Re: [Harp-L] Re: music and perception




Neil Young is well known for despising CD quality sound. His opinion is that there's nothing better than vinyl, at least through a good system/cartridge and those first few plays until the disc becomes damaged, warped, whatever.

Neil Young can afford a heck of a great stereo. I might prefer vinyl too if I could afford one and if I could afford to keep buying a vinyl disk for each record that was starting to sound chewy. I used to record new vinyl to casette to preserve a relic of the non-chewy sound. Quite often the only time the vinyl got played was the first time. Then a few years after I started doing this I put a few of those vinyls on my turntable and the single play, and time, caused the vinyl to deteriorate and make it as unlistenable for me as MP3s are for FJM.


You may recall that a vinyl master lasted about 2000 pressings before it had to be replaced. If you were in the music business, as I was, during the vinyl era, you knew that pressing 3000 or more platters to cut costs was very, very common. And frankly as you approached 2000 platters quality started dropping precipitously. The best stores, the ones that gave the least discount, got the early runs, but there were whole regions of the US that only got the later part of the run. Most of the vinyl in your collection and mine was later-run.

There were more grades of vinyl than there are of pizza mozzarella, and guess where the labels cut costs again. That's right, customers had to pay extra for 'audiophile' quality vinyl or they got the Pizza Hut kind.

And, we were told, the longer the platter stayed in the press the better the quality, and a friend who could do so demonstrated to me the truth of that. And guess what again? The suits cut costs by speeding up production.

I can't remember the name anymore, but RCA came out with a process that produced a much thinner platter. They hyped it on the cover of every album like it was actually a feature, but the music people at RCA shook their heads at the reduced quality of the sound, and the fewer plays you could get from it. And you wouldn't believe how pissed off the music people at Capitol Nashville were at the crummy quality of the vinyl pressings. Even Neil Young couldn't buy a well-pressed Merle Haggard record.

CDs, for me, are vinyl for a guy with a harp player's income. Or at least that idealized vinyl that I keep hearing about but never got to hear.

I will also, annoyingly, repeat what the great jazz engineer Rudy van Gelder said about digital recording, since he was also talking about CD sound. He said "Digital sound is what we were going for all along."

The only a/b'ing of vinyl vs. CD that I ever did was back in '85 through '87, when I had both a CD player and a turntable. The first, often cheezy, CD reissues were coming out, and I was able to a/b my favorite albums on both formats. Two years of a/b'ing, frankly, because I was intrigued by how great the CDs sounded next to the vinyl, and was amazed by all the people who were definitively stating, even back then, how much better vinyl was than CD, and I wanted to see if I could finally hear what I was clearly missing.

By 1988 my albums were in storage and my turntable was in heaven, as it had been a good and loyal friend for years and deserved no less.

I absolutely believe people who prefer vinyl hear something I don't hear, that it is not The Kings New Clothes. But I have good ears too.

And in terms of digital vs. analog recording, so many great recordings have been made in both eras that it is impossible to really compare. But just because I love, say, Sonny Boy Williamson's recordings on Trumpet, or Aja by Steely Dan, doesn't mean my ears can't also be delighted by Hearts and Bones, an early and beautiful digital recording by Paul Simon.

I know a hip hop producer, a very good one, who did something interesting for a while with his singles releases. He'd record and mix the tracks digitally and use samples off CDs even if they were recorded analog. But he'd record his singer analog. THEN he'd get the vocal alone mastered and pressed to vinyl. THEN he'd go back in the studio and dub the vinyl-based vocal to a track of his digital recording.

What a cool idea. He said it helped the vocal stand out just a wee bit. But I bet he wouldn't have used that vinyl a second time, as it would not have sounded as good.

K





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