The Quality of recordings these days

Im getting so tired of poorly recorded albums and thought it best rather than ranting on to my dear long suffering wife... that I ought to share my cd buying experience (nightmare) this last couple of months.

I find that by far the best recorded cd's tend to be classical, Jazz and certain dance / trance discs, whereas rock and pop cd's have been leaving me cold and headachy.... they all seem to be recorded with no headroom i.e all settings on max

This is even more apparent after upgrading to a high quality dac recently. Good recordings sound excellent...poor recordings are plain awful, there seems to be no compromise, this has made me consider buying some kind of EQ to ease the listening of certain discs.

heres a list of recently bought cd's and a recording quality score (*****)

Kasabian.... (*) I quite liked this band until the quality of the cd put me off.
Guillemots, through the windowpane... (**) so much production, so little music.
Pat metheny quartet... (****) easy to knock but beautifully recorded like most recent PM albums.
Pearl Jam... (**) recorded in a tin can under a large blanket (damned shame).
Yeah Yeah Yeahs, show your bones... (***) good album fairly well recorded
Kate Bush, Sensual world (**) sounds passable in the car... just, (Blasphemy?)
Massive attack, Collected (***)
Porcupine Tree, Signify... (***) not bad for a 10 year old album
Shpongle, Remixed... (*****) Excellent recording
Love, Forever changes remastered... (***) its 40 years old but still sounds fresh.
Delibes Lakme, Joan sutherland...(****) another recording from the 60's that could teach todays sound engineers a thing or two
Keith Jarrett, The melody at night with you... (****) beautifully intimate cd.
Younger Brother, A flock of Bleeps... (*****) like all Simon Posfords work this deserves six stars... why doesnt he advise others on what there doing wrong at the mixing desk?... like some sort of sound engineer Tzar
Sufjan Stevens, Avalanche (*****) ah sufjan!

looking at the list obviously all is not lost.. but is it unreasonable to want ALL my discs to sound good?

Interestingly a lot of poor sounding cd's that I buy these days tend to sound better on my car stereo as if they have been mixed for this purpose alone.

Its a travesty I tell you, A TRAVESTY rant rant.


Jack.

[KennyK]

the short answer is that many albums are very heavily compressed at the mastering stage. compression removes any dynamic range - i.e. no headroom.

if you 'rip' tracks from a CD and look at the waveform you will see the problem. the upshot is that as you point out, it sounds better in the car. most FM radio is compressed as well. someone somewhere got the idea that louder=better. Adverts on TV often do this so they seem louder as well - it's to grab your attention...

the problem is that it sounds bloody awful.

as an example, Coldplay's X&Y is one of the most heavily compressed albums around. the fact that the music is as devoid of merit as the mastering engineer is of achieving anything remotely like acceptable sonic quality means that fortunately I am unaffected by this particular audio nightmare and nor am I likely to be.

It means that slowly, I am changing my musical tastes as the maxed out high RMS mastered albums leave me cold as well.

Good to see Shpongle geting a name check. "Are You Shpongled?" is a recent discovery and is now in my most played pile

the irony is that CD has a far better theoretical dynamic range than vinyl...

[Dave_The_Vinyl_Junkie]

The two recordings that I demonstrated my 401 / OTL's with at Eggfest 2 a year ago were made in 1961 (I think) and 1958 respectively. We'd had Norah Jones all day and I decided it was time to frighten the horses.

The '61 was a reissue of a Mercury Living Presence reccording of Stravinsky's Firebird (that was dynamic enough to almost destroy Neal's speakers). The '58 was the opening of Das Rheingold (Wagner) which was a Decca job - this was played on Paul's 212 with James' Quasars.

Someone has lent me (admittedly on CD) the recent Testament issue of Decca's live stereo recording of Siegfried at the 1955 Bayreuth festival. This was before even the first stereo LP's came along. The sound is rich, warm and detailed, despite the live setting and the inevitable compromises that could have resulted.

That is a 50 year-old recording - issued for the first time because it's now out of copyright (Culshaw vetoed its release because of his plans for a studio Ring cycle - mentioned above). If Decca were doing this in 1955 then what on earth were Deutsche Grammophon playing at 20 years later?!!

