Continuing with CDs?

that's why my browser is vinyl-based

Pono-browser or GTFO!

Seems like bad form for a record shop to play a skippy record for everybody like that.

I'm guessing they had a batch come in and they were just testing them out, but it was clearly for everyone in the store - like the sleeve was put up vertically on a stand at the counter that indicated this is what we're hearing.

But yeah, the short answer really is, it's not the format, it's how it's cut or mastered, and most of the time that ends up making the format a moot point to me.

To use The Pretenders as an example, a good chunk of that album had been released earlier on singles. (Learning to Crawl, my other favorite Pretenders album, is like that as well.) When they made the LP master, they didn't splice together a master tape from the first-generation single masters, they dubbed those down on to another tape and IIRC it wasn't a flat copy either. When MFSL decided to reissue the album decades later, they did what no pressing had done before with the help of DSD technology - they went back to the original first-generation masters of each song, captured each one in DSD 256, and digitally put them together with no generational loss. This became the master for their SACD and they even cut a vinyl release from the same DSD master they created too. Whichever format you pick, it sounds amazing and IMHO cleaner, clearer and more immediate than past releases on CD or LP.

"xp often the difference is mastering for quality vs mastering for digital cut through. I could play you dozens of CDs where you can hear the room and thrill to the dynamics of every instrument"

oh yah for sure i've heard plenty of great CDs. i was talking mainly about old records that were recorded on tape and then put on vinyl and tape. and people who never hear them and only know that music from radio/streaming/CD might not understand why record people like records so much.
honestly, when all is said and done, i kinda can't believe there hasn't been more of a hepcat resurgence in reel to reel tape and players because they sound best of all. an original pre-recorded reel in good shape sounds ungodly. i've said this before and and i'll say it just once more to be annoying but i have a friend who puts factory-made reel to reel tapes of random albums on CD for me and he does nothing but a little noise reduction and those CDs he has made for me on 10 cent CDr are some of the best CD sounds i've ever heard in my life. because the tapes sound so good! they are huge and have crazy depth. kinda like how i will often prefer a very clean vinyl copy of an old album recorded onto a good cassette to a CD reissue and will get comments from people in the store when i'm playing a good tape taken from vinyl and will not get those comments if i play the CD. unless its a Kompakt CD. i have never played a Kompakt CD in the store and not been asked by multiple people what i was playing. even old people! my marantz must like microhouse. they really pop. every CD should be made like whoever makes those CDs.

(if dance music people and experimental/avant garde people can make CDs that sound like a million bucks - and these are often people who don't have a million bucks to spend - why can't everyone else?)

I recently got Steely Dan’s Royal Scam on vinyl (MCA reissue so probably early 80s) and it sounds so much better than my CD (MCA Compact Price reissue so probably late 80s).

Aja on vinyl is pretty amazing, but that should be no surprise as the production was bankrolled to sound thus.

Yeah I think engineers in the 70s probably had in the back of their minds experience about what would sound good on vinyl which informed lots of little decisions. It’s not so easy to take that recording and make it sound good on CD.

Sure it is, my Aja CD sounds fucking fantastic.

I’m not saying it’s impossible, just not easy. I think the reverse is also true. New vinyl generally is no improvement over the CD (or digital file) since that institutional knowledge is lost.

i don't know what side of the argument y'all fall with regards to modern era vinyl vs CDs but i've been so cautious lately (burned by the great 4 Men With Beards wars) and really try to make sure the vinyl pressing is definitely high quality (i.e. the Stereolab reissues, Light in the Attic, Tone Poet Blue Note, Verve Acoustic, U2 reissues tbh), because sometimes i lean towards getting the CD. i think it's probably better now than the flimsy '90s but idk, i'm not one of those guys with one of those programs that shows a seismograph looking thing for audio. maybe i'm way off base.

I mean, I hear this about vinyl a lot but I've never found it to hold true in my home listening... CDs just sound better most of the time. One might argue that over time since most of my listening is digital sources that I've accumulated stereo equipment that complements those sources. I bought vinyl when I was younger because it was often significantly cheaper than the CD, or it was something that wasn't available on CD yet. But I always thought of it as a budget medium, to be put up with when necessary. Lacking even the utility of cassettes which could be listened to in the car or in a walkman.

