>STICK WITH THE FIRST RELEASES, discard all MFSL...
While you definitely have something there I'm afraid I'll have to respectfully disagree.
Oh, I too experimented with 'color' CDs many years ago - heck, I still may have a couple unopened shrink-wrapped Kodak Ultima 100% Gold CD-R discs somewhere in basement, lol
Unlike you, though, I actually preferred black CDs to gold ones - Curiously, not all blacks were good - only from certain manufacturers. Those that were good however, sounded way superior not only in some high-end CD player but the difference was very obvious even in a car!
I am sure you can give many examples (and please, do give examples – it’s time somebody exposes those cheaters!) were ‘remaster’ or ‘gold’ version only managed to completely botch/destroy the original master. Yeah, I’ve seen those too and totally agree: it’s a shame and complete fraud... I don’t know why this happens: is it really only because of insatiable greed of major record companies (which, although despicable, _is_ completely understandable), or to satisfy market _needs_ (=if your song does not sound LOUD on radio the kids won’t buy it & you’ll lose sales – again, sad turn of events but it also makes sense and you really have no option but to play the game), or, much, much more worryingly, could it be that the art of mastering completely died some 10-20 years ago because of that ‘greed & market need’?
I hope not.
And let me explain my case before the jury with two exhibits where ‘gold’/’remaster’ was IMHO much better sounding than CD ‘first release’:
Exhibit A: ABC “Lexicon Of Love”: 25th Anniversary Edition (remaster):
An amazing record. I think I was a teenager when it came out – there simply was nothing like it in pop music before or after....
CD still was not invented at that time so we listened to records or, more likely, to own-recorded tapes from vinyl (btw, it sounded gorgeous on Maxell XL-S & Sony Walkman: those were the days....)
When it came out on CD (uh, 20 years ago?) I bought it immediately (one of first CDs I bought).
It sounded like cr*p.
I mean, it was sooooo bad, I believe even my ‘limited-frequency-range’ Maxell XL-S Dolby C tape recording from original vinyl on a boombox sounded better!
Fast forward 25 years: By chance, I run into ‘25th Anniversary Edition’ CD on Amazon. I’m sceptical.... Damn bastards only made couple good songs since then and want to sucker me for my money.... I hate paying for same thing twice and this would even make it thrice! (incl vinyl)...... But reviews on Amazon are enthusiastic and don’t sound like nostalgic drivel.....some even praise the sound quality of ‘remaster’..... hmmmmm, let’s order it wtf...
Long story short: 25th Anniversary remaster _blew away_ my ‘original’ CD pressing!
Exhibit B: Pink Floyd - The Wall
Everybody knows this album – an absolute masterpiece - ‘nuff said.
I bought double CD almost 20 years ago – I wouldn’t know how to check but I guess it’d qualify as ‘first’ release.
It sounds ok-ish. Much better than ABC cd.
But the problem was, I also bought original vinyl some, uhmmm, 30? years ago (boy, does time fly)....
Mind you, back then I was a kid and didn’t have money for a great record player... or a great amp...or speakers.....In fact, I had no money at all and record player & speakers were rather cr*ppy...
But, despite all this, the CD version somehow never sounded ‘right’ – that is, I seemed to have in my memory a certain sound: and it simply was not there when listening to CD for, well, almost 20 years.... In that time, of course, I was able to improve on ‘hardware’ part quite a lot but whatever I did (transistor->tubes, speakers, cables, whatever) while I always did get better sound the emotion that got burned somewhere in my mind from vinyl days never really came to life....
Then, completely by chance, I got an opportunity to listen to original Sony Japan vinyl pressing from 1979 (!) converted to CD format by an unknown obsessive audiophile (where would we be without this incredible thing called Internet?)..... Wow! This thing totally _blew away_ my ‘first release’ CD by wiiiide margin.....
Now, I’ve stopped listening to vinyl ~20+ years ago and was getting tired of all those vinyl junkies screaming how superior vinyl was to CD (especially since we have this great XXHighEnd player!), and yet, here it was: original vinyl, even converted to digital format, just killed my CD version..... But wait a minute, it still was _digital_...What’s going on here?
Intrigued, I learned there was a ‘gold remastered’ CD MFSL release of ‘The Wall’ (mind you, I’ve never even heard of MFSL company before this occasion) and decided to try that too...(hey, you only live once and it seems I’ve logged some years.....)
To cut a long story short, after a loooong, back & forward session between ‘audiophile digitized’ 1979 Vinyl & MFSL ‘gold remaster’ CD, as much as in the back of my mind I may have been rooting for vinyl (the memories & emotions from listening to original vinyl 30 years ago suddenly came to life), in the end I had to admit that MFSL had pretty much everything that digitized vinyl version had but it did not have any vinyl drawbacks (pops, clicks, arm-needle issues, you know, usual suspects...)
Now I _really_ wanted to know what is going on here: are all my CDs ‘obsolete’ and how can it be that some guy with record player (although admittedly obsessive audiophile with some probably very expensive equipment) is able to digitize original vinyl and totally destroy my ‘first release’ CD version?
So, I went on to read what this audiophile did to convert his analog ‘master’ to digital CD format and learned a lot about how extremely tricky it is to make a good analog to digital conversion and how many of digital algorithms have only been perfected many _years_ after CD format was unveiled (....and digital was proclaimed to be ‘perfect sound forever’ by Sony/Phillips marketing machine....)
One of those algorithms was called ‘Dithering’: what it does sounds deceptively simple and unimportant: because analog master, in a manner of speaking, has ‘infinite’ resolution and CD is fixed to 16-bits, this ‘infinite’ has to be ‘rounded’ into these 16 bits somehow and ‘dithering’ algorithm decides whether this last bit is 0 or 1 - that’s it..... To my astonishment, there appeared to be dozens of ways to do, this seemingly unimportant, ‘rounding’ – and even worse, they all produced a slightly different sound signature....?
And, to make matters a bit more complicated, it turns out that before this ‘rounding’ (=dithering) happens, pretty much all mastering engineers nowadays ‘noise shape’ analog signal by, literally, _adding noise_ to original signal because it makes dithering works even better and resulting digital signal ends up sounding more ‘analog/vinyl’...?
Strange, very strange, but true. I could not resist and tried playing with demo version of tools used by this audiophile to create ‘his’ digital version of vinyl recordings. And all those ‘algorithms’ did, indeed, change the sound and made it nicer sounding....
So, as I said, I have to disagree with statement that all ‘gold, remasters, etc’ are bad because:
a) I do find some cases where I hear otherwise
b) It simply makes sense that analog to digital conversion technology improved (it’s been more than quarter of a century since CD came about and story about dithering & noise shaping algorithm development is a testament to this development)
But, again, you are 100% right that there are bad, bad, bad, ‘remasters’ out there – However, it would seem it’s not because of a lack of knowledge & tools, but simply because of ‘greed & market need’ – So, by all means, let’s expose them here....
BTW: you mentioned you’d expand on ‘high-resolution’ recordings: Don’t have much experience with those (am limited to 16/44, well, apart from SuperAudioCD that’s gathering dust) but would very much like to hear what you experienced!
Cheers,
Josef
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