SH Spotlight Recording and Mastering Questions---Answered here. Any more?

Thank you Mr. Hoffman. The original CD for the E.T. soundtrack album has always been confusing to me. The MCA CD I have, which I think it was released in 1988, so several years after the movie and album release, states that it's an analog recording and it has a SPARS code of AAD, but it never sounded like the typical analog recording of the era, which use to sound much much better than this CD. Second, as you well said, there's what sounds as tape hiss between tracks, like if the single tracks were re-recorded on a single tape to conform the album, analog editing I think it's called, sorry but I'm Spanish and English is not my mother languaje.
Maybe the analog back up tape was used as you say, or maybe the analog equalized/LP mastering tape was used and just tranfered to CD. The fact is I've never heard the E.T. soundtrack to sound well until its first remixing and mastering of the almost complete soundtrack CD in 1996 which used the analog multitrack tapes as source. If it wasn't because of the multichannel 5.1 mix the SACD has (which is front heavy with instruments placed on the 3 from channels and just what sounds like recording studio ambiance, either real or fake, on the rears) my preferd version would be the 1996 CD, on a CD quality level it sounds better to me than the 20th Anniversary CD.

 

Steve, will you provide a list of your five greatest mastering achievements (and why) and a list of five titles you'd like another crack at? Thanks!

 

Good question.

 

How about the others, @Steve Hoffman?

 

OK, just wanted to make sure you saw the question.

 

Steve, I recall that when you remastered Bob Dylan Greatest Hits Vol. 2 on SACD, you said that you were not trying to get all the songs to sound alike. Has that always been your philosophy when doing comps or "hit" collections? I listened very recently to some of the old DCC comps like Beach Classics and both volumes of Toga Rock. They sound so good. Same thing with the DCC Zombies and many more.

 

I bought some of the first CD's back in early '83 as an early adopter of the medium when I was 16 years old. I had never heard vinyl at that point, so the CD's I bought for my Sony CDP-101 player sounded great (to me). "Sweet Dreams (are made of this)," "Thriller," "Synchronicity," Steve's "Aja" were some of my first purchases.

The CD's arrival on the world stage was met with derision then as the end of music as we know it - shrill, brittle, incomplete notes, etc. Audiophiles ranted and raved back then.

Fast forward to 2017 and many of those original CD's (like the Japan 35dp series) are considered definitive now. Why was there such pushback then, and are now looked at fondly in this age of 'loudness wars?'

Certainly Steve and DCC did a great deal to persuade audiophiles to calm down, but why such (misplaced) anger back then?

 

The bit depth. All things been equal, 24/48 (imo) trumps 16/96.

 

That is one of those myths. There was no misplaced anger amongst the mainstream. It was heralded as a significant advance in audio quality and convenience. I know I was there. Just read any audiophile mag from that era, the dissenters were a tiny minority.

 

I have to agree, I was there too. If anything, it is now that there is dissent for all the new "remasters" and even some of the SACDs have been overly compressed and in my opinion ruined somewhat. What happened to the advantages that CD was supposed to bring, ie the increased DR as it seems that now vinyl has the DR and the CDs are compressed!! What the hell is going on?

 

That is what I noticed too. It was around the mid 90s and certainly later that CDs were being thought as inferior to LP formats - a very close correlation with the sound wars time-line. Of course there were some Fremer types that held a different view through the 80s/90s.

 

They did it to get you to buy everything again silly.

 

Can you state that again? Aside from compressing and limiting the crapola out of the music, making everything sound sonically similar is the biggest turnoff to listening to an album. There's no adventure, no peaks or valleys, no emotion! And, they use plug-ins that EQ everything to sound similar instead of using ear and feeling. It's like with spacing the gaps. Remember in the old days, it was standard to gap everything at like six or seven seconds? Spacing the songs for feel and impact works much better. Same with sonics.

 

Ummm...I don't recall that version of history at all! If there were people deriding digital back then, it was probably from within the engineering community, but they didn't voice it publicly.

As for the brittle sound of CD back then, I think a lot of it was due to the cheap players with their ringing brickwall filters.

 

Well, it ain't working. I don't buy remasters any more, unless someone that I trust recommends it. In fact, I won't buy any CD/SACD any more unless I get a recommendation, so the music "big wigs" are failing.

 

Hi Steve
I also own this release. It is sonically "delicious" so I too am interested in your thoughts/recollections of mastering it.
Not sure if it was in your Adventures in Mastering thread...

 

Good to read your thoughts on the sound. The copy I ordered should arrive this week. I'm looking forward to listening to it - and Steve's comments.

 

No difference on playback, providing it is implemented correctly (I agree though, this has been debated to death).

Steve, just as a matter of interest, what bit depth/sample rates did you use in production for most of the DCC CDs?

 

That's something i like to know also.
Made In Japan for instance.

 

And do you keep these files in your personal archive?

 

Sorry if this is a stupid question, but here goes...
I can easily understand how changes can be made from track to track, even fairly drastic EQ changes, once the master tape is digitized into a DAW. But how are these changes made from tape, particularly if the time between tracks is very short. You can't stop the cutter head, right? So how are these moves done in real time? Or are you assembling individual song masters to a new tape, and recording the moves there...as well as recreating the gaps between songs? This is confusing to me because it seems like mastering engineers may not always get the master tape(s). They may have to use a safety copy...relabed as "master". Or a Production or EQ copy.

Thank you.

 

You might like this thread as I learned some consoles have two sections so you can set up for the next song in advance then switch Greg Calbi mastering Dire Straits in 1979

This is Kevin Gray/Cohearent's console with the a/b sections I believe


Our System