Most likely the older CDs were made from tapes prepared for LP release, and were compressed as part of the recording process LPs required compression to keep for a number of reasons, including pressing, and the tapes were compressed as part of the process to begin with. Sometimes they used copies of copies of copies, so there was some degradation of the tapes as well. Newer recordings made in the last 20 years or so are much better to start with.
I think you are confusing compression with RIAA equalization.
Equalization, if done properly, does not change the sound from recording (or master) to final audio output (speakers or headphones). The purpose is to compensate for a problem inherent in the disk process. Without equalization, bass frequencies, have considerable energy, would overwhelm the cutter head and result in wide excursions in the grooves. This would take up mucho space on the disk and possibly make it impossible for the playback needle to track.
So the frequency response is drastically altered prior to cutting the disk master, boosting the highs and cutting the lows. After playback, the reverse is done, restoring both highs and lows to the original.
AFAIK, all equalization was always done at the cutting lathe, not by the recording studio. No one made a special tape with EQ on it just for LP purposes.
For that matter, most compression that people complain about is done at the radio station, using standard releases. Radios are often played in less-than-ideal acoustic environments, and some stations deliberately modify their signals to make sure that soft passages are not below the ambient noise level.
In classical music, great care is taken to avoid compression and put as wide a dynamic range on the final product as technology allows.
And professional recording techniques never used “copies of copies” unless they were going for effect or there was nothing else available. A typical recording process, pre-digital, post-1960, was (1) master multitrack, mixed down to (2) 2 track tape and (3) sent to the disk lathe. Since this was on professional equipment, the loss from only one generation or two was negligible.
In the 1950’s, the multitrack option wasn’t always available, and mixes usually went from live to tape to lathe, even one less generation. This is not “copies of copies.”
I don’t have much to add, other than agreeing that practices regarding compression, stereo separation and mixing change over time, and “remastering” often makes old recordings sound “better” to ears accustomed to modern techniques. Certainly, drums and vocals are typically emphasized more than in olden days.
I just wanted to add that I vividly remember how good the Dire Straits album “Brothers in Arms” sounded when it came out on CD in 1985. [CDs were first introduced in 1983, if I recall correctly.] It was one of the earliest albums to be recorded digitally, and Mark Knopfler took great care to record, mix and tweak the sound, and it showed. If you do a web search, you see numerous articles and posts about the album’s sound. I remember re-listening to it two decades later and thinking that it still sounded better than most CDs.
This is actually one the big myths about vinyl.
From what I remember, it wasn’t that people were using LP mixing techniques on CDs. It was that often CDs were just direct copies from the original without any real changes. The idea was that the only reason you had to alter the sound for LPs was to overcome their inherent limitations. Due to this, a lot of times the LPs really did sound better.
If I am correct, then finding some tutorials on how to do modern mixing techniques for people recording their own stuff might allow you to make remixed copies that would sound better to you.
Early CDs were recorded using straight forward PCM (pulse code modulation) for every step in the digital processing chain, whereas more recently Delta-sigma modulation has been used right up to the point in the process where the final encoding is performed.
My experience is the opposite of the OP’s.
I remember listening to FM radio when CDs just started to be used. They would even announce which songs were from CDs. The CD songs sounded a lot brighter. Higher treble, “pingier”. Hard to describe in words. It was quite noticeable. An easy to win game when the announcement that it was a CD song came afterwards.
The comments at the time were that LPs sounded “warmer” than CDs, which I take to mean that people noticed the smoother bass/mid-tone sound of LPs over the CDs of the era.
I didn’t own a CD player (and therefore any CDs) for some time afterward. So my experience was limited to FM radio. Some of these issues may have been due to the early forms of the players, rather than the CDs themselves. The DACs were fairly basic. So listening to old CDs on new equipment might be a very different experience. I.e., the sound of early CDs was adjusted to sound better on the equipment of the day.
This is a bit confused, and actually backwards. All CDs are recorded with PCM encoding. Where you see a form of delta-sigma is in SACD. Where the coding (DSD) is essentially the stream of correction bits from a delta sigma coder. The problem with DSD is that it is essentially impossible to do anything with it in its raw state - there are almost no useful algorithms to mix, change, level, filter, let alone the more complex aspects of recording production. So this leaves it as a final step encoding - either you take a magnetic tape and code it in DSD, or you take a PCM encoded recording and convert it to DSD, and then cut the SACD master. You can do direct live recording that go straight to DSD, you have to mix them live, in the analog domain, before coding, there is no way of fixing after the event.
