EQ", because it was monitored on an X-Y scope, showing a beautiful 45° (NE-SW) Lissajous when things were "right".
 
Yes, pink noise is what I meant to say, too.

There's a software that will analyze a track and show different curves for different time frames and will allow you to EQ the track (Har-Bal). It demonstrates pretty well how the music dictates the curve and how little sense there is in bending it to resemble a straight line.
 
abbey road d enfer said:
A major improvement occured when Neumann and Studer worked out the preview head system, where the pitch was "predicted" by analysing the signal coming from the sync (record) head before the actual repro signal hit the cutting head. That way, loud passages had a larger pitch than quieter ones, often permitting 25-30% more content.
While Neumann was working on the concept in the 1950's,
Larry Scully is usually credited for the achievement, which RCA Victor and Columbia quickly adopted.
You can read about it in the December 1956 edition of "High Fidelity Magazine".
Studer was a late comer to the preview tape machine party.
 
gridcurrent said:
While Neumann was working on the concept in the 1950's,
Larry Scully is usually credited for the achievement, which RCA Victor and Columbia quickly adopted.
You can read about it in the December 1956 edition of "High Fidelity Magazine".
Studer was a late comer to the preview tape machine party.
Look ahead is always useful for managing dynamics.

JR
 
emrr said:
Central point is the growing group of hifi audio nuts  who think music spectral content should look like pink noise, and are re-EQing ('de-mastering' as the call it) to that curve with 'breathtaking' result.  No apparent interest in studying tue reality of music production.

So their ideal album is Lou Reed's "Metal Machine Music?" I'm sure he'd be happy to hear that.
 

Latest posts

Back
Top