I mean, you used to go to a record store and what they had was what you chose from, medium be damned... sure you could look for stuff, even place special orders, but if you wanted to hear it and could afford it, you bought it when it was in your hands. So I used to be fine with rough-sounding vinyl because pre-Internet it was buy the record or probably not be able to hear the album at all. Now I can check out an album online, read reviews of the mastering quality of the CD reissue, and buy that with minimal shipping fees. The album now comes before the medium, which is exactly the opposite of my formative years. The circumstances of your listening used to choose you, now you choose them.

So barring truly terrible CD mastering jobs (easy to find warnings about online), the entire idea of which medium has the edge in sound quality is just sort of alien to my process. My listening ecosystem is set up for digital. No compelling reason to fuck with it. Pretty much everything I buy on CD or FLAC sounds great. My record player(s) are there if I need them.

whatever old Canadian pressing of Aja i had sounded like trash next to whatever mastering is on Spotify. Huge variation among pressings of big releases.

(and yeah my vinyl and digital systems are comparable bla bla)

Reading a comment quite a bit up thread reminded me of the olden days when I thought my CD collection was some kind of pension fund.

I spend 95% of my time listening to digital files on my laptop, through headphones. (Good headphones, TBF — Sony MDR-7506s, which are what musicians use in the recording studio.) Speakers and vinyl vs CD affecting the sound as it floats through the room? Not really an issue.

i'm not one of those guys with one of those programs that shows a seismograph looking thing for audio.

lol, it me

it's honestly one of those things i wish i had the time to do, i think it would at least be informative w/r/t whether or not i should upgrade something. it's rare that i notice a lesser version of an album. though i did have a really lousy repress of the first Led Zep album which immediately went to a friend who confessed to me he collected pressings of LZ1.

it’s not iust slick stuff, lofi or raw metal stuff can get totally fucked over by remastering that negatively alters the distortion texture, makes for a whole new and unsatisfying brain massage time

I spent some time reading up on speaker positioning, height, wall surfaces, etc because that stuff is easy and inexpensive to optimize. Make a noticeable difference. (Also my new place has a bedroom with big barn doors and I put speakers on either side of them... with a big open space between them it's astounding how much stereo imaging you get)

honestly, when all is said and done, i kinda can't believe there hasn't been more of a hepcat resurgence in reel to reel tape and players because they sound best of all.

It's happening, but too expensive for most.

https://store.acousticsounds.com/d/180395/The_White_Stripes-Elephant-14_Inch_-_15_IPS_Tape

reel-to-reels are sort of a pain in the ass to use (do I have one? of course I do) and the amount of pre-recorded media available is vanishingly small and the non-classical stuff is stupid expensive

i love Gillian Welch and hope she and Rawlings make some good money from this but it's definitely a pricey niche interest.

https://store.aconyrecords.com/products/the-harrow-the-harvest-reel-to-reel?variant=40182622388311

re: Spotify, that's another reason why I kept CD's - I can actually choose the mastering I want to listen to and not be stuck with whatever brickwall mastering that's your only choice on Spotify. Before Tom Petty died, he had this conversation with the guy in charge of the technical aspects of reissuing and distributing his catalog, and while Petty cared enough about sound quality NOT to subject his physical reissues to excessive compression, the compromise was that all streaming and possibly downloads (at least not from high-end vendors) would be brickwalled just so his music would be as "loud" as everyone else's on Spotify and elsewhere.

whatever old Canadian pressing of Aja i had sounded like trash next to whatever mastering is on Spotify. Huge variation among pressings of big releases.

i love Gillian Welch and hope she and Rawlings make some good money from this but it's definitely a pricey niche interest.

https://store.aconyrecords.com/products/the-harrow-the-harvest-reel-to-reel?variant=40182622388311🕸

we could do an entire survey of what the recordings on spotify are mastered toward, and whether settings make
it differ. do they change their EQ based on device? I’ve
never looked into it

CD mastering is fun. I had a discman and tape adapter for the car and it was such a shitshow

similarly to how I’m on a mobile app and keep accidentally putting new lines in my mobile posts

The blank tape reels alone for that Gillian Welch release cost $300 so they aren't soaking you to the degree it might seem

So many Canadian records got the shit treatment, like the cutting engineer was sent a 3rd-generation tape to master from and he had 10 cuts to get done that day and it was almost lunchtime so just crank something out.

