_even_more_riverrun_mixes_(and_turntable_stuff)_

[stimpee]

Originally Posted by negative1

interesting article on the rise of vinyl again:

http://www.wired.com/entertainment/m...eningpost_1029

i wonder what Oblivion with bells, will sound like?
i ordered it..

later
-1

This is the shit thing about CDs these days:

Although CDs have a wider dynamic range, mastering houses are often encouraged to compress the audio on CDs to make it as loud as possible: It's the so-called loudness war. Since the audio on vinyl can't be compressed to such extremes, records generally offer a more nuanced sound.

Theres a thread on the hydrogenaudio forums that lists CDs that have been mastered overly loud and have lots of clipping. The Depeche Mode album Playing The Angel was one of those. Before Oink's demise I requested a FLAC rip from the vinyl and it sounds far better.

[negative1]

well, this is interesting...

a cd on one side, with grooves on the other (like vinyl)...
http://blog.wired.com/music/2007/11/...cds-groov.html

don't think it will catch on , but its a nice oddity..

from this company..

http://www.optimal-online.de/Vinyl.341.0.html

later
-1

[cacophony]

Originally Posted by stimpee

Theres a thread on the hydrogenaudio forums that lists CDs that have been mastered overly loud and have lots of clipping. The Depeche Mode album Playing The Angel was one of those. Before Oink's demise I requested a FLAC rip from the vinyl and it sounds far better.

interesting. i like "playing the angel" as an album, but i find the sound quality of it almost impossible to listen to at times. it definitely has an overmodulated, clipped sound. it never occurred to me that it was an artifact of the mastering process rather than a creative decision to err on the side of "grittiness."

too bad about oink. i would love to hear the vinyl version of the album to see if the clippy sound i find offensive is reduced.

[negative1]

Originally Posted by cacophony

interesting. i like "playing the angel" as an album, but i find the sound quality of it almost impossible to listen to at times. it definitely has an overmodulated, clipped sound. it never occurred to me that it was an artifact of the mastering process rather than a creative decision to err on the side of "grittiness."

too bad about oink. i would love to hear the vinyl version of the album to see if the clippy sound i find offensive is reduced.

check this link out : http://brianstagg.co.uk/p_t_a_clipressed/
concerning : depeche mode - playing the angel on vinyl

later
-1

[Jan]

Originally Posted by negative1

check this link out : http://brianstagg.co.uk/p_t_a_clipressed/
concerning : depeche mode - playing the angel on vinyl

later
-1

This is crap. You get nothing by just looking at waveforms. His wannabe scientific method is completely invalid. A waveform alone can not give information about the dynamic range.
I hate the loudness war myself, but this is just wrong.

[cacophony]

i agree that you can't learn a lot from simply looking at the waveforms. for example, it tells you nothing of the signal in relation to the noise floor. in which case the smaller waveform could be the inferior one.

however the methodology isn't completley invalid. this image tells the story. the squared off tips of the peaks means clipping, pure and simple. a non-clipped signal doesn't square off.

so in this case, the point is valid. but you're right, you can't make a purist argument against louder mastering simply by comparing the size of waveforms alone.

[negative1]

i know i'm dragging this out further (sorry),
but a more detailed analysis of some of the
depeche mode remasters can be found here...

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/...hp/t44492.html

later
-1

[cacophony]

this thread is pretty much off-topic at this point so i figured i'd go ahead and include this here:

after several critical comparisons between the CD and vinyl of "playing the angel," i've come to a few realizations:

yes, the vinyl transfer is different. the mix is more subtle, the stereo field a little more balanced and precise. there's a banging-your-head-against-the-desk feeling to the depth of field on the CD version where everything is jockeying to be at the front of the line. very shallow. the depth of field on the vinyl version is, for lack of a better word, deeper. elements recede and prioritize themselves in a much more pleasing way. i think "damaged people" is the most outstanding example of these differences.

that being said, a lot of the gritty distortion and clipping is still apparent on the vinyl version. it is by no means a clip-free transfer. you can definitely hear where it's worse on the CD, like the outtro to "nothing's impossible" (the farty sounding bass on the CD version is fart-less on the vinyl version) but there's still a lot of nasty sounding grit on the vinyl transfer. there are clips on martin's backup vocal in the chorus of "nothing's impossible" that are audible and identical in both versions. and the chorus of "john the revelator" is equally harsh on the ear on both versions.

it sounds to me the clipping wasn't necessarily all in the CD mastering process, which is what the debate seems to be about. i feel like i'm hearing clipping that goes back to the layback of the original master. whatever they sent on to the mastering house already had some pretty bad distortion on it (some intentional, i feel, and some not). the CD mastering process exacerbated the problem by compressing the hell out of the final product and cramming every element into your ear at the same damn loudness. it's like putting spotty, blemished skin beneath a magnifying glass. the vinyl, on the other hand, acts like a soft vaselined lens, making the blemishes sound smoother and less noticable.

but the blemishes are still there.

all IMHO, of course.

[froopy seal]

Originally Posted by negative1

testing...

here's a link to the cd-cover..
http://www.picoodle.com/view.php?img....jpg&srv=img30

or http://tinyurl.com/3y7dcd

-1

Hey Raj,

would you mind uploading the cover art again? The links are dead.

Love this mix. It's been sitting nicely besides holden's/AViD's Born Slippy megamix on my mobile music-listening device for these last years. It got me into the new UW stuff of the time.

[stimpee]

works for me http://img30.picoodle.com/img/img30/...om_fc28dc6.jpg

http://tinyurl.com/3y7dcd