Jon Astley - The Master Of Remastering

Oh, no doubt! Many top mastering engineers, for an example, get a kick out of seeing how loud they can cleanly boost a CD.

In some engineering circles, the philosophy is to see how clean you can make the recording by any means necessary.

 

Birds of a feather. Men of the same ears.

 

He is/was Pete's brother-in-law.

 

Explain to me what's wrong with CD Creator?

-D

 

Would NR necessarily decrease the *dynamics* (ie.., the difference betweem the quietest and loudest parts)?

What he may have done by bad NR is decrease the frequency range, which is not the same thing.

Improving the sound of the master is something SH does occasionally as well.

 

I know. But still, they wouldn't have clicked but for the same (hard of) hearing.

 

Necessarily? I dunno. Many programs give you the option of hearing *only what was removed* by a processing pass. That way you can check to hear that nothing 'musical' has been lost.

 

Yes, but not with NR! There is a difference...

NR would INCREASE dynamic range artifically, which would render the sound unnatural, or at least make it different than what's on the master tape.

 

There is nothing wrong with CD Creator. It is the de-clicking app it uses. Have you ever tried it? It attenuates the treble horribly and leaves burbly noise as an artifact. Finer de-clickers like the one in Cool Edit, Sound Forge, Waves, and others don't do this, at least with proper setting.

 

I don't know that Astley's hard of hearing, but he does seem to be ignoring the damage he causes. He probably really thinks he is improving the sound, much like the teenager who jacks up the bass and treble on his equalizer, thinking it sounds better.

 

Correct. And, to be sure, there is a difference in the sound of limiting and compression. It's just that they are usually used together.

Naw, back to our weekly schedualed Astley-bashing...

 

See, that's the problem. It's just like eq or using reverb on remixes, or whatever. It's OK as long as it's used very very carefully, but so many times it isn't and the end result sounds like sonic death. That's why I think a lot of these recordings would be better IMO as flat transfers from high quality metal parts, etc, with very little if any sonic tampering. We all well know how picky we are here about sound quality. I'm pretty sure declicking will remove some of the music transients, no matter how good you are at using it, but certainly less so if used by someone who has the good sense to go light on the controls and employ manual declicking if necessary.

As a very extreme example, I have grown to appreciate what Columbia did when they released Benny Goodman's 1938 Concert at Carnegie Hall on CD. There is more noise on that set than you've heard on anything else, period. But the music is all there. Now, many of us here have tools at our disposal to tidy up the noise a bit, but we have the raw material on those discs. I like that in this case, because most engineers would scrub all the life out of this one. This was a very bold move on Sony/Columbia's part, and they get my highest praise for taking the purist approach!

 

Mike,

I don't know if you have done much vinyl restoration of if you have any experience with it at all, but given the right tool(s) and being careful should not result in removing transients. The lessening of them should not be as dramatic as you make it sound.

If you do restoration, what software do you, or have you used, if any?

 

But isn't Dolby NR used in the studio as well?

 

That's what I thought. And it's why Grant's blanket denunciation of NR as seems off to me. (Yes, I know he meant NR applied to masters, but if necessarily NR makes things sound unnatural or not true to the source, then
surely that applies during recording and mixing too.)

 

Phil Schaap,the producer of that reissue took a lot of static in many reviews and fan comments over his handling of this reissue.They complained about too much noise etc..

 

Krabapple and Steve,

To clear things up a bit, I was specifically referring to the single-ended digital NR, not Dolby, DBX, or any other type of compander system used on analog tape.