HW: EMI Reissues

[Doug Pearson]

Interesting comments on 'Astounding' ... hopefully I'll address both
Steve's and Keith's excellent comments on that album in another message ...

On Tue, 8 Apr 2003 19:56:53 +0100, Captain Bl at ck <starfield at SUPANET.COM>
wrote:
>But back to the vinyl versus CD debate for a moment; the reason a lot of
>early CD reissues sounded so awful was
>
>a: because they were taken from the tapes used to master the vinyl; that is
>to say, the bass was rolled off (to fit it onto the LP groove).

There's the explanation of the RIAA eq curve for Steve!  The theory is ...
it takes more energy to generate bass tones than higher-frequency tones
(that's why, for instance, when the guitarist in a band is playing a 100
watt Marshall stack, the bassist needs a 300 watt SVT to remain audible),
and on vinyl, the energy of a signal is proportional to the width of the
groove.  So if you try to put "full energy" bass signals on vinyl, you risk
either breaking through the walls of one groove into the next one (which of
course makes the record unplayable), or you have huge grooves that cause so
much needle motion that skipping starts to become a major problem, even
with unscratched records (there are also issues with the transformers in
cartridges "clipping" if the bass signals are too strong, but that's more
theoretical than the other two concerns).  So to prevent this, records
are "cut" with the bass rolled off below around 500Hz (IIRC); this then
needs to be compensated for at the listener's end (otherwise, there would
be no audible bass), so phono preamps typically have an eq curve that
boosts signals below 500Hz to restore the bass.  Some older LP's actually
list the slope and cutoff frequency of the RIAA curve, but I'm not looking
at any right at this moment ...

However, I was under the impression that the RIAA eq is applied when the
vinyl master is cut (between the tape player and the cutting lathe), and
not to the actual tape that the master is cut from.  But I could certainly
be wrong about that ...

>b: They used poor quality A-D converters.

These days, $100 soundcards have better converters than the ones used in
professional studios in the 80's.

>And Doug touched upon something else in his reply; why so many modern CD's
>are recorded with a minimal dynamic range compared to the theoretical
>possibilities of the medium.
>
>Shall you tell 'em or shall I?

Louder sounds "better" (a well-known psychoacoustic phenomenon), and
compressed sounds "louder" (because the total energy:peak energy ratio is
higher at the same volume level).  (And compressed-to-hell, like most
modern rock CD's, sounds "like shit", IMHO.  But the "right amount" of
compression is one of the most important ingredients of a good mastering or
remastering job.)

    -Doug (sorry if I'm getting too off-topic again! feel free to shoot me!)
     jasret at mindspring.com