Re: [Harp-L] Re: music and perception

[Ken Deifik <kenneth.d@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> Neil Young is well known for despising CD quality sound. His opinion is 
> that there's nothing better than vinyl, at least through a good 
> system/cartridge and those first few plays until the disc becomes damaged, 
> warped, whatever.

Neil Young can afford a heck of a great stereo.  I might prefer vinyl too 
if I could afford one and if I could afford to keep buying a vinyl disk for 
each record that was starting to sound chewy.  I used to record new vinyl 
to casette to preserve a relic of the non-chewy sound.  Quite often the 
only time the vinyl got played was the first time.  Then a few years after 
I started doing this I put a few of those vinyls on my turntable and the 
single play, and time, caused the vinyl to deteriorate and make it as 
unlistenable for me as MP3s are for FJM.

You may recall that a vinyl master lasted about 2000 pressings before it 
had to be replaced.  If you were in the music business, as I was, during 
the vinyl era, you knew that pressing 3000 or more platters to cut costs 
was very, very common.  And frankly as you approached 2000 platters quality 
started dropping precipitously.  The best stores, the ones that gave the 
least discount, got the early runs, but there were whole regions of the US 
that only got the later part of the run.  Most of the vinyl in your 
collection and mine was later-run.

There were more grades of vinyl than there are of pizza mozzarella, and 
guess where the labels cut costs again.  That's right, customers had to pay 
extra for 'audiophile' quality vinyl or they got the Pizza Hut kind.

And, we were told, the longer the platter stayed in the press the better 
the quality, and a friend who could do so demonstrated to me the truth of 
that.  And guess what again?  The suits cut costs by speeding up production.

I can't remember the name anymore, but RCA came out with a process that 
produced a much thinner platter.  They hyped it on the cover of every album 
like it was actually a feature, but the music people at RCA shook their 
heads at the reduced quality of the sound, and the fewer plays you could 
get from it.  And you wouldn't believe how pissed off the music people at 
Capitol Nashville were at the crummy quality of the vinyl pressings.  Even 
Neil Young couldn't buy a well-pressed Merle Haggard record.

CDs, for me, are vinyl for a guy with a harp player's income.  Or at least 
that idealized vinyl that I keep hearing about but never got to hear.

I will also, annoyingly, repeat what the great jazz engineer Rudy van 
Gelder said about digital recording, since he was also talking about CD 
sound.  He said "Digital sound is what we were going for all along."

The only a/b'ing of vinyl vs. CD that I ever did was back in '85 through 
'87, when I had both a CD player and a turntable.  The first, often cheezy, 
CD reissues were coming out, and I was able to a/b my favorite albums on 
both formats.  Two years of a/b'ing, frankly, because I was intrigued by 
how great the CDs sounded next to the vinyl, and was amazed by all the 
people who were definitively stating, even back then, how much better vinyl 
was than CD, and I wanted to see if I could finally hear what I was clearly 
missing.

By 1988 my albums were in storage and my turntable was in heaven, as it had 
been a good and loyal friend for years and deserved no less.

I absolutely believe people who prefer vinyl hear something I don't hear, 
that it is not The Kings New Clothes.  But I have good ears too.

And in terms of digital vs. analog recording, so many great recordings have 
been made in both eras that it is impossible to really compare.  But just 
because I love, say, Sonny Boy Williamson's recordings on Trumpet, or Aja 
by Steely Dan, doesn't mean my ears can't also be delighted by Hearts and 
Bones, an early and beautiful digital recording by Paul Simon.

I know a hip hop producer, a very good one, who did something interesting 
for a while with his singles releases.  He'd record and mix the tracks 
digitally and use samples off CDs even if they were recorded analog.  But 
he'd record his singer analog.  THEN he'd get the vocal alone mastered and 
pressed to vinyl.  THEN he'd go back in the studio and dub the vinyl-based 
vocal to a track of his digital recording.

What a cool idea.  He said it helped the vocal stand out just a wee 
bit.  But I bet he wouldn't have used that vinyl a second time, as it would 
not have sounded as good.

K