No, I am not confusing anything. Compression and limiting were used to keep the sound within the cutting limits. Classical music was treated this way too. I have some recordings where you can hear the ‘gain riding’ by the engineer. Orchestra conductors tried to keep within certain limits too. Von Karajan worked closely with the DGG Tonmeister to understand what was needed. In other words, the orchestra played a little louder in the soft parts, and a little less loud in the loud parts, to avoid problems.
Original masters were not used to cut ‘mothers’. Copies were made of the masters to cut new ‘mothers’, because they wore out after so long. So, your first pressing of Parsley Sage Rosemary and Thyme was likely to sound better than one made in 1978, because the tapes were worn out.
Presumably fashions change as a new generation of audio technicians comes through.
Someone listening to the Rolling Stones 30 years ago will have mixed the tracks to give a certain sound, within the limitations of the equipment. But a 20 something tech mixing the same track now will have had exposure to a whole lot of new musical trends, so might favour more tops or bottoms or midrange or whatever (as well as having access to more technological options).
I guess the same would be true in photography… if you took a negative from Cartier-Bresson and gave it to a studio now the type of image they’d produce may look very different.
Yes, the old recordings (many of which were of course re-released on CD) were not as good to begin with, and their sound had been tailored to the LP technology of the 1960s. Rapid advances were being mad in recording technology from the mid-to-late 1960s, which is why Sgt. Pepper’s was such a revelation. It was miles ahead of 1962 recording, but the advances made since then are equally profound. When those old recordings are transferred to CD, their shortcomings are revealed. The LP format hides some of them. Also, CD transfer technology at the beginning was not as good as it is today.
That is likely true, however technology has been changing faster then generations of engineers. Each new wave of technology has brought with it new possibilities, and curiously new problems. In each change of technology there are valuable skills lost, only to be rediscovered.
But the march of fidelity has been constant. There is some irony that the last gasps of tape as a mainstream medium were happening just as the technology came to a point where it could rival 16but PCM for signal to noise and bandwidth.
Something else that bears mentioning about transcriptions of tape to digital. Modern transcriptions are able to recover astounding amounts of information from old tapes, information that probably no-one ever heard until this work was done. By digitising at a very high sample rate - so that the bandwidth actually is higher than the bias frequency used when the recording was made, it becomes possible to process the recording to correct for a whole range of speed variation artefacts. Scrape flutter in particular can be removed to reveal impressive detail in the recorded sound. For best effect this needs to be done for the original multitrack recordings - and the music then need remixing - a step where ther can be more or less fidelity to the original mix. So some of these modern remasterings can sound phenomenal compared to earlier CD releases.
You’re going to have to provide some proof of that. Tapes don’t wear out that fast, and the sound wouldn’t change if they did. Furthermore, by the time automated mixing boards came in (1970s?), if a new stereo master was needed, it was possible to re-run the mix and get an exact copy of the original mix on new tape with no generation loss, minus only the minimal degradation from aging of the multitrack master. Copies were not made of copies if they didn’t have to be, and if they did have to be, the quality of the recording equipment was top-notch. No recording engineer would begin a session without head alignment, cleaning, and sometimes a frequency response test.
Very true. Just an example: when stereo was still new, the fashion was often to produce super-separation between tracks, and have 100% of one voice or instrument on one side, at least before the bleed of 45/45 playback blended them a little. Enoch Light did this with his all-studio recordings, and I have a recording of a group of 4 singers with 2 on each side, A Capella (“The New Light”). Made it easy for me to write down their exact notes, just play one channel at a time.
Original masters were left in the vaults, and copies were used to create mothers. When those copies became worn, new ones were made from the masters. The pressing runs for big-sellers were huge, requiring many re-cuttings of mothers, so the sound quality of pressings of popular recordings from the 1960s gradually deteriorated as the source tapes wore.
I think this is the main cause of so-called ‘older’ CDs not sounding as good. The first letter indicated the original studio recording, which for most everything before the 90s (and absolutely everything before the mid-80s) was always analog. The second letter referred to the mastering or ‘mix’, where all the different vocal and instrumental tracks are put together. The last letter refers to the final transcribing method onto the compact disc master (which because CDs are inherently digital is sort of redundant, it is always a ‘D’).
