In article , Iain Churches
wrote:
"Jim Lesurf" wrote in message
...
So I'd guess they equate such mindless behaviour as them being
"cheaper and better" than their competitors. Perhaps a survival
adaptation to a pop music world where the faith is "louder is better".
I don't know about cheaper. Except for projects funded by EU cultural
foundations which must, as a term of the funding be put out to tender
for subcontracting, I am not sure that the price of mastering is a
serious consideration when compared with the other outlays involved.
Here "cheaper" has two meanings that can cause the makers/vendors to act as
they do. One is the ability to reduce their own costs. The other is the
ability to then use that for some choice of increased margin and lower
price to induce more sales. They obvious want to charge the customer as
much as they can get, regardless. And want to rack up the margin and volume
of sales.
I am less convinced that it was such a golden age for 'accuracy' in
the 1:1 sense. :-)
Given the technology available at the time, I think the results were
often amazingly good. Rather like iron ships built before the days of
welding:-)
My only demur would be wrt the use of "often". :-)
Partly because - as I recall - some people who 'cut' the discs traded
on having a reputation for making the result 'sound better' by
tweaking it in various mystical ways.
Harry Fisher, the senior disc cutting engineer at Decca, under whose
beady eye, I learned the art of disc cutting, used to say "The objective
is to make the disc sound the same as the tape. Any fool can make it
sound different"
However in the pop field it was evident IIRC that disc cutters used to
'sell themselves' on the basis that they could 'improve' the results. And
some became known to LP buyers as being 'gurus' who could magic up 'better'
sound.
Again, the 'guru' disc cutters seemed to mainly be a feature of the
'pop' world where they would scratch their sign on the land at the
inner end of the side. The master mason leaving his mark... they
wished. :-)
Everyone who cut discs was required to inscribe their ID together with
the matrix and the cut number on the inner of the disc, adjacent to the
locked groove, so that the factory knew who had cut the disc and on
which lathe. This was not just something the "gurus" did, we all did
it:-)
But how many then became widely known amongst buyers and used a name like
'Porky'?... :-)
So far as I can see, you are talking about one subset - mainly classical
and jazz perhaps. Whereas I'm pointing out what the (bigger in commercial
terms, I guess) pop/rock types got up to. As a parallel to what you got for
the CD you raised for this thread.
Either way, so far as I can see there was no 'Golden Age' of disc creation
in my lifetime so far. Just that some did their jobs one way, and others
worked on a different basis like a faith that "louder is better". So just
as it was possible to obtain well-made LPs, so it is possible to obtain
well-made CDs. And then as now, your chances depended on the company and
the type of music.
For LP the dilemma was that:
Classical/serious music was often well recorded and the disc cut with care.
But then the duplication process was prone to lousy production of the
individual LPs. Clicks, swishes, wow, etc, all very audible and easy to
distinguish from the sound of a quartet or orchestra.
Pop/rock music tended to be loud more of the time, so the same type of
click or swish tended to be masked by the music. Hence less sensitive to
poor LP duplication. And for 'studio created' pop there might be no way for
purchasers of an LP to tell if changes in the sound had occurred due to the
people making the 'cut' fiddling about to show how clever they were.
On one side the approach you describe in terms of Fisher. On the other, the
approach of 'Prime Cuts', etc.
The details of the divide in ways of working and thinking have changed. But
the divide still seems there to me. Just that with pop/rock, people have
more quickly slid downmarket to mp3 downloads as cheap and convenient. :-)
Whereas on the serious side people may be more attracted by high rate aac,
flac, lpcm, 24bit, 192k, etc. That side of things has perhaps been slower
off the mark because it is more demanding on the technology. And maybe
because the quality-minded may be more cautious about change.
Slainte,
Jim
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