Why do old audio CDs sound duller?

[Mr.Me]

Flim & the BB’s first album was made from a digital master, on an experimental machine from 3M.

[Melchior]

@11811

Th Cooder’s “Bop 'til You Drop” was the first pop album to be recorded, mixed, and mastered digitally.

Yello’s recordings are fantastic-sounding. If anyone doubts that CDs can sound fantastic, have him listen to *Baby *or anything after that.

http://www.amazon.com/Baby-Yello/dp/B000007666/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1391914416&sr=8-1&keywords=yello+baby

[dropzone]

@Fiendish_Astronaut

I was considering this. Most of my early CDs were from contemporary artists, but it makes sense if they always sounded that lifeless and only now have I started noticing.

Contemporary artists? Twenty year old CDs? I think we found the problem: Music from 1994 WAS lifeless!

@Musicat

Listening to some CDs of Mamas and Papas tunes revealed some things that made me go, “Hmmm…” since I was able to detect some stuff in one channel that I never heard before. In particular, a flute track that seemed “out of place” in the mix. I could hear it quite clearly if I turned off one channel and turned up the other.

I’ve listened to some Pop from the mid-late Sixties, including them, and found the problem is that the recordings were slapdash usage of four-track decks. You can pick out the individual tracks: vocals on track 1, bass and drums on 2, guitars or brass on 3, strings or whatever else on 4. They were mostly mixed for AM car radios with some concessions to the owners of console stereos built with murky sound, no real stereo separation, and a philosophy of the more bass the better. The people with decent equipment and an appreciation of nuance didn’t listen to that crap, so an album could be recorded in a day. The Beatles used the same equipment but Martin cared and took longer, and it showed.

@Ranger_Jeff

When CD players were first released, they were plugged into home stereo systems. You youngsters don’t remember the joy and science of shopping at a stereo store to put together the best sounding system you could afford. Now they’re tweaking stuff so it’ll sound good on ear buds, not large Advents, JBL L-26s, or JBL 4310s.

But damn, a good remix and a high bitrate played on an MP3 player that isn’t too shitty ($17) and heard through not-awful earbuds ($10) with decent audio isolation (rubber thingies from some earplugs I got at the dollar store that fit better) can be surprisingly close to awesome.

Advents were just loud with no subtlety, but my best (favorite? ones I was complimented on the most?) home theaters were JBL from preamp to subs.

[Fiendish_Astronaut]

@dropzone

Contemporary artists? Twenty year old CDs? I think we found the problem: Music from 1994 WAS lifeless!

Heh. I beg to differ though - in Britain at least it was the breakthrough decade of non-mainstream music. This is a conversation for a different thread though.