Reissued CDs

equipmentdork said:
To your point, no, I don't think of the industry, as primarily creative or anything but business, at least not since I was 14 or 15.
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Making an album is creative, mixing an album is creative and mastering is a series of creative decisions based on the customers requests.
I don't know, it seems like all the time people are trying to dismiss professional music as 100% money/business and the only purely creative people are those doing it as a hobby (no money involved).
Not trying to pick on you, just making the general point (again!).
 
Chris Whitten said:
Making an album is creative, mixing an album is creative and mastering is a series of creative decisions based on the customers requests.
I don't know, it seems like all the time people are trying to dismiss professional music as 100% money/business and the only purely creative people are those doing it as a hobby (no money involved).
Not trying to pick on you, just making the general point (again!).
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I don't think you're picking on me, I think I may not have been clear when I meant the business is not "primarily" creative. We probably disagree there, in that case. All three of those processes, which I know well with much detriment to my bank account, are at once the most life affirming and the most soul crushing. I wouldn't have it any other way when it's working, but I regret never having been successful when making an album could yield real money.



Dan
 
equipmentdork said:
I think you're making more of this issue than is warranted. I've only heard one CD mastered WITHOUT decoding Dolby A. That tells me an untrained ear worked on it. Similarly, the top end boost and cut in the bass of the RIAA curve would also be detectable to a trained ear(if it were not marked on the tape box as "RIAA" or "EQ'd dub" or some such and hopefully rejected outright). I've never heard an RIAA-EQ'd tape. I'm sure it sounds gnarly.

I've spent a lot of time talking to mastering engineers about the early days of CDs and I've never heard them mention RIAA or even CCIR as any kind of pervasive issue, not as opposed to, say. fighting with Dolby A decoding or dbx or sticky tapes that have to be baked or finding the first generation tapes. If this issue really bothers you that much, I'll ring up the guy I know(he just mastered an album I played on), as he's forgotten more than we'll ever know about the subject--he was Polygram's go-to guy in the mid-80s.

To your point, no, I don't think of the industry, as primarily creative or anything but business, at least not since I was 14 or 15.


Dan
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So why are you doing it?
 
equipmentdork said:
I meant the RIAA curve issue.


Dan
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I think we’re not quite on the same wavelength. I thought you were talking about how the music business is all about business and not music and creativity. That’s why I asked why you do it. Did I miss something?
 
Personally - I’ve never heard of mis-applied RIAA curves making to CD - maybe they did - I don’t know. What I do know is that many of the complaints about early generation CD’s come from the use of Production Master tapes (sometimes called EQ’d master tapes).

So what are production masters? Sorry this is a long journey - but let’s review how vinyl records were made for mass production - before there were CD’s. As that what created the needs for Production Masters….

So just like now, the multitrack would be mixed down to a stereo Master Tape

The mastering engineer would take that Master Tape and use eq and compression as necessary to accomplish two things - 1. make it sound better, if needed 2. and to make sure that the music could be safely pressed into a record (this meant not too much bass, absolutely no out-of-phase bass, etc. Once he decided upon the proper settings - which might be different for each track… and had insured there was the desired amount of space left between each song. He would play the tape of Side One, while making the appropriate adjustments - while the disc lathe operator would control the lathe to cut a lacquer disk of that side of the record.

Then they would repeat this for the other side.

The lacquer master for each side was then used to make a pair of Master Disks - one for side. This process destroys the lacquer disks.

That pair of Master Disks could be used to make between 2 and 4 pairs of “Mothers” before being ruined - 2 gave you better quality than 4.

Each pair of Mothers could then be used to make up to six pairs of stampers before being ruined.

Then each stamper pair could make about 1000 records.

So…. one play of the master tape = one lacquer = one master disk = 4 mothers = 24 stampers - producing about 24,000 LP’s

So a platinum selling record would require making at least 42 pairs of lacquers.

