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Old vinyl vs today's technology

Legendz said:
I find that most people here are already dumping all their CD collection's for the sake of their beloved 128 mp3! :|
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On PFM, I would doubt.

People are embracing streaming in droves, but nearly everyone is using .flac or other lossless formats.

Chris
 
Legendz said:
I find that most people here are already dumping all their CD collection's for the sake of their beloved 128 mp3! :|
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I hope so. I'm really looking forward to picking up an obsolete, used, ex-£6000 rrp CD player for £500 in a couple of years.
 
My best old recording is tony bennett songs from the jet set on cbs 62544,
on mono a1 b1 press and its a suberb recording, oh charity shop £1 bargain.
 
positive_energy said:
Its digital vs analogue I am afraid. As soon as they started mastering using digital, quality went out of the window. You can listen to RVG mastered vinyl from the 50,s and 60's (when vinyl was made using an analogue process) and later from the 70's (when digital mastering was used) and there is no contest - the analogue process sounds better.
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And there you have it. I have a friend who buys lots of 50s vinyl, for pennies, time after time I am shocked by the sheer quality.With modern recordings I am also shocked...but this time by the lack of quality.
What caused this? The industry found it could get away with selling us crap...so it did.
 
paskinn said:
And there you have it. I have a friend who buys lots of 50s vinyl, for pennies, time after time I am shocked by the sheer quality.With modern recordings I am also shocked...but this time by the lack of quality.
What caused this? The industry found it could get away with selling us crap...so it did.
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The relative cost in real terms between LPs at 39/6 in the fifties when that represented nearly a days pay for most people against CDs at a few pounds now may have something to do with it - many people don`t require high quality and aren`t prepared to pay for it so the industry provides what is required.
 
I'll say it again. It's not the bloody technology, much as many of you tube'n'vinyl fanatics would love it to be so.

Please read my post #10
 
Pluto,

It's not the bloody technology, much as many of you tube'n'vinyl fanatics would love it to be so.
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You forgot one: Tube, vinyl 'n' horn fanatics.

Joe
 
Arkless Repairs said:
It does indeed seem that much has been lost in the art of sound recording. Many late 50's and early 60's jazz recordings sound stunning!
I'm sure the reasons are many and most have been covered by previous posters...
I have myself made recording of live music with an identical signal going to a pro reel to reel recorder and also to a 2496 digital set up. On replaying it I was amazed just how large was the superiority of the analogue sound from the R to R. I think there is more to it than just this though!
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I haven't done this for some years, but back then my experience was the opposite to that.
Also if I put my recording device in the monitor loop all of the analogue recorders I have used over the last 40 years have audibly degraded the output. With the digital I can not tell whether the recorder is switched in or out of the loop - I would say it is completely transparent to the source as far as I can hear.
 
Yesterday, I bought a lovely tidy copy of Art Blakey And The Jazz Messengers on HMV from 1961. Blew me away in a similar way the OP describes. Kinda odd the way some people seem to want to deny this wonderfulness. Their loss.
 
Even the argument about lack of expertise is a red herring. There's plenty of expertise around (although most of those great rooms are long gone). Anyone doubting the existence of craft would do well to take a peek at Steve Albini's studio website (www.electricalaudio.com). Purpose built, two studio complex and a collection of vintage microphones you wouldn't believe.

On the transparency of digital, I've run my TT through a modern ADC and back out the DAC. Very careful volume matching was necessary (and possible) but there was no difference I could hear, compared to direct.
 
A lot of those 50's and 60's recordings went from microphone to valve pre-amp to valve tape recorder to direct valve driven master cutting head; some even left out the tape machine stage. I have a huge collection of Jazz on vinyl and even some of the earliest stuff done on LP sounds good. I've done some test live recordings using ribbon mics through a simple valve pre-amp onto a Studer valve tape machine I restored for a customer - the results were astounding. Vinyl/valves/loudspeakers/ears - suits me.
 
Plutox said:
Largely, microphone technique.

They used relatively few of them, positioned the band and singer in the studio to work well with that style of mic-ing. Everybody could hear everybody they needed to - the rhythm section would be closest to the piano and singer, the loud blowers furthest away. The unit was inherently self-balancing; no electric instruments to mess it up - or at least, if there were (say, electric guitar) the amplifier volume would be sent to blend correctly into the mix.

