Serious Question About CD's....

From Amazon,I recently ordered the cd “How Long?” by the group ACE which I have not yet received. Checking out the reviews, one person gave the cd only a one star rating.

Curious, I read the guy’s review and he wrote (in essence) that every song except one was off-key and he got his money back. As it was an import, I pretty sure he was told to keep it as well.

It was a repressing of the original, so I was skeptical. Also no other customer had made this complaint.

So is such a thing possible and how often does it occur?

Thanks

It can happen. There were some early pressings of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon which were inferior.

NeKtar’s Remember the Future had a very different sound depending on which CD you bought. They were taking off of different master tapes and mixes.

There are many instances where someone decides that this or that version of a recording has been mastered off-speed and that a correction should be made. The thing will be reissued and touted as “definitive”, but that can be a matter of dispute and you are bound to catch flack from buyers who grew up with the song and want it to sound the way they remember hearing it.

Adding spice to this brew, some radio disc jockeys were known to play a record a bit faster than intended - not a lot, but enough to make it peppier and give it a "brighter’ sound. So if your Ace CD arrives and seems sluggish and off-key, maybe it’s because you are used to hearing the caffeinated version.

Hey Clothes. I used to work at one of those stations, but the reasons we sped up the records (45’s) was because the station manager wanted to fit in more time for commercials. “Life In The Fast Lane” was one of these. I had already left that station (“town to town, up and down the dial”) when the FCC hit 'em hard.

Thanks to both of you for the answers.

Q

The Seventies station on Sirius XM (70s on 7) does this for some, though not all songs, in an approach that I have to assume is meant to replicate the feel of a 1970s top-40 station. (They also have a filter on their DJs’ microphone feeds to create a more low-fi sound.)

if it’s a re-pressing of the original, then no, it’s not possible. CD audio runs at a fixed sampling frequency (44.1 kHz) and CD audio mechanisms spin the disc with constant linear velocity (CLV.) The only way all but one song could have been “off-key” is if it had been remixed/re-mastered.

The seller has the product clearly marked as a “repressing”.

then that one reviewer is a loon-bat, assuming the seller is being truthful.

There is no material, mechanical , chemical , "of the substance " reason for this.

The CD stores data with error detection and error correction,
So at what level could the data be corrupted ?

A pressed CD is made with metal , with the tracks of dots shaped in it, pressed onto foil.
If you copy the die, then the error correction copies with it. Corruption could only result in an inability to play the resulting CD’s.

If you copy the CD by reading the raw data from a CD and writing the data (to a die, or to a CD-R), then the errors are copied, but so too the error correction info … so corruption in a simple copy would only result in an inability to play the resulting CD’s.

Anyway, its not because the electric motor went at the wrong speed or any other problem affected the material of the CD or any “analogue” problem… its because a computer ran some purpose programmed sound algorithm to change the sound … whether someone thought the algorithm was a good idea, or accidentally turned it on, or the computer glitched and just did it…

Why would a professional CD publisher have such software anyway ?
Well they may do talking books and so on, and then they are sometimes given a CD that is too long to fit onto CD-R… the pressed CD can be longer than CDR’s you see… and they want the purchaser of the pressed CD to be able to make CDR’s of the CD…

is it a “repressing?” or a bootleg copy ?

missed the edit but it sounds like a ripped copy …

That could mean a lot of things. It could mean that the album in question is a reissue - same songs, same packaging - without necessarily meaning a new master wasn’t made. And when you remaster from analogue tapes (as with a recording by a 70s band like Ace), all sorts of speed discrepancies might creep in.

There are plenty of instances where someone thinks they spotted a speed problem in an old recording and decided it should be fixed. From Wikipedia:

  • The version of Crimson and Clover on the 1991 “Crimson and Clover/Cellophane Symphony” CD is the same as the original album version; however, digital technology was used to fix the speed and pitch error mistake made in 1968. The CD booklet states that “Crimson and Clover” is now as it was “meant to be heard,” and that Tommy James is “very satisfied” with the reissue of the recordings in CD format.*

Right, so Tommy James may be happy with it, but you might rightly call that revisionism (the “pitch error” version sold millions) and prefer the unfixed version, and who’s to say you shouldn’t? (Look for future reissues to restore that error and declare they finally got it right and the book’s closed forever!)

