At 03:34 PM 2007-01-06, phillip holmes wrote:
You can lump me in with the Japanese collector/retro/audiophile crew. I have experienced many occasions where the original LP was vastly superior to the reissue CD.
Phillip,
I totally agree with you that many original LPs sound vastly superior to the reissue CD, but the difference is not in the medium--at least not most of it.
When the original LP was made, pride was taken in the entire process and the artists usually signed off on the entire process. In a phrase, the LPs were professionally mastered.
When the CD reissues came out, the most charitable way I can think of the process for at least some of the reissues was that the CDs were not professionally mastered.
I have had long discussions with a number of people who were intimately involved with the processes and they concur. They knew what was being lost from master tape to test pressing to final consumer pressing. That's not to say that LPs can't be very good, but what you're hearing is not the medium, but the execution of what is put on the medium. It's like "don't shoot the messenger".
As to preferences for recording media, you'll note that the classical crews who were looking for output=input switched quickly to digital. The pop/rock recordists missed the distortions and the unique limiting curves of analog tape and other vintage equipment and have continued to use it as an effect (in my opinion).
Also, a portion of the retro adoptees of tape and tube gear do so because there is a high-profile marketing campaign (both official and in the grapevine) that you've got to use the certain piece of kewl equipment that made this or that record a hit. Look at the eBay ads for some of this gear "Just like what XXX made their #1 hit record on" and stuff like that.
Perhaps, just perhaps, the hit record had something to do with the void that artist was filling at the time, or, heavens forbid, musical TALENT!
For the manufacturers from Ampex on, it was always striving for output=input.
Cheers,
Richard
Richard L. Hess email: richard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Aurora, Ontario, Canada (905) 713 6733 1-877-TAPE-FIX Detailed contact information: http://www.richardhess.com/tape/contact.htm Quality tape transfers -- even from hard-to-play tapes.