I keep hearing old songs on the radio that are amazingly clear. You can hear details that you never heard in the originals - voices, accompaniments, instruments, even the words. I gather what’s happening is that a song is “digitally remastered.” But they were originally recorded on tape, with old equipment. Was all that information present on those tapes but with the existing technology, impossible to retrieve to be put on a record? And now, it can be retrieved? Is that what digital remastering is all about? Is it also about how the radio stations broadcast? Big question, but I’d really like to understand what’s underneath it all. Dopers? xo, C.
Of course, if I had simply googled or checked Wiki, I could have found out a lot. Mods - if you want, can this thread. mea culpa
But I want to know too!
Ditto. Share your newfound knowledge and crush ignorance!
These songs were originally recorded on tape running at 32inch per second, which is rather more than your cassette tape at 1+1/8th ips. The higher the write speed, the wider the bandwidth, in other words you get more of the higher frequencies and more of the lower frequencies.
Not only that, but the track width was somewhat wider too, the rule is that if you double the track width, you increase the information storing capacity by 4. This gives you more dynamic range, whichmeans that the bass drum or huge symbol crash has more attack, more punch.Studio mastering tape is rather wide although there are normally 8 to 16 track on it.
The remastering process into digital is simply extracting what is already on tape, even tapes going back well into the 1950’s are very high quality.
The problem with such mastering on tape is that tapes can deteriorate, such as damage to the magnetic domains, or the oxide can become detatched.
When these tapes were originally laid down on vinyl, the studios had a problem, because the tapes had far greater capacity thatn was possible to get down on vinyl.
With vinyl, the story about write speeds is very similar to tapes, the higher it is the better the quality - you’d be surprised at how good a perfect 78 disc can sound.
However once you squash the disc tracks closer together and slow the speed, you end up with lots of problems, so you have to do a few tricks.
This is done to make the vinyl discs able to store more music, or else the LP simply would not have been practical.
You may have heard of RIAA equalisation, this is a trick to compress the dynamic range before writing to vinyl and also it has a pre-emphasis on the higher frequencies.
When you replay it, you put the signal lifted off the disc through another RIAA equalisation process (The reverse of what you used to put it onto vinyl in the first place) and hopefully you restore the glory of the original reocrding that was laid down on tape.
Alas, this does not truly happen, and a couple of generations didn’t know just how much musical information was lost when mastering from tape down to vinyl disc.
The number of people who had reel to reel tape machines that could replay tapes that had been copied was always a small percentage of the music purchasing public, so most folk had no real idea of how good master recordings on tape could be.
You can see pre-recorded reel to reel tapes available on EBAY - get a good one and you will be surprised at just how much better they sound than vinyl.Obviously you’d need the machine to play it on.
When CDs came out, they first made the mistake of using the vinyl masters to convert to digital, missing out on the fact that these were already heavily tweaked for the vinyl medium - so many earlier CDs actually sound worse than vinyl.
Moral of the story, when you want to make a master copy from another master, first you must consider the medium for which your first master was intended.
When the studios than went back to the original studio masters and put them on CD, the differance is quite dramatic.
Even so, what you get from a remastered CD from the original studio tapes is still not quite as good because even ordinary CDs do not have the capacity to capture all the music information, there was a push to have SACD discs, which are somewhat better, but sales of the players and discs have not really taken off - shame really.
You have to realise that virtually all music, from the early 1950’s, right through to the mid 1990’s was originally recorded by the artists on tape, and digital has steadily moved in because it is much more readily manipulated - however in my opinion, good music comes from working around the limitations of systems and media, you have to learn and be much more inventive, nowadays a bum note can be readily corrected, a rubbish voice can be pitch corrected.
The result is the ‘Britains/Americas Got Talent’ competitions, its how pretty people with virtually no ability to play or sing a note can almost sound reasonable, but if you are familiar with electronic music systems, you can hear the joins, you can hear the various post production enhancements - let me tell you, there are a lot of big star names that are utterly rubbish musicians out there.
This means you Daniel Bedingfield, you are crap.