Couldn't wait...

[Stephen Swann]

Paul Mather writes:
>
> On Sun, 6 Dec 1998, Patrick Cordiner wrote:
>
> => Yes, as soon as you get pretty much any of the old CD's onto a new stereo
> => these days they sound like shit (Hawkind and BOC are both at fault here).
>
> I'm not quite sure here, but are you saying the Hawkwind EMI remasters
> blow chunks?  (They are the first Hawkwind albums.)  They sound pretty
> spiffy to me.

Actually, are you ready for this one?  I'm about to eat my own words,
here (my words of a year or so ago).

The EMI remasters sound "soft".  There, I've said it.  Basically, the
processing software used to clean up those albums appears to have
had the following effects:

1.  It reduces hiss and general background noise
2.  It softens the "attack" of the instruments - the string plucks
    don't sound as crisp.

Frankly, after much listening with the new system, I've decided that
my personal favorite CDs of the early Hawkwind albums are One Way, who
appear to have done the least muddling with the sources.  The worst
are Griffin, which are positively muffled, and sound like they're
wallowing in syrup.

Frankly, when I did comparisons of all my copies of _Live Chronicles_,
I found that none of the CDs reproduced the guitar and other mid-range
sounds as nicely as the vinyl.  (Or even as well as the minidisc
transcription of the vinyl that I made!).

> => In comparison the production qualities of albums from the same era of (for
> => example) Black Sabbath and Deep Purple have higher sound quality, but of
> => course with bands such as D.P. you are mainly relying on production to
> => achieve a good sound as opposed to the band themselves. I would say the
>
> So what are you saying?  That Deep Purple and Black Sabbath were a load
> of Milli Vanillis and Frankie Goes to Hollywoods who covered up their
> lack of playing/musical ability with slick studio trickery??  If so, I'd
> say that was insulting, and would humbly disagree.

I'm going to ignore the insinuations about these bands' musical
prowess, and focus on the "sound" issue.  The fact is that the Black
Sabbath remasters sound *awesome*, even on a highly revealing system.

(As a ide note, _Black Sabbath_, and _Welcome to Sky Valley_ were two
of the dozen or so test disks that I used when auditioning speakers.
It was Kyuss that revealed the sorry bass response of just about every
brand of speaker on the market these days, btw.)

Anyway, my point is that Sony's "SuperBitMapping" technique used on
the Black Sabbath masters appears to have the quality of preserving
the sound of the original recording as much as possible (noise,
harshness and all), rather than blunting the edge of the music in the
interests of making it sound "cleaner" (like Mobile Fidelity does
sometimes on really old, bad recordings, and EMI did with the Hawkwind
remasters).

That said, I still think the EMI remasters have a lot to be said for
them, unless you're planning on spending the several thousands of
dollars on stereo system upgrades that it would take to reveal their
shortcomings.  Same thing with Mobile Fidelity, to some extent,
although I stick to my assertion that Mobile Fidelity makes a fuckup
of really bad recordings, by using too heavy-handed a noise suppression
algorithm.  On Thick As A Brick, for instance, you can actually hear
the algorithm kick in, and back out again in the "dead space" where
the band pauses between notes.  As the note fades out, you can hear
the hiss sharply descrease, like someone manually turning down the
record level, and then just as the next note is starting after the
pause, you hear the hiss suddenly rush back in...  It sounds sort
of ridiculous.

> => main albums that stand out for me in terms of actual sound mixing would
> => have to be `Warrior on the edge of time' and `OYFOYK' (sheerly because of
> => the ability to get such a good sound out of a concert, personally comparing
> => the quailty of that to, say `Some Enchanted Evening' ).
>
> Off the top of my head, my candidate for the #1 worst legit Hawkwind CD
> transfer would be the Dojo _Chronicle of the Black Sword_, which sounds
> like it was mastered straight from a master ED'd for vinyl.  (The vinyl,
> on the other hand, sounds nice.)

Haven't heard that one.  My personal candidate for "worst offender" is
Griffin's _Live Chronicles_, which sounds positively muddy.  This
despite the fact that the various other reproductions of _LC_ indicate
strongly that it came from a set of good, clean sources (maybe when
Griffin bought the rights to it, they were shipped a bad copy of the
masters?).

Steve
swann at plutonia.com