Plus there was the issue of making cassettes - and dealing with foreign pressings… basically everything couldn’t done while tying up the main mastering engineer’s studio for days on end. Though I do remember Bernie Grundman’s studio at A&M running night and day - with assistance running off lacquers after lacquers throughout the night (following Bernie’s meticulous notes).

So to accommodate the need for cassette masters, foreign masters and the need for more stampers in the future, when going back to the original mastering studio wouldn’t be possible - there was the Production Master.

Basically a tape made by playing the master tape through the mastering engineers settings and capturing the result to tape - a second generation master tape all eq’d and compressed that could just be fed directly into the lathe…. anywhere.

It is my understanding that these production master were quite often used for the creation of many 1st generation CD’s. Not the original tapes - but tapes that had been squashed and eq’d (oftentimes dramatically in the bass) to sound best on vinyl. But that sadly left the extended frequency and dynamic range that the new CD format had to offer - entirely unused. Of course, they didn’t have surface noise or wow and flutter - but they were not re-creations of the original recordings - nor were they newly mastered versions of those recordings. They were just the vinyl record mastering job printed onto CD’s.

One of the most blatant examples of this I ran into was the first two CD pressings of the Hendrix recordings - which sounded pretty similar - and in hindsight - were obviously made off of production masters. It wasn’t until the 3rd pressings - the first remasters once the family had taken control of production - that the effort was made to procure the actual original master tapes. The added bass frequencies and expanded stereo soundstage is not even remotely subtle. They were a real treat to hear.

Sorry for the length - but there’s many steps to this process that has been pretty much gone for longer than many here have been alive!
 
JimmyM said:
I think we’re not quite on the same wavelength. I thought you were talking about how the music business is all about business and not music and creativity. That’s why I asked why you do it. Did I miss something?
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Oh, sorry, I misunderstood. For me, it's a compulsion, something I have to do. I know I'm not going to get rich doing it, but there's something about playing and creating things in the studio that, for me, is worth it.


Dan
 
equipmentdork said:
Oh, sorry, I misunderstood. For me, it's a compulsion, something I have to do. I know I'm not going to get rich doing it, but there's something about playing and creating things in the studio that, for me, is worth it.


Dan
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Well considering that there are far easier ways to get rich than operating a record company, especially now, that makes me think that those who get rich from it must have a similar compulsion. Some might have their heads up their own butts, but I think they mostly do it because they like music and want to put out good stuff.
 
In the 70's and 80's there were a lot of music fans at record companies. They were widely replaced by accountants and desk jockeys by the mid-90's, and the mainstream industry is 99% business these days.
Anyone who wants to be in a wholly creative environment today should look for a small independent label, or self release.
 
equipmentdork said:
Similarly, the top end boost and cut in the bass of the RIAA curve would also be detectable to a trained ear(if it were not marked on the tape box as "RIAA" or "EQ'd dub" or some such and hopefully rejected outright). I've never heard an RIAA-EQ'd tape. I'm sure it sounds gnarly.
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Exactly. An uncorrected RIAA curve wouldn't just be detectable, it would be gnarly as you say. Which is why it would never happen. It would be so obvious that it wouldn't rise to the level of being an artistic judgement call. It would just be a technical correction to me made.

I'm just trying to put the RIAA curve theory for bad sounding early CDs to rest here. It was discussed early in the thread at some length but never got clearly settled IMO.
 
It was mentioned on page one.I wouldn't say it was discussed 'at length'. It was brought up and pretty immediately dismissed as a theory.
It was dismissed by someone in post #17, you dismissed it yourself in post #20. So why are we still talking about it 30 posts later?
 
Chris Whitten said:
It was mentioned on page one.I wouldn't say it was discussed 'at length'. It was brought up and pretty immediately dismissed as a theory.
It was dismissed by someone in post #17, you dismissed it yourself in post #20. So why are we still talking about it 30 posts later?
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Well I'm pleased that we've achieved clarity on the RIAA curve issue then.

Carry on.
 
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