Pink Floyd - Dark Side of the Moon - Analysis

Guthrie will be at RMAF next weekend discussing WYWH. I wonder if he might comment on what he feels is different than prior masterings.

 

Yes, that was in post #3.

After ripping the 1983 Sony (I have a Harvest Japan-for-Europe Blackface) as a wav+cue I loaded the whole shebang in SoundForge and used the iZotope Mastering EQ plug-in. This has a "post-emphasis curve" preset. When I do the spectral analysis on the before and after files my Excel chart shows a perfect emphasis curve, so I know both my measurement method and de-emphasis EQ are correct.

That is yet another reason there is such confusion about the TO/non-TO early CDs. Not only did did both the early masterings appear con-currently in all markets, I'm convinced some folks have listened to the 1983 Sony without proper de-emphasis. Either as a straight rip, or in a modern CD/DVD player that doesn't do de-emphasis.

 

Might as well include a link!

Excellent work, foobar!

 

Would be interesting to learn if any CDs were "flat transfers"?

Not that I believe that is always the ideal to strive for in a mastering. If I could assign a true flat transfer as the "baseline" in the chart the other curves would be more meaningful.

Better not show him this thread though, he'll think we're hopeless geeks fer sure.

 

Foobar, can I swim against the current here and say I prefer the results to be presented without being normalized? Normalizing loses the relative levels of each mastering and dumbs things down - it actually makes reading the graphs harder when they are all squashed together.
Fantastic work! Ignore the graphical interface haters - they must be due to crawl out about now.

 

Wow foobar, this is really an impressive work!!!

Thank you for all the efforts you've put in this... much appreciated!!

 

This is a question I've had here for some time. I'd thought some modern players, maybe even most, did not apply de-emphasis. I was bluntly corrected by another forum member that nearly all modern cd players correct for pre-emphasis. Is the Japan DSOTM pre-emph flag not in the (normal) TOC location? That would prevent all players from handling it correctly.

 

I absolutely agree with you. Better to show the data as it actually exists on the discs.

 

Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think any CD player that can correct for pre-emphasis can handle it wherever the flag is?

I know that newer versions of EAC have trouble detecting every type of flag, and indeed I just popped my Harvest Blackface CP35-3017 in and EAC says "no" in the pre-emphasis column, which is wrong.

I know there are some modern CD players which do not have the de-emphasis circuit at all. (It's an extra analog circuit.) I recall a forum member contacting a company to complain about this (I think it was NAD) and they told him to just turn down the treble knob! I'm pretty sure most DVD players do not have the circuit either.

 

I'm almost certain that my recently purchased Sony blu-ray player does not properly de-emphasize the '83 Japan DSOTM. On other players in my home it does fine, but playing on this blu-ray player it is ridiculously over the top with the high frequencies.

 

That's certainly what it would sound like. It's a 10dB boost to the high end.

Shame that even Sony has abandoned it.

 

Awesome thread. No surprise that the MFSL mastering is smiling at me in those graphs. I've heard all of these masterings except the new one done by Guthrie. I own the 1983 CD so I am pretty pessimistic about Guthrie's being better than it.

 

Like you said, the 84 release has a 7kHz boost...it would make sense that the dynamic content of the alarm clocks are radically different, because that's the range that those clocks are hitting in.

 

I read somewhere that the 1983 mastering was a flat transfer, but it was done from a tape copy. I will try to figure out where I read this (it was in one of the many threads here about that Black Triangle mastering). If that's true, then it's definitely the closest sound you're going to get to the master tape, EQ wise. (Being a tape copy would also explain why the absolute phase is inverted compared to most other masterings). It wouldn't surprise me if it was true though, becuase I think the 83 mastering is superior to all the other ones. By it using a flat transfer means it has Alan Parsons' EQ moves on it...which were always very tasteful.

 

We know next to zero about the early masterings.

I think you'll find that nearly everyone who champions a particular mastering will swear it's a flat transfer, and true to the artist's intent, without any facts to base that on.

 

Good point, well spotted.

 

What about what Vernon calls the "EMI revision level 1" mastering:

83.8 / 90.4 / 95.5 / 92.8 / 95.5 / 94.6 / 95.5 / 91.7 / 95.5

(Found on later "original" USA releases)?

 

More likely the tape copy was already equalized from the master for vinyl pressing... so you'll get a flat transfer of what an "ideal" vinyl copy would sound like but not the 1st generation master. But nobody really knows.

 

In addition to the other comments, the fact that it has pre-emphasis alone means that it is not a flat transfer.

 

I think that's a level shifted version of what I call 1984 EMI, without any EQ adjustments.

 

Ha! That may have been me, but most recently I was told the NAD T585 player does handle pre-emph.
Although the flag in the wrong place may make this moot.
Btw, use EAC pre-beta 3, select Detect Manually for Pre-Emph to find the flag if it's not in TOC.

 

Yeah if you count the 0.1 dB (or whatever) frequency response error that comes from encoding and decoding it...which I consider to be negligible. The frequency response of the tape machine they used to do the transfer probably had a wider frequency response swing than would have been created by the pre-emphasis.

 

Maybe? I thought tapes that were EQ'd for vinyl pressing typically had the highs boosted and the ultra lows rolled off...it doesn't sound that way to my ears and doesn't appear to be that way on the graphs either. Also, I had a high quality needledrop of the coveted first Japanese pressing (solid blue triangle EMI/Odeon, done by a highly respected forum member)....I level matched and compared the two once, they sounded almost identical. I would be willing to bet that they were both sourced from that same tape. If that's the case, then there's no way that tape has been EQ'd for vinyl. Of course this is all just speculation.

Who mastered the non-TO black triangle anyway?

 

That remains one of the big mysteries. The Japan Wish You Were Here 2-track is also a mystery. (Correct me if I'm wrong.)

 

Does the 2-track WYWH have pre-emphasis as well?