Like I said, for anything made before the mid-eighties or so the first letter cannot be a D because digital recording technology did not yet exist. When CD sales took off a lot of older, classic albums (Led Zepplin, The Beatles etc.) were rushed out onto CD without re-mastering them digitally, so these are the older, crappy-sounding AAD discs. Because the digital CD technology exceeded the old time analog recording & mixing technologies the CDs could reveal the limitations of the source material. Look at older AAD discs and you’ll often find this exact warning written on the back of the jewel box. This is why record companies starting re-releasing classic albums as being so-called ‘digitally re-mastered’, instead of being AAD they were now ADD and it often made a huge difference in sound quality.
Actually, it’s supposed to mean this, but it doesn’t always. When the Beatles catalog was re-released about five years ago with great fanfare a lot of fans were disappointed because they weren’t really (or I suspect because of their age couldn’t be) truly re-mastered, they were simply ‘enhanced’. IOW they didn’t re-transcribe the individual, separate master tapes (drum track, guitar track, vocal track etc.) onto digital and then remix them digitally. Consequently they didn’t sound much better than the last re-release and, again, a lot of fans felt it was just a marketing gimmick.
Anyway, once all recording studios converted to full digital, all new artists’ and new material released on CD from then on were always fully digital (i.e. DDD) so they eventually dropped the three letter code entirely.
I first became aware of the three-letter code back when I bought some of my first classical CDs (i.e. Mozart, Beethoven etc.). I often found AAD and ADD (non-full digital) classical discs for sale cheap. I discovered why: Classical music sounds *terrible *on CD unless it is a fully digital recording.
This should be of interest:
http://www.analogplanet.com/content/copies-beatles-master-tapes-played-ces-and-rmaf-2013
How ironic that most music is now listened to as compressed mp3 files or internet streams through tiny laptop speakers, tiny ipad dock speakers, cheap earbuds and boomy car speakers. There are probably still some people who listen to music on good sound systems, but I would wager it is less than in the peak “HiFi” 70s and 80s decades. And, just as certain, lots of people used to listen to music on lowfi transistor radios, tabletop radios and one-speaker car radios.
But I think the percentage of people who put on an album and critically listen on a good sound system has diminished dramatically. I guess the wildcard I’m not sure about are modern earbuds and headphones. To be fair, I think most do a pretty good job in terms of fidelity, but I don’t know for sure.
It’s original recording, mixing, final mastering.
Older AAD CDs are effectively analog recordings on a CD, and anything pre-1983 or so will be ADD at the very best. A LOT of them back in the 80s and early 90s were either AAD or ADD, and probably sound rather analog.
Most anything after the early 90s are probably DDD and sound good.
This is sad but true. However we forget the travesties of sound of the past. The reality is that the vast majority of people don’t care all that much, but the base level of sound that people get has improved across the board. It was the Sony Walkman that defined portable sound in the 80’s. It is worth comparing with that. The WM2 didn’t have Dolby, which was both odd, and a limitation. I remember having different tapes for the car and the Walkman because of this.
You can get fantastic sound in an iPod with earbud phones - but the phones that come with the iPod are crud. Sadly many of the after market phones are not great, and many are designed to deliver coloured, bass heavy, sound. Personally I rip everything I listen to with a lossless coder, and I’m happy to say that I come across more and more people who do the same. Storage for portable players is now so cheap that there is no excuse not to rip with a high quality coder. High bitrate or variable bitrate MP3 is actually very good, it is the low bitrate encodings that got MP3 a poor reputation.
The reality is that it is home theatre where the action is. And here the expectations have changed. But people are spending big money of home theatre setups, and putting effort into the sound. And car systems don’t have to be horrid boomboxes. The yoof of today, with bass to shake ones teeth out are not the norm. My car has a sound system that is ridiculously good. Cars have the advantage that they are a fixed known space, so a designer can craft the system to fit with remarkable accuracy. The downside is that it is, well, still in a car, and you fight road noise. Both in-car and home theatre systems have embraced technology in a way that HiFi seems to have avoided.
But the nature of listening has changed quite a bit. Indeed, what you don’t get are people listening at home to albums as a whole, as a single listening for pleasure experience. For many music is, and has always been, a background thing.
Th Cooder’s “Bop 'til You Drop” was the first pop album to be recorded, mixed, and mastered digitally.