Heh, the good 'ol peanut butter vs. chocolate thread....
I think that alot of people are just looking for ways to validate or de-validate the reasons for music theft nowadays. As I pointed out in another thread, I like the slightly wilder sound of vinyl--more background noise so that fades (and the background noise in the recordings--tape hiss, room noise, etc) seem to emanate a bit more naturally than from the noiseless and clear cd bottom floor. Plus, it's more of an experience--better liner notes, better art, etc.
But I have an old Pioneer cd recorder from about 1999 in which I paid $1000 at the time, and it's much better sounding than even my higher end JVC home stereo bookshelf system from the same year. And I think that it's a fair assessment to say that it's an anomaly in the digital realm, in that i've never had errors or complaints or breakdowns or crap sound. But it could be because it's a recording cd player in that Pioneer had to overbuild in which to not have recording errors, but I think that it's a great case of what great build quality will impart on a cd. Clearer, bass is tighter, and here's another test that people don't seem to be acknowledging--on the JVC (high quality and above average components used, or at worse, a quality of built that the majority of consumers would play back their cds on), there's cds in my collection that skip. BUT, on the Pioneer, they never skip. Never. I've never once had a skip,
even on problematic cds that seem to have reading problems in the JVC (Sloan's "Never Hear The End Of It" has serious problems in the JVC, however, NONE in the Pioneer). Some burnt cds have problems being read in the JVC as well, and no problem on the Pioneer.
I monitored all my mixes on it, as well, all the cd mixes i've done have been cut on it. Never a problem. 100 percent. 10 years. No failures. It's always exactly the way that I mixed it, because the whole point of digital/ optical connectors was to transfer your exact sound, whereas (and I still have to get the finished vinyl records back to get the proper vinyl back) with vinyl, even other bands' recordings that I have on both cd and vinyl, the vinyl is a bit warmer, but it's not the exact sound of the cd. I don't know what mechanism they put in the PDR-509 was--or if I lucked out with one of the best of their best runs. It's so damn good in fact, that now that cd players and cd technology is being declared junk, that i'm now going to stock up on them as an example of what people will be after as gold in 10-15 years.
Here's a wee test that would disprove the fact that cd players are all created equal, in that people think that they buy a crap low end cd player and are immediately imparted great sound:
The Flaming Lips released "Zaireeka", and this is in the liners:
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"So anyway....I got a couple of CD players together and played some tracks that I had on two separate cds. You know, the same song but on two different discs, like say a track off an album and a track off a single....anyway--I played them together simply by pressing the play buttons at the same time. To my surprise they played relatively in synch for the first minute or so....but even more of a surprise was that they would wobble in and out of synch sort of arbitrarily. From what I can tell, cd players will not play in synch with each other. They get close, depending on the quality of the players, but for the most part it can be pretty random. It was this part that excited me, the fact that they played close enough together that you could tell what was going on, but also played unpredictably in front of or behind the other, making it confusing. Sometimes one would start behind and catch up to the other, other times the opposite"
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Which was the whole reason that they released the four disc "Zaireeka", in which to play simultaneously on four different stereos with different sounds on each disc--the recording is slightly out, you're never getting the same exact sound twice because the tracks float in and out of synch with each other. I've also experienced this when synching up a drum machine--non-MIDI-- with the same tempo and it being on the beat at the beginning of the song and for a few minutes afterwards.....then it floats off time!!
Here's the problem--when you listen to the same music on different stereos or different listening environments, it changes the way the music sounds. That also has an effect of how people see the release, doesn't matter whether it's vinyl or cd, you often get one or two listens before someone derives an opinion....no matter if it was on vinyl or cd or listened to in an improper listening environment, they've drawn their conclusion. I was listening to the masters of my new album in a friends basement on a really, really haphazard setup--the speakers were all mixed and matched, different systems, not equidistant, we weren't in the middle of the speakers (closer to one channel than another) and there's, you know, a bunch of stuff in the rafters and stuff strewn around here and there. And the mixes sounded
weird....the guitars weren't loud enough for part of the album. But on the Pioneer in my studio and on my headphones and even in my own living room setup, the guitars were sounding fine...I listened to it on several systems, with proper monitoring systems, and I know that they were fine. As my friend remarked, "well, what do you expect from a 7 dollar thrift shop find?".
