Today I went to a customer’s house to turn the water off to his water heater and drain it. Right when I walked in the door I saw some bookshelves on stand’s and when I went into the basement there were R2R tapes sitting on a rack, so I peeked around while he grabbed a hose and he had a listening room around the corner. Nothing drastic, you could just tell that audio was important to him. He was in his 70’s or 80’s and I said “are those audio tracks there?” So we got to have a good conversation about various thing’s all starting from audio. I could have just stuck the hose in the drain and said good day sir but I chose to engage and the conversation was great. What I learned from him is that early CD’s were mastered poorly, he said that he hated them but eventually learned that the studio engineer’s were learning what they were doing along the way. This lead to another observation of him, having hundreds of LP’s, as I asked him about his R2R recording’s of LP’s what he thought of comparing the two (knowing all along that a recording of a recording is never as good) but he gave me a gem of knowledge. Turns out along the way with Record’s they served the same fate as early CD’s only some recording studio’s would regularly put out terrible master’s and other’s would put out quality. I have complete faith that any LP made at the height of the technology with the best sound engineer’s will sound 10x better on LP than digital. And I’m thankful for that insight he gave me.
The very first CDs came out around 1983 and were all digitally converted from analog sources. The marketing departments came up with codes that they slapped on CD cases: “AAD”, “ADD”, and “DDD”. AAD meant analog first stage (recording), analog second stage (mixing), and digital third stage (mastering). The so-called best were DDD or digital, digital, digital.
See Dire Straits Brothers in Arms (1985) and Sting’s …Nothing like the Sun (1987) for two early DDD recordings. They said “these don’t hiss like records,” but to my ears almost every 1980s CD leaned toward being too bright and brittle on the early CD players. They also floated and skipped because they were held in place only by gravity.
A tube amp and full analog LP audiophile backlash soon began.
The music recording industry was DRAMATICALLY different in the analog era (pre digital Pro-Tools of 1989). Pro-Tools and similar software led to low budget home recording and DIY productions – recording is effectively free today. Those old studios cost a fortune to use and thereby filtered out many mediocre bands and performers. You had to pay to play back in the day.
Watch Sound City (2013) – it documents the history and end of an old time analog studio near Los Angeles.
To hear low-budget analog recordings versus what came out of better studios, check out The Replacements discography. Their Twin Tone albums from 1981 to 1984 sound…awful… They then went to Sire in 1985.
Most of the early 16 bit players CD players I’d agree, there was a period early on where error correction logic was almost none existent in the players themselves, so the quality of the spinning transports was very important, because more robust transports introduced less errors. Also related directly to Jitter, which wasn’t a thing anyone cared about at that point in time. It was a few years after the release of CD that Cambridge audio did the experiments that identified Jitter as a significant audible phenomenon.
I have a soft spot for the Phillips CD104, which was a 4x 14 bit player, with a transport built like a tank, but nothing in that period compared to the vinyl setup I was running at the time.
Part of that was Hardware, and part of it mastering, a lot of CD masters were direct Master tape copies, or worse, and that resulted in what I’d term very wishy washy sound (the format really didn’t convey dynamic range as well as Vinyl despite on paper being much better at it) with audible tape hiss, even ignoring the annoying treble, which was as much a problem with the filters being used before the transfer as it was the playback hardware. I wrote audio processing software in that period and you were working with 8MHz 32 bit processors, and memory that couldn’t hold an entire track, there were just severe limitations on what was feasible. There also weren’t any reasonably priced fast A to D converters, so most of the stuff was digitized directly to 44KHz, or later 48KHz, when DAT became a thing.
Brothers in arms was so much better than the other early CD’s is was silly. The solution to a lot of Digital problem’s early on was additional compression, which lead into the loudness wars.
Lot’s of things have been remastered over the years, and many have gotten better, one of the issues with streaming services is it’s often hard to know which version of something your listening to.
SACD for me was the big savior digitally, it brough back a lot of what Early CD couldn’t do.
Some older recording have never had good versions, or they aren’t readily available, the only digital version of Machine head that can hold a candle to the original Vinyl version, is the Japanese SACD release, and I’ve never found a good version of Bat out of Hell.
i am no expert and i don’t have the greatest equipment but i can tell you i’ve listened to steely dan albums on just about every streaming service and they don’t come close to the sound i remember from my vinyl albums in the 1970s and even then i only had middling quality equipment (albeit i listened quite a bit in quadrophonic). i would chalk it up to my poorer hearing, but other artists and albums do sound much better on the same streaming services, so i can only believe it’s the difference between vinyl and everything else.
𝑾𝒉𝒊𝒍𝒔𝒕 𝒕𝒂𝒑𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒇𝒓𝒐𝒎 𝑳𝑷𝒔 𝒘𝒂𝒔 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒑𝒓𝒆𝒇𝒇𝒆𝒓𝒆𝒅 𝒇𝒐𝒓𝒎 𝒐𝒇 𝒎𝒚 𝒆𝒂𝒓𝒍𝒊𝒆𝒔𝒕 𝒑𝒍𝒂𝒚𝒍𝒊𝒔𝒕𝒔, 𝑰 𝒅𝒊𝒅𝒏❜𝒕 𝒄𝒂𝒓𝒆 𝒊𝒇 𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒓𝒆 𝒘𝒂𝒔 𝒂 𝒔𝒍𝒊𝒈𝒉𝒕 𝒓𝒆𝒅𝒖𝒄𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏 𝒊𝒏 𝒔𝒐𝒏𝒊𝒄 𝒒𝒖𝒂𝒍𝒊𝒕𝒚, 𝒆𝒔𝒑𝒆𝒄𝒊𝒂𝒍𝒍𝒚 𝒔𝒊𝒏𝒄𝒆 𝒕𝒉𝒊𝒔 𝒎𝒆𝒂𝒏𝒕 𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒓𝒆 𝒘𝒂𝒔 𝒔𝒐 𝒍𝒊𝒕𝒕𝒍𝒆 𝒕𝒊𝒎𝒆 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝑳𝑷𝒔 𝒘𝒆𝒓𝒆 𝒖𝒏𝒅𝒆𝒓 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒏𝒆𝒆𝒅𝒍𝒆, 𝒘𝒉𝒊𝒄𝒉 𝒍𝒆𝒇𝒕 𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒎 𝒊𝒏 𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒊𝒓 𝒃𝒆𝒔𝒕 𝒑𝒐𝒔𝒔𝒊𝒃𝒍𝒆 𝒄𝒐𝒏𝒅𝒊𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏 𝒇𝒐𝒓 𝒐𝒄𝒄𝒂𝒔𝒊𝒐𝒏𝒂𝒍 𝒑𝒍𝒂𝒚𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒐𝒇 𝒇𝒖𝒍𝒍 𝒔𝒊𝒅𝒆𝒔 — 𝒇𝒆𝒘𝒆𝒓 𝒑𝒐𝒕𝒆𝒏𝒕𝒊𝒂𝒍 𝒏𝒊𝒄𝒌𝒔 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒔𝒄𝒓𝒂𝒕𝒄𝒉𝒆𝒔 𝒇𝒓𝒐𝒎 𝒓𝒆𝒈𝒖𝒍𝒂𝒓 𝒉𝒂𝒏𝒅𝒍𝒊𝒏𝒈 — 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒚𝒆𝒔 𝑰❜𝒎 75 