Jazz recording tonight with all my DIY stuff!

[Tubetec]

Theres all sorts of limitations with the process of cutting to disk that mean it cant sound the same as the digital master ,

What about the great members we have here who are passionate and dedicated themselves to vinyl cutting , Like Paul Gold and Brian Roth ,

Whoops you're getting up on your high horse again , vinyl is rubbish and a 100$ audio interface isnt worthy of recording musicians ,

The best hardware in the world in the hands of someone who doesnt know what their doing can still sound like shit , meanwhile even a humble audio interface in the hands of people who do know what their doing can sound great .

 

[Mr. Moscode]

Theres all sorts of limitations with the process of cutting to disk that mean it cant sound the same as the digital master

Thank God! At least the needle moves the way sound does, as a continuous wave.

What about the great members we have here who are passionate and dedicated themselves to vinyl cutting , Like Paul Gold and Brian Roth ,

Whoops you're getting up on your high horse again , vinyl is rubbish and a 100$ audio interface isnt worthy of recording musicians ,

The best hardware in the world in the hands of someone who doesnt know what their doing can still sound like shit , meanwhile even a humble audio interface in the hands of people who do know what their doing can sound great

Great enough anyway.

I assume you are referring to Red Book CDs. For what was touted as the perfect medium billions of dollars have been spent to make it sound as good as live.

I have some recently made CDs that are unlistenable, period.
On others it's passable. I have some SACDs that sound really great. And I have a very transparent playback system. Higher bit depth and rates does sound much less grainy.

The more transparent the playback system is, the clearer the limitations of Red Book becomes.

I've spent 40 years in the hi end audio market and I'm a professional musician with 56 years on the bandstand. I know a live cymbal from a recorded one.
That's my story and I'm sticking with it.

And I feel relief when I put on Bill Evans Live at the Vanguard vinyl. And a bit of surface noise doesn't bother me.

A long time ago I was at RCA studio in Manhattan during the recording of a Red Rodney CD by Chesky Records. I was listening to a rehearsal then I went into the control room and listened. Apparently 90% of the sound, music never made it out of the studio. It's amazing what our minds can do to fill in the missing pieces.

To each his/her/their own.

 

[Lampie519]

The more transparent the playback system is, the clearer the limitations of Red Book becomes.

I found the oposite to be true. SACD is no match to Red book as is no vinyl.
Standard 16 bit at high sampling rate when done correctly is free of any grain and most natural sounding of all. High resolution may be better on paper but doesn’t in practice. Everyone who came listening was convinced after a few notes playing.
I have a dual mono output on my cd player that allows 2x176 khz at 16 bit on the S/Pdif outputs. This is audible not the bitrate.

 

[k brown]

I found the oposite to be true. SACD is no match to Red book as is no vinyl.
Standard 16 bit at high sampling rate when done correctly is free of any grain and most natural sounding of all. High resolution may be better on paper but doesn’t in practice. Everyone who came listening was convinced after a few notes playing.
I have a dual mono output on my cd player that allows 2x176 khz at 16 bit on the S/Pdif outputs. This is audible not the bitrate.

You're saying you find 16bit to sound smoother than 24bit?

Or just that high sampling rate is more audible than bit depth.

 

[Mr. Moscode]

This is nuts to get into this argument. This is the furthest thing from a controlled comparison as we can possibly get. There are at least hundreds or more variables for each recording chain, and variations between even the same equipment, not to mention the mastering process. We aren't talking about the same analogue source. There is no absolute.

There are practically infinite combinations of play back chains.

They airbrush the Playmate model's pictures in Playboy, when there was Playboy mag. Make up doesn't hurt either. I like vinyl for that reason.

That said, Frank - Do you upsample the cds?

 

[Lampie519]

I say that the difference is not audible, not near as it is claimed ( marketing claims). The benefit is S/N ratio but anything beyond 100dB is lost anyway in the entire signal chain.
Sampling rate is very much audible indeed but can be a bad thing as well as it can be a cause of the “digital sound” in case it not done correctly.
There are many who just removed any so called digital filters. This can be a first step in the right direction but needs steep analog filtering if you care about a clean signal (some don’t care).
In case the sampling rate is increased the filtering can be simpler.
But for dynamic range in playback systems a high bitrange is not justified.
This in contrast of recording where high bitrange is desirable ( i use 32bit float now) to prevent clipping in the converters if you like to stay far away from the noise floor.