[John T]

Gosh! What a coincidence Dave. One of my “best” recordings is also Firebird (coupled with Le Coq d’Or) recorded on RCA Victor in 1965. According to the sleeve, it’s recorded in “RCA’s newly developed Dynagroove system which provides a spectacular improvement to sound quality……….”

This disc gives the impression of being 1/8in thick(!!) and in spite of being played eons of times on all kinds and quality of equipment still reproduces superbly and exhibits virtually no surface noise, ticks or clicks – and to cap it all, it’s never been cleaned.

Personally, I’m sure the reason for this quality of reproduction is simply that in those days they used virgin vinyl in the manufacturing process and not recycled rubbish.

John.

Originally Posted by Dave_The_Vinyl_Junkie

We'd had Norah Jones all day and I decided it was time to frighten the horses.

Isn't Norah Jones (and Eva Cassidy, etc) that kind of anaemic lite-jazz that makes any hi-fi sound "nice"?

Congratulations to you for putting on something that will not only make a bad hi-fi struggle, but for choosing music that has life too!

[BOONDI]

Originally Posted by KennyK

the short answer is that many albums are very heavily compressed at the mastering stage. compression removes any dynamic range - i.e. no headroom. someone somewhere got the idea that louder=better. Adverts on TV often do this so they seem louder as well - it's to grab your attention...

the problem is that it sounds bloody awful.

HI Kenny, all....

With regard to loud adverts, just hit the mute button at every ad break.

I hate this "Louder than thou" attitude with advertising. it doesn't make me want to buy anything......it just makes me

I ask that everyone mute the volume during the adds. Also please send an email to the companies involved in the adds. A quick email to tell them that their adds are sounding disturbing and are offputting from enough people will soon halt the problem. Remember, a lot of adds and music are recorded by the same studios...... .

The message will get through......

[david]

One of my best-sounding CDs is Kind of Blue by Miles Davis-recorded around 1961? this is the version remastered off the original tapes on all valve equipment.

There are other great sounding modern CDs-try Rodrigo y Gabriella's Live in Leeds and Dublin-but few few are 'mainstream' recordings.

I use a DVD ripper these days to extract 48khz sampled music from DVDs and it's amazing how much better this sounds for music where I've got the 'identical' cd with its 44.1khz sampling of music recorded at the same concert. The difference is more than just the sound quality as the cd often sounds muddy and compressed compared to a much more open sounding DVD rip.
David

[lt_texan]

Originally Posted by Dave_The_Vinyl_Junkie

...We'd had Norah Jones all day and I decided it was time to frighten the horses....

as if that wasn't frightening enough!

I'm getting good quality pressings on buying on line from HMV at about £10 (vs £9 cd) on new/newish releases. I just got the Zutons last album and the pressing is nice and quiet. The recording sounds pretty good to me too.

Dan

[Cobblers]

Free MP3 downloads of any major album (coming to a PC near you!) are apparently the future on websites containing lots of advertising to pay for it.
No doubt it will be at the lowest bit rate with a fee for higher bit rate downloads. I don't thing joe average will want to pay for his recordings. Maybe the lions share of music will soon be available only at 64-128kbps depressing thought.


The worrying thing for anyone who remotely cares about sound quality is that it is obviously going down, when the potential within the technology has actually gone up (Dynamic range etc).

Apparently the old recordings from the 50's and 60's tend to be better because they couldn't do anything silly with the mic's!
Improvements in recording technology has actually reduced the quality of modern recordings!
Many 80's classical and jazz recording engineers onwards ruin the sound of various recordings by using microphones way too near (or in) the instruments (relying on EQ to correct results afterward) because it is possible to do so without the distortion of older microphones which where usually postioned away from the instruments capturing the ambience and reverberation of the room the performers were playing in.

Microphone technology has always captured more potential than replay hardware allows us to hear accurately since the diagrams only have to be very small and light.

More people probably hear good results from archive recordings with modern light tracking cartridges than when the recordings were first made.

[lt_texan]

Originally Posted by Cobblers

...Improvements in recording technology has actually reduced the quality of modern recordings...

Yes, isn't technological advances supposed to be used to increase profits. I never thought of it as a way to increase quality.