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But when it comes to portable music, people stuff their iPods with tunes of far worse quality than either CDs or LPs. MP3s are compressed files that cut as much as 90 percent of the sound from the original recording
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I totally agree with this. When people complain about cd quality being crap, they're often listening to the MP3 versions with inferior rip quality. 128 KBPS should be banned, and anything below 192 KBPS should be banned. I listened to certain same songs in varying KBPS and indeed, they were having a reduced emotional/ subconscious effect on me. That's the best I can describe it.
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by using computer models of human hearing and removing subtle sounds that most of us don’t realize we’re missing. A compressed recording of a French horn, for example, might lack the slight reverberations from the concert hall.
Instead of filling his digital music player with thousands of songs of crummy sound quality, Grammy Award–winning producer Jim Anderson keeps his iPod stocked with just 55 songs in an uncompressed format, including jazz pianist Keith Jarrett’s epic live solo concerts in Germany. (Anderson prefers the lossless AIFF format, in which one minute of stereo audio occupies 10 megabytes.) “If I were to cut the CD down to an MP3, I’d be throwing out all the stuff in the room that makes the piano sound as full as it does,” says Anderson, who is also chair of the department of recorded music at New York University. “I hear the piano exactly as it was at the concert.”
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No doubt. And as i've mentioned before, there's more gadgetry than ever on stereos to enhance the finished cd. Wasn't that the whole
point of production? At work, there was a reverb sound on the stereo---there was a bunch of classic songs that were playing that I knew for a fact didn't have that much reverb on them. Sure enough, the "surround" (i'm guessing reverb surround) was activated. Factor in expanders, EQ's, bass boosts, the aforementioned reverb surround, and how do you know what exactly cd sound
is? It's like if people say "well, I really don't like orange flavour". I've tasted an actual orange, and then i've tasted cheap, $.50 cent orange drinks--it's NOT orange. It's a poor, harsh facsimile, but what people should realize with cd audio as well, don't claim that you want true orange flavour and then shell out for the cheap orange flavoured drinks and claim that you don't like the orange experience. There's a whole pile of additives in anything that are anything but pure--you could say that high fructose corn syrup or phosphoric acid could be the equivalent of playing cds on inferior cheap equipment, or engineers using extreme brickwall limiting or extreme EQ to get the most out of the cd format.
Going back to the early 90's, with Andy Wallace/ John Agnello/ Brian Paulson/ J Mascis technical help, with George Marino/ Bob Ludwig/ Howie Weinberg mastering sounded
amazing--the levels were great, the sound was great--powerful, clear, concise, sharp, defined, rich. A guy like Andy Wallace really truly knew how to mix--everything sounded great, was compressed (esp drums) a bit to even it out a bit more to get it punchier, but guys like that were just trying to get everything to cut through the mix with each other, but the mixes still breathed. Now, the problem is that the industry and volume wars have helped to pitch in to ruin the sound of the actual recordings by trying to all outdo each other on cd changers (no one wanted the lower cd on your 10 disc changer in, say, 1998 or so).
So it's probably a combination of the techniques used to extract the loudest possible sound on cd (possible in cds without any errors but clipping, as opposed to vinyl which would skip with levels cut too hot), inferior MP3 ripping or downloading rates in order to maximize space on their IPod or hard drive, and then you also have all the aforementioned stereo gadgetry to "improve" the apparently inferior sound that we've worked so hard to get right. I mean, hell, why even mix or master the thing with all those stereo gadgets? Why not just get the audience to do it?