 

[Lampie519]

That said, Frank - Do you upsample the cds?

Yes, the Red book player does this for me. Now i have added an input so i can use other sources as the Philips transport is to be desired.
There are better upscalers but my D/A converter is limited to 192Khz. So it is of no use to me.
The differences are subtle but once heard difficult to return to the “old” situation.

 

[Mr. Moscode]

Yes, the Red book player does this for me. Now i have added an input so i can use other sources as the Philips transport is to be desired.
There are better upscalers but my D/A converter is limited to 192Khz. So it is of no use to me.
The differences are subtle but once heard difficult to return to the “old” situation.

Exactly. Once one has heard great sound, one knows great sound. Difficult to go back to the high overhead girlfriend. (Mixed metaphor, I know) Overhead being the difficulty one's brain has dealing with the visceral reaction to the "not right", i.e. listener fatigue, the constant search for "Ah, beautiful!!" The continuing saga of the relentless pursuit.

I know you know.

 

[Gold]

Theres all sorts of limitations with the process of cutting to disk that mean it cant sound the same as the digital master ,

What about the great members we have here who are passionate and dedicated themselves to vinyl cutting , Like Paul Gold and Brian

I don’t think Brian cuts but point taken. I thought about responding but then thought better of it. I try not to argue about subjective things unless they are flat out wrong. What he said is not technically wrong. I would say that the technical limitations of vinyl are its benefits. If something doesn’t translate well to vinyl it’s poorly engineered.

 

[Whoops]

What about the great members we have here who are passionate and dedicated themselves to vinyl cutting , Like Paul Gold and Brian Roth ,

I have just the huge amount of respect for Paul's work, and also for Brian as a member, although I don't know his work.

Having respect for Paul's work doesn't mean that I have to defend Vinyl as a final medium when there's nothing to defend about it.
Professional Tape was much better sounding but it was expensive and time consuming to manufacture to be be used as a final medium to be sold to the public.
Some cheaper liquid plastic that was easily pressed and where a factory could manufacture a lot of different copies in one hour was much easy as an end user format than tape, although it sounded much worse, that's the only reason why Vinyl was used it was never because of it's quality.

A good digital copy of a Master Tape still sounds much similar to the Master Tape than any Vinyl ever made.
And I rest my case.

Whoops you're getting up on your high horse again ,

What does that mean really? can you care to explain?
Also what "again" means?

My thoughts and my sharings are from a professional with many years of experience,
that works every day in mixing or mastering.

vinyl is rubbish

Yes it is.
Do you do Pre-Masters for Vinyl? Do you have any idea of the amount of limitations you have to put into a great sounding Digital Mix or Tape Mix to be cut into Vinyl?
Do you have any idea that actually a great sounding mix (Tape or Digital) has to be degraded?

Do you know the Vinyl Mastering preparation specs?

and a 100$ audio interface isnt worthy of recording musicians ,

Who said that?
It was not me for sure

I think you are for sure really confused.
If you are making accusations please prove that I ever said anything along those lines.

The best hardware in the world in the hands of someone who doesnt know what their doing can still sound like shit , meanwhile even a humble audio interface in the hands of people who do know what their doing can sound great .

I totally agree with that and I will be the first person to say that.
So nothing new there for me, you are preaching to the wrong person

 

[Whoops]

If something doesn’t translate well to vinyl it’s poorly engineered.

Hi Paul,
every album that I do the Vinyl Pre-Mastering (normally records that have great sounding digital mixes to begin with) and send to the plants translates well into Vinyl, in the sense it still sounds alright.
But the end Vinyl, always and always sounds much worse than the Digital Pre-Master that I send to the plant.
That's independent of the plant it's manufactured or the person that cuts it, as all labels do it in different places, so I had a lot of places to compared with.
So it's not a translation problem, it's just that the end Vinyl is always worse than what we send, and always much worse than the original digital mixes and the original digital master.

I'm constantly learning and trying to improve my work, and as you are really experienced with Vinyl maybe you can give me some tips on how to at least shorten that distance (sound difference between digital pre master and final Vinyl).
If that's possible please let me know and I contact you privately.

Thank you so much

 

[Whoops]

I have some recently made CDs that are unlistenable, period.

So that's the problem, you are confusing the sound of a very Limited Master that was put into a CD to the sound of the CD itself (16 Bit 44.1Khz).

It's not the CD format fault if someone decided to put crap into it, and in some cases overly and excessive limited mixes/masters.