Musicians would stand and play louder for solos, thus bringing them out in the audio picture just enough to work; there are many examples from this era of this technique being over cooked - many Stan Getz records exhibit this type of problem.

The studios had a sound that lent itself to the style of music; not too dead, not too live - just nice. Some studios were considered so special they wouldn't even risk painting the walls for fear of messing up the sound. Fundamentally, everyone was there to capture a musical performance.

The difference today is nothing to do with technology; back then, record producers were like photographers. Today they have become more akin to sculptors.
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I'm so glad I read this.

Thank you.
 
Werner said:
In the 50s and 60s serious music recording, production, and cutting vinyl simply did not suffer fools. Likewise it almost demanded serious musicianship as a bum note would mean to redo it all.

Nowadays everyone with a laptop can record and produce music, even play it, as everything can be stitched together from individual notes.
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I see that as both a blessing and a curse. I am much preferring the "bedroom" artists both sound wise and musically because it has heart/soul..

East River Pipe is an incredible example of this.

the microphones: the glow is another


there is of course a lot more bad stuff to wade through, but I am all about getting control out of the hands of the suits and bean counters.
 
The sound of the records back then..wasn't *so much* a product of the sound of tubes and tape...but more related to the *lack of tracks* and *insane expense* required to make a record. The issue was that there were no punch ins, and one chance to get it right. As a result the bands were much more prepared...and the engineers really were engineers(Tom Dowd for example was a part of the manhattan project). Learning to mix live to two track on the fly required a great deal of skill, as did being able to tweak EQ settings(fixed, not variable) to get the desired sound.

It was the limitation of not having thousands of tracks. The equipment today(mics, preamps, digital recorders) is several hundred orders of magnitude better than the best gear back then..so we have all the potential in the world to make better recordings than ever before. the availability of tracks and cheap storage space, and availability of technology to any average joe...thats the rub. take those same tube mics and use them correctly with todays technology and youll have a result that kicks the old stuff into the tall grass...


some "must see" documentaries about the old recording ways..

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00011ZBOS/?tag=pinkfishmedia-20

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B000PDZQUG/?tag=pinkfishmedia-20

[youtube]-xs2kJn6PBE[/youtube]

I also see releasing new releases on vinyl as patently idiotic. Having this material that was recording at 32bit FP or whatever and then putting it on a media that essentially degrades it right out of the gate...stupid. damn stupid. a money making scheme, capitalizing on trends.
If it was analogue all the way through the process..fine.

but putting a digitally created album on a media that removes its potential.. how dumb can we be??
 
hughmc2 said:
The drummer was almost "visible", the piano was, I kid you not, about 5 feet to the left of the left speaker. Nothing I have heard has ever portrayed a soundstage that wide. Sinatra was just right of centre and you could follow him as he moved across to the piano on one track. He was standing next to my turntable ! Everything was in it's own space.
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Welcome to my world. Good vintage vinyl is special stuff indeed.
 
Nice to see there are a few others who enjoy the pleasures of "soundstage" (not to reduce the quality of these recordings to just that single aspect, of course, but it is part of it).
 
colasblue said:
Trouble is its probably exactly the same sort of pro 96/24 recorder that was used to A/D a lot of the original CD masters.

Digital technology has moved on in leaps and bounds since the 1980's and now you can easily and cheaply own a digital setup which would trounce the best studio kit of that era.

There's another thread on the go about original vs remastered CD's and its all tied up with the same issues. If its AAD its all down to the quality of the mastering and the equipment used. A lot of remasters post about 1997 seem to leave the vinyl version for dead, whereas a lot of earlier ones don't.

You also get issues with degradation of analogue masters between when they were first A/D'd on crappy 80's kit and now when we have better kit.

The result is that its all a bit hit and miss from the consumer's point of view though an increasingly large proportion of material now sounds better on CD.

Ironic that the CD format has come good just as it's about to become as obsolete as its vinyl predecessor!
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And even more remasters post that period are worse. In fact around '97/'98 was when studios (and unfortunately artists) started to compress the hell out of albums and remix everything to make it "more exciting", thus totally ruining the music. Iron Maiden are a classic example of this, to the point where fans are seeking out original releases for their SQ.

CD was as good as it was ever going to get around the early 90's. Introduction of 24bit recording in around 97 was completely overshadowed by ever worsening recording techniques.

Plus CDs imminent demise is seriously exaggerated, just like vinyls was, it's going to be around a for quite a while yet.
 
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