Bought a pressed CD, got a needle drop ?

I got an old (yet sealed) copy of UK Subs ¨Another Kind Of Blues/Crash Course (2 lps on one CD, italian label Get Back)) . It's not a remastered edition from '93 (sounds great) but during the drums intro on track one there is an evident dropout followed by a scratchy sound on the left channel; nothing to loose sleep about at the bargain price I got it for but :

Is it possible it has been culled from an lp ?

There's no other evidence of this on any part of the cd though.

 

Italians and needledrops go together

 

From your comment I gather it's a common practice among italian labels ?

 

My Get Back (Italy) CDs of the first two Pearls Before Swine albums sound fine. The master tapes to these two albums have been long gone, long before the CD era. The best available sources were used for these two albums on all the CD reissues. I also have the ESP/ZYX Balaklava CD and that sounds great as well.

Italian labels do use needle drops for some of their reissues, but this happens in other countries as well and in the USA.

 

I'm not sure about this one (showing back side) . . .



Anyway, my old vinyl copy is off-center by a hair. I could actually get it to play right by moving it around because the hole was just a hair oversized, too.

 

Quite a few early Bootleg CD's were sourced from vinyl.

 

Sandy's Album Is Here At Last - Sandy Hurvitz.
Collectors Choice CD release is a mediocre Needle Drop.

 

Aorta 2-Michael Been's (The Call) debut album. It also looks like it's one of those pressed CDs made to "look" like normal. Artwork is pretty decent though. It's a relatively clean needle drop.

 

THIS was one of my most disappointing purchases ever! Not only is it a needledrop, but the LP it was taken from was in awful condition! I wonder how a record company even considers releasing such a poor sounding CD!

 

Of course here in Europe there's a lot of those out-of-copyright albums available of material issued in 1962 or earlier, and these can contain either rips of other CDs or needledrops, assuming that the album has appeared on CD before.

I acquired cheaply one such of 15 Duke Ellington albums spread across 10 CDs. Some of these are definite needledrops. One has a lot of scratching and whooshing noises, which make me think its been taken from a low bit-rate MP3 of a needledrop of a badly worn LP.

 

Just look on the bright side: most of the times needledrops sound much better than CDs

 

Generally not the ones you get on commercial CDs though.

 

I have a needledrop of "Ruben & the Jets" and I know I'm not alone there, never mind the chundering history of Zappa vs. Digital Sound.

 

Now that I am more educated on the matter, I am finding way more needledrops on official pressed CDs than I'd like to. Especially nowadays when people don't want to spend the money to transfer tapes (it seems), they just resort to needledrops. And worse yet, they don't even bother to do them well.

One release that sent me complaining to the label was Esoteric's release of Italian prog rock band Banco's "As in a Last Supper". Not only was it a needledrop, but it was taken from a worn LP and seemingly done on a crummy setup, so there is noticeable distortion. Of course they nailed it with NR and click reduction, so it sounds awful. Although I own three copies of that original LP and never got one on quiet vinyl, if I were that label, I would have just given up and not bothered releasing the thing.

That said, I myself worked on a soundtrack CD of the 1980 horror film "The Boogey Man" and we had to use a needledrop because we could only locate one person involved with the original soundtrack album and he had no idea where the master tapes might be. The rights holder only offered poor quality MP3s also taken from vinyl. As we worked on it, we found that oddly enough, that LP master was partially done from acetate needledrops itself (a really incomprehensible thing), so even having master tapes wouldn't have given us much better sound. Unlike Esoteric and some other labels though, I bothered to find a guy who was both a professional and did this stuff as a hobby (and is also a forum member!), so I'd bet most of our listeners would have believed they were listening to something that came from a master tape. In our case, the CD is WAY better than the original vinyl because we refused to put out anything subpar.

I'm pretty certain some jerks just then used our CD to make their reissue vinyl versions without any credit or financial compensation, so there you have a situation of a needledrop on a CD being the master for vinyl. That's modern indie record labels for ya today.