I remember in the 80's when the change from Vinyl to CD happened (before the use of brickwall limiters) how much better the CD releases sounded compared to any Vinyl release of the same record.
I was amazed and impressed with the sound quality when I got rid of all my Vinyl records and replaced them with CD releases.
Everyone was pretty happy also that CD came along and no one was sorry to ditch Vinyl.

My George Marino 80's CD remasters of the Led Zeppelin discography are still my best sounding Led Zeppelin releases ever (Subjective for sure), and I have all the original Vinyl releases of the same records.

I also agree that Music with excess of brickwall limiting sounds pretty bad, and if it's put into a CD or a 24bit 192khz WAV file, of course it will still sound crap. But that's not the sound of the CD, or a WAV 24bit 192khz, that's the sound of distorted and overly limited audio.

For Vinyl it doesn't happen that much because overly Limited sources make it hard to cut, so in this case Vinyl limitation can be it's benefit, as CD and WAV files don't have that limitation.
Although Modern Vinyl releases I can notice that brick-wall limiting was applied before the cut, and sometimes quite much more than you would expect.

Digital Streaming quality is improving by the day, and actually it came to help in reducing the Loudness Wars with their standard of -14 LUFS, I can see that records are not as limited nowadays as they were around 14/15 years ago.

But like I said a Good Digital Copy of any source still sounds much more similar to the source than any Vinyl cut of that source.

 

[Gold]

That's independent of the plant it's manufactured or the person that cuts it, as all labels do it in different places, so I had a lot of places to compared with.
So it's not a translation problem, it's just that the end Vinyl is always worse than what we send, and always much worse than the original digital mixes and the original digital master

I’d draw the opposite conclusion. It is a translation problem. The mixes can’t be cut cleanly.

As you know vinyl has lots of limitations. To get the best cut there should be no dynamic range and limited bandwidth. The farther you deviate from this the worse the record will sound. I’m kind of half joking. Meaning it’s really the truth.

As an example, snappy percussion and close mic’ed uncompressed vocals may sound good but it is a technical disaster. I’d submit a disaster for everything even if the consequences aren’t as severe as with vinyl.

 

[Brian Roth]

I don’t think Brian cuts but point taken.

Indeed, I am not a cutter....I just maintain all the gear in a lacquer cutting room. I've watched the process a jillion times and know just enough to be dangerous if I actually did cut lacquers! <g>

Bri

 

[Gold]

Indeed, I am not a cutter....I just maintain all the gear in a lacquer cutting room. I've watched the process a jillion times and know just enough to be dangerous if I actually did cut lacquers! <g>

Bri

I saw the giant pile of stuff at Chris’s. It should be much easier to maintain after he gets done with it.

 

[Brian Roth]

I saw the giant pile of stuff at Chris’s. It should be much easier to maintain after he gets done with it.

Yes, the Doug Sax (The Mastering Lab) system had dual lathes. It was cut down (NOT by me) into a single lathe setup that is in place here. There are extra cutting amps as well. Chris picked up all the extra parts to do a rebuild.

Bri

 

[Brian Roth]

Professional Tape was much better sounding but it was expensive and time consuming to manufacture to be be used as a final medium to be sold to the public.

In addition to having a lacquer cutting system here, I also maintain an adjacent studio which does 1:1 speed copies onto open reel tape. A niche market for sure, but there is a market for high end product like this.



https://store.acousticsounds.com/c/397/Reel_to_Reel
Bri

 

[Gold]

Yes, the Doug Sax (The Mastering Lab) system had dual lathes. It was cut down (NOT by me) into a single lathe setup that is in place here. There are extra cutting amps as well. Chris picked up all the extra parts to do a rebuild.

Bri

I've heard rumors that my old Neumann SP75 may be a part of that. It was originally a Sterling console. I got it out of their storage space when they cleaned that out. I sold it when I had the A side transfer path and monitor and meters of Shaker Desk to replace it. It went to a pressing plant in NJ where it sat until Chris picked it up.

 

[Brian Roth]

All of the audio electronics were custom built by/for Doug Sax. The cutting amps were vacuum tube based and built by his brother, Sherwood Sax. The EQ and limiters in the desk were also custom Sax units.

Bri

 

[Gold]

Is it an A/B path setup? The SP75 has A/B path switching built in. It only switches the RV75 level adjustors and the OE Duo EQ’s. Chris said Chad wanted it.