Having had the album from release date and having listened to the 8-track for many, many years prior to CDs, it literally came as a shock to me when I heard a CD version without the cough. It's like listening to any album you're very familiar with and someone removing 4 seconds of the a song on the album. That's why I was glad to see Barry say that he left the cough in place. It had to be someone else after him who removed it.
Could the coughless versions be Columbia Record & CD Club versions? I have a Columbia House LP version of Houses of the Holy from which someone removed Bonzo's "rap" at the beginning of The Ocean. Mind you I also once had an old Canadian late-70's reissue of LZII from which the organ swell at the end of Thank You was missing.
There is a CRC LP pressing out there w/o the cough (reported years ago on an old thread) and maybe that's where this whole coughless thing originated, but my LP set has no CRC markings. Someone posted their CRC matrix and it included "GP" (Piros). My side one matrix ends in -C. Minus cough, maybe? But there is no "GP" and the lettering looks different than the other 3 sides. It's seems to have been intentionally to me. Such a mystery...
I looked at original PG-CD1 IMTOD tracks taken from Japan-for-US (no cough) & domestic US (cough) CD rips, & they seem to be not 100% identical digitally. First, tracks need to be carefully lined up at the start & then the null test indeed cancels out the first ~1:10 min of audio. It looks like there is ~0.005s of audio info somehow missing on US domestic track compared to Japan-for-US track at that point (compare highlighted areas of the logarithmic waveforms), but further down the PCM audio once again becomes 100% identical (up to the final 18s of the unedited track including Plant's "Dying,dying,dying...", Bonham's cough & etc.): - Japan-for-US pressing (no cough): - US pressing (cough): Plot thickens?..
I bought the Physical Graffiti CD from a store in the mall when it came out and it was sans cough. It was also literally the worst sounding CD I have heard to this day. I sold it to a used record store a few weeks after I bought it. The praise for this particular release is the reason I never pay attention to sound quality reviews on this site.
Funny you should mention that - I just now added one more member's opinions to my zero-attention list.
Does this graph tell us that the cough is gone? If those are exact places of IMTOD, there's more difference than just the area you highlighted. Hmm..
As to the process of creating a CD master and seeing it through to the pressing plant, no doubt there are many more qualified than me to respond. Hopefully Steve H. can join in and help with this. That said, Barry made it clear that once his mastering was done it should not in anyway be futzed with content wise. I'm guessing that Atlantic's mastering dept. would clone his premaster (to Umatic digital tape?) and then send the clones to the pressing plants for the glass mastering, electroforming and replication stages. If there was to be a change to Barry's work it seems it would have happened in the Atlantic CD mastering room. Hopefully someone will correct me if I'm mistaken in any of this. Steve, can you help us out here?
No, that is not the case. Testikoff's waveforms show both tracks are 100% bit-identical except (based on what he says) for 0.005 seconds around the 1:10 mark, and then the final 18 seconds of the track. Not a different mastering, but rather clearly some kind of edits/glitch/manipulation done to Diament's master after it left his hands - which is essentially what Diament himself has always said must've happened.
I don't think this issue tells us anything about the streetdate version that left Atlantic mastering. Only that there is seemingly a tiny glitch in the "fixed" cough version done later. Testikoff, do you know if that cough version has re-1 in the matrix?
No idea (I managed to only grab a verified-as-accurate CD rip of this one)... My physical disc PG-CD1 (no cough) manufactured by Victor Company of Japan has the following matrix: 200 - 2 - 1 - V2E11
I am commenting on Marino's mastering style, which is to present strength across all frequencies. Diament often goes for more of a bass heavy approach.
You actually have more "finding of harshness" with Jimmy Page's recording and mixing style. Marino's mastering didn't put the distortion onto the master tape. All Marino is doing is bringing out the distortion that is on the tape. Again, you might find some examples of the tiniest amount of clipping on the first four disc crop circles box, but the dynamics are virtually fully intact. It isn't compression for the sake of compression like we have with the newest Zeppelin digital editions.
You get all of the songs with both boxes and more dynamics than you do if you buy the individual Marino CDs.
I looked through the threads and was surprised to find the crop circle boxes are entirely different masterings. I will have to look into this. I always thought they were identical to the 1991 studio box. Me bad! Thing is the Diaments have no compression, and I like the nice bottom end they have. But I am going to check out the crop circle boxes!
The box with individual CDs for each album came out in 1993, around the same time as the second crop circles box. I actually like some of Diament's work on the catalog, but not all of his work on the catalog.
I would try to keep an open mind. Many of the CD's from 25 years ago that I did not like back then sound very good when played back at the right volume on CD playback equipment that is much better than I had when I was a kid.
The DACs in the CD players were the problem back then. The first CD players were 8 bit, now they are 24 bit. Plus the filtering on the output stage was lousy too back then. That's why those first gen CDs sounded like garbage. Now they sound like gold.
About all this cough stuff on PG, I know at least for the Diaments that on the Japanese Forever Young first pressing, no cough. On the US version, cough. On 91 remaster for the studio box, cough. After I finish this Marlboro Light, cough.
Don't forget that the ADCs used in recording studios back then also contributed to the sound. There's a thread around here somewhere in which our host talked about how converters took a big leap in the 90's. Plus Barry Diament also mentioned around here somewhere how he can really hear the sound of those old converters when he listens to his old CDs. To my ears the CDs being produced in the past 5-10 years have much better rendering of both low and high frequencies (when they are not heavily compressed at both the mixing and mastering stages). Cymbals sound far more realistic and analog like without the graininess of early digital converters; kick drums sound much more real. In the case of Led Zeppelin, the Davis remasters are the first versions that approach the sound of good vinyl when it comes to rendering John Bonham's brilliant ďrum work. Sometimes I think we get so focused on the dynamics aspect that we forget the other important points.
