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Welcome Licorice Pizza (LP) lovers! Setup guides and Vinyl FAQ.

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It's all about the mastering moves

Posted by Garven on March 21, 2017 at 09:55:37:
Perhaps I'm mistaken, but you seem to be thinking that all CDs are simply direct copies of the master tapes. That's almost never the case (just as it's rarely if ever the case for vinyl releases). In fact, a lot of audiophiles would be quite pleased if CDs were flat transfers of the master tapes. A lot of the problem with CDs these days is heavy-handed mastering moves, usually a combination of over-compression and goosed highs or "smiley faced EQ" Although sometimes the master mixes needs some help, with digital, it's easy to go way overboard.

Early CDs were often flat transfers of the production master tapes, which were copies of the mixdown master--sometimes more than one generation down-- to which EQ and compression was applied with cutting vinyl in mind. In the rush to get CDs out in the market, record companies grabbed whatever they had on hand. This should be close to having "needledrops" without the needles, but the digital technology back then was primitive by today's standards.

Eventually, the whole "digitally remastered" trend took hold and companies discovered that folks would buy new versions of the same material if they went back to the master tapes and retransferred them. That's fine in theory but then they decided to apply things like no-noise processing, which when misused removed the ambience and life from recordings; then came the loudness war and all hell broke loose!

Most folks who have actually heard the real master tapes will tell you that flat transfers with no processing in many if not most cases do not sound so good. Many times the master tapes need the helping hand of mastering folks (called engineers by many but a lot of them don't actually have formal training in engineering so they're not really "engineers" in the academic sense).

All this being said, I do get what you're saying. I've been an avid "needledropper" now for a decade and I continue to be amazed at how transparently a digital recording can duplicate the magic of vinyl. Heck I can even convert my recordings to high-bitrate MP3s and still they sound a gazillion times better than most commercial CD releases! So clearly modern digital recording, even 16-bit/44.1kHz material, can sound incredible. It's all in what's been done, and not done, to the material.