Makes sense, from the scattered quality of the handful I've had. I once sold a copy of Space Oddity on discogs and the guy asked me if I had any more Canadian pressed classic rock because he'd gotten really into that. Not an interest I've heard of before or since. I think he was in the Sates. Maybe he had a nostalgia for the sound of vinyl copied to tape... copied to another tape.

do they change their EQ based on device?

No. I always poke at those settings. EQ is off/flat by default but there is normalization enabled... which makes sense to me given that there whole thing is playlists from scattered sources. I always disable it because I'm nuts.

if you're into flying the black flag one thing i've noticed about recent group releases is that a lot of them are "web rips" from tidal/qobuz/various other high quality streaming service. my question is whether these rips have actually cracked open the DRM egg that is a tidal/qobuz stream and are able to access the delicious lossless file inside, or are instead just a mic-out WAV record of a tidal stream after the digital to analogue conversion has already happened. hard to say.

back in the day some releases would advertise that it was downloaded directly from the itunes store. so at least you'd know it was 256kbps AAC.

another reason why it can be better to rip your own. you control the chain of custody. if you care about this stuff.

pretty sure people are using stream rippers for that web rip stuff, but as you say... it's not easy to know for sure

my question is whether these rips have actually cracked open the DRM egg that is a tidal/qobuz stream and are able to access the delicious lossless file inside

I haven't tested this personally, but I just looked to see what tools people have used to do this, and a quick skim of the source of a Tidal downloader seems to indicate it's downloading and decrypting. So if that one is still being used, it's cracking the egg

It's similar to the way eBook decrypters work, you (or the software) digs into the official app's code or communications with their servers and pulls your user token out which can then be used to decrypt the files/stream to allow you do whatever want with them. I would guess they're not overly worried about it because it's a pain in the ass to do it and you probably need an active subscription to keep ripping from their servers anyway. I spent a fun evening decrypting my Nook eBook files when I stopped using Nook eReaders... I'd guess that most people would give up in disgust trying to do that. It's "easy" once you've spent 4-6 hours locating all the random freeware you need to do it and working through the half-assed instructions across a dozen message boards.

i sort of assumed tidal drm was going to be really tough like widevine

Widevine is really tough... still got cracked.

Bought a new/not-used triple CD set yesterday.
Sickening.
What's going to become of me??

what was it?

that's how it always begins. very small.

It was the Steve Swell Fire Into Music Quartet w/ Jemeel Moondoc, William Parker & Hamid Drake on Rogueart.

That's a good set.

Yeah I'm excited. But also... not excited, even anxious, to start buying new CDs.

(f hazel, i have just sent to ilx-mail. nothing exciting, feel free to ignore)

Sale on hat hut-affiliated labels bringing things down to $7 mostly.
https://www.squidco.com/miva/merchant.mvc?Screen=CTGY&Store_Code=S&Category_Code=HATSALE

Wow thanks, that sale looks great! I had to be careful to get stuff I didn't already own, packaged with a different name so it's not always obvious (e.g. Coltrane's "One Up, One Down" at the Half Note, a bunch of Miles Davis material already released in the Columbia "bootleg" series, etc.).

Yeah, it’s a little confusing, but at $7 apiece, even if I own one half of the package in another format, it’s no big deal. I got a pair of the aylers, plus one each by Marion brown, shepp, Cecil, and Paul bley.

This could/should probably be on a different thread but... My kid got given a CD player recently, but it's got a weird 3-pin plug that I have no idea what to do with. I've tried Googling it, and I think it's called an 'alter plug' but I can't find any real advice about adapters or if I can switch it out for a 'normal' plug. Anyone got any ideas?

https://i.imgur.com/WITJv5S.png

that's a type L 3-pin plug as used in italy (and chile!)

https://www.worldstandards.eu/electricity/plugs-and-sockets/

Thanks Nick! Having a dig around, I've noticed the word Conblock on it - looks like a connector they used to use in the 90s.

https://www.hifiwigwam.com/threads/what-sort-of-plug-is-this.122336/

okay that is a different thing than I was saying, yours has a middle pin that's longer than the other two. Either way I'm guessing you can just swap it out for a standard uk plug?