 

It's much more common than people think. The number of songs on compilations that are needle drops from the majors is staggering. I remember on more than one occasion doing projects I really wanted to see happen for free just so the masters were used rather than vinyl.

 

The Fox album, Blue Hotel, from Cherry Red, is a total needle drop. A very badly executed one too. I've been moaning about it to anyone who'll listen for years. The bloody thing is still in print as well!

 

Me too. I was furious about that release. The masters must still exist for some tracks as they've been on other releases sounding fab.

 

I actually complained about that to Cherry Red. The guy who responded told me that 'hardly anyone else had complained' and that Kenny Young had approved the master after rejecting one mix because it wasn't 'warm enough'.

What made it worse was that the other 2 Fox albums sound great!

 

Hi guys, been a lurker for a while, thought I'd finally put my 2 cents in!

I'm totally fine with needledrops on official releases, as long as the record company is honest about it, and that they put in enough effort to do the best sounding needledrop possible.

Real Gone Music have done an amazing job with their Mamas & Papas and Steppenwolf mono singles collections, considering that there probably aren't many mono tape sources left for those two artists.

People often forget that 90% of the 1960s tracks on any BBC session come from needledrops of BBC transcription discs, which usually sound fantastic without any obvious artifacts. The ones on the big Kinks BBC set are particularly good transfers.

I noticed also that on the latest Esoteric reissue, the mono mix of the 2nd Procol Harum album is a needledrop, but it is very clean and well done. They even left it as a stereo transfer, which is great for fans who want to do the cleanup themselves, as mastering engineers do have a tendency to overdo vinyl cleanup sometimes.

I've been very disappointed recently with Sundazed of all companies, as it seems that quite a number of their mono releases are purportedly from master tapes, but there is definite evidence that they are using needledrops for sources, and just editing on fold-downs from the stereo mix (which usually comes from a tape source) onto the start and end of the tracks to hide the surface noise.

I first noticed this on the mono Mamas & Papas 2nd album, for which the entire CD consists of just that, a mono needledrop with folded stereo intros and outros. The mono Blue Cheer Vincebus album is exactly the same.

"The Other Side Of This Life" from the first mono Lovin Spooful album also has this issue, and by OOPsing the track you can hear that the intro and outro are clean mono but the main body of the song has vinyl distortions which become very clear when OOPsed. Luckily thats the only aberation on those great reissues!

Perhaps most annoyingly, there is definite issue with "Electricity" on the mono Captain Beefhear Safe As Milk album, at the very end of the song on the proper mono mix the backing track is mixed out leaving only the theremin, but on the Sundazed CD the backing track continues right to the end, just like the stereo mix.

In the end, I look at everything as a case by case basis. Sometimes a needledrop is the only source left for a particular mix or track, sometimes it's just record company laziness (or flat out money-grabbing in the case of fly-by-night dodgy european labels!) and other times it's just a complete mystery like the Fall reissues dubbed from noisy old LPs when previous CDs came from the masters!

Peace,
Greg

 

Kenny Young is clearly deaf then!

Yes the other two were great quality.

 

The Music Club CD of Huey Piano Smith's greatest. Atrocious.

 

As you said, some songs have been on CD from Blue Hotel before sounding good. Perhaps some of the masters were lost and they did everything as a needle drop to 'match'?

It was a disgrace. Probably the worst CD I've ever bought.

That and a US copy of Lynsey De Paul's Love Bomb. Came close to Blue Hotel.

 

Blue Hotel is definitely the worst CD I've ever bought. It was taken from a scratched bargain bin copy.

 

The Radioactive label (is it still going?) is/was notorious for this.

Hst, I'm grateful for their issue of Farewell, Aldebaran - an album I wouldn't other wise have heard.

 

It's not even a recent phenomenon, not has it been confined to CD (or download). I have the 1987 Fat & Frantic album Aggressive Sunbathing on both vinyl and cassette; the cassette is very obviously a needle drop. (But the more recent download version sounds like it may well come from the master.)