Vinyl rips on Spotify??

Just been listening to Prince's Sign O' The Times on Spotify - what a mess. Huge jumps in volume from track to track so you're constantly having to adjust it, and big differences in mastering too, like some tracks have been taken from some massively compressed remaster. (I've noticed this before on albums on Spotify, where they seem to take the singles from a later compilation with totally different mastering to the rest of the album. It's incredibly irritating.)

The most bizarre thing, however, is that I'd swear blind that "The Ballad of Dorothy Parker" is a vinyl rip - and not a good one. The whole track has that sort of mushy end-of-side distortion instantly familiar to anyone who's ever heard a cheap or worn cartridge, and Prince's voice has definite vinyl-esque sibilance and a nasty harsh edge that sounds like a stylus mistracking. The weird thing is my original vinyl copy doesn't sound like that at all!

How difficult would it have been to simply rip the CD?? I haven't heard it but I can't imagine it sounds like this.

 

I'm pretty sure that the recently-added 70s-era Daddy Cool albums are needledrops. Oliver, of "Good Morning Starshine" fame, t00 - or maybe worse - sounds like a copy of an 8-track tape or cassette! I haven't stumbled upon too many of these, fortunately.

 

Just gave it a listen, I agree the album is completely borked here. The loudest mastered track on the original album is "Its Gonna be a beautiful night - live"

From a quick skim, the SOTT title track, Hot Thing, The Cross and Adore are louder than the rest. I think they have sourced these from somewhere else.

The rest of the album seems to volume match the others in his catalog around that time. Remember that only Purple Rain and 1999 have been remastered so far in his entire catalog.

I would guess that the 4 tracks that are louder than anything else have come from somewhere else!

 

That's our world today...no effort by streaming services to get it right...another reason to avoid all that scum and listen to vinyl and CDs.

 

They take what they get from the labels, no curating.

Sony's been offering digital versions of old, long out of print catalog titles and at least one of those (David Ackles's Five and Dime from 1973) sounds to me like it is vinyl sourced. Stealers Wheel's three albums for A&M went up on Spotify a year or so ago and those may also be from vinyl.

 

^^^ The labels do decide what to give, but the way in which Spotify and Apple ingest the titles is nuts! There are about 80 ways it can get screwed up.

 

I listened to a David Lee Roth album on Apple Music a couple months ago, and there were notable volume differences, and noting what tracks they were, concluded it was feeding those tracks from a later hits compilation (he's had two) which came out years later. I haven't run into this too much, but it is a thing. I wonder if that's what's happening with Sign O The Times as well.

 

I have literally heard the needle drop on a couple of Spotify albums in the past three years.

 

There are loads of needle-drops which have become the most commonly-heard version after being uploaded to streaming services. In certain genres, it's not uncommon at all, as the original recordings were unmarketable for years and the masters lost or discarded. Some of them are quite dire and sound like they were played back on a plastic USB iDistort turntable with a nail for a stylus.

But none of that surprises me. What does surprise me is a track I came across which was not only a needle drop, but played back at the wrong speed.

 

Also there were plenty of CD's released with needle-drops by less-than-reputable (but still legal) labels, so this isn't necessarily a product of the streaming era. (Hell, if you went back far enough you can probably find LP's which are needle-drop clones of other LP's because someone at a label was too lazy to find the original tape)

 

No problem with professional vinyl rips, if done properly.

 

There are lots of dubious sources on spotify. A lot of the releases are grey market cd or vinyl rips. Lots of junk by Dol, Waxtime, etc. It's a shame because none of the money is being given to who it should be. A telltale sign is an old album with a recent release date. You'll see a record released in the 50s or 60s and the release date on spotify will be sometime in the past 10 years. It's quite frustrating. You would think a company as large as spotify would pay more attention to what they're doing...

 

I find this issue particularly irritating with streaming services. Single edits used and volume differences.

 

FWIW, on Apple Music, the regular album version of 1999 (not the new remastered one) doesn't have the album versions of the title track and Little Red Corvette... they are some single versions. I think SOTT is OK though on Apple Music, but I just gave it a quick listen there.

So yeah, it looks like they're mixing different sources.

 

It is not just on Spotify, it is also present on Amazon Music.
On SOTT album, listen to the track Dorothy Parker. Around the 39 second mark, just before Prince sings Dishwater Blonde, you can here some surface noise in the right channel.
It looks like there is no quality control going on at these record labels when providing music files to the streaming services.