It clearly states “repressing”

Thanks

*A repress is identical to an original in that it is produced from the same source as the original. The term repress may be found in literature about the release from official sources like the label or artist, printed on hype stickers or discussed in formal reviews. The term has come to be used casually in reference to the re-release of an album though the media in question may not technically constitute a repress. Things to remember:

  1. The source material must be identical to the original
  2. Literature should reference or state the release is a repress
  3. Only applicable to formats that are pressed: LP’s and CD’s*

source: http://waxtimes.com/repress-reissue-and-remaster-explained/

So, remastering is distinctly possible; maybe even probable. In any case, a weasel word which means what the issuer wants it to mean.

But look, whatever they call it, it will either please you or it won’t. If you think it’s off-pitch, get your money back and order a different Ace compilation. “How long / has this been going on?” Answer: forever, and it’ll never stop.

Thanks to all of you.

Quasi

A little more, probably pointless, detail.

This recording was made in that days when everything was recorded on tape, mixed on tape, and a master was created on tape to be sent to the LP pressing plants. If you had a major hit, many copies of the master were made, and sent to the pressing plants around the world.

Tape is and was always subject to speed variations. And worse, at every step of the process when a new transfer of the music was made, you could get a variation. Mostly this was not too much of an issue. The pressing master was mixed with the understanding that LP was the final media. This led to the mixdown being done in a manner that took into account the foibles of LP format. LPs roll off the top end, and have a limited dynamic range at some frequencies. Bass cannot be mixed far from centre in a stereo mix otherwise the stylus will simply jump out of the groove. And so on.

When CDs first came out many were created by simply taking the LP pressing mix and digitising it. Often these were not even the true master tape, but one of the pressing copies. Sometimes this sounded rather horrid, as the mix had all the colouration intended to compensate for the LP perfectly reproduced. Further, the mix didn’t really take advantage of the CDs advantages (ie better signal to noise and frequency response.)

But in here you would occasionally get ridiculous mistakes. Like running the tape machine at not quite the right speed, which would freeze onto the digital media that wrong speed. Sometimes that one digitisation would get used and reused. Sent to CD pressing plants around the world, and maybe used for compilations and other uses. Best example of that I have is Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue. It was issued originally on CD about a semitone out.

If you ave access to the original recordings - ie the multi-track “masters” from which the final recording was made, it is possible to work miracles. It is now possible to recover the sound from those tapes with significantly better fidelity than was ever achieved when they were made. One of the really interesting tricks is to make a very wide bandwidth recording - one that includes the bias oscillator frequency. This provides a stable sample clock that allows exact recovery of the sound, with removal of essentially all frequency shift artefacts. Most importantly, not just tape speed variations but scrape flutter - a very insidious distortion all tape recorders are subject to, where the tape running across the tape heads has high frequency small changes in speed due to binding and releasing. These distortions can be processed out of the digitised result. If you have the multitrack originals you can then remix the recording to achieve a result that is better than anyone has ever heard before. The big difficulty is in not being tempted to produce a full “remix” that intentionally sounds different.

The same technique can be applied to the final mixdown tapes if the original multi-track has been lost. But obviously one entire generation of scrape flutter and other nasties are irrevocably baked into this.

In modern parlance, digital recordings are subject to a final “mastering” phase. This is something new, and was not done in the days of tape. Here the final stereo mix is created by the mixing engineer, and sent to someone who is responsible for the final tweaks to the overall sound. So subtle changes in equalisation, compression and the like. Sadly, for popular music, the compression part of this can be vastly overdone. The “make it pump” and “make it sound louder than everything else” demands on the mastering engineer often lead to results that they are not proud of at all, but are what the customer demanded. aka “The Loudness Wars.”

You can go back further. Some of the old 78s can be amazing. Some of the big band stuff, where the musicians were consummate professionals and didn’t need mixing at all, as they understood how to do it for real in real time when performing. A mono recording on a 78 can have remarkable frequency response and dynamic range if it was made once the general principles of audio electronics were nailed. Very careful transcription from these old 78s to digital format, and very delicate processing can yield revelations.

Excellent post from Francis Vaugh above.

I just want to add a small consideration: there are no consistently enforced or enforceable laws which prevent people from using the word “repressing” or any other recording terms, to mean anything from “carefully transferred from original approved and tested master disks,” to “copied over a cheap microphone held up to my even crappier TV speaker, while a low quality recording of a live concert was being broadcast.”

I checked this guy’a ratings and it looks like he’s okay. He gave a refund, and I suspect the customer did not have to return the “defective” cd, so who knows?

I guess “THE DOPE knows!”