HW RE: off into dodgy vinyl ness

[Paul Mather]

On Tue, Mar 02, 2004 at 10:49:35AM -0000, David Dobbie wrote:

=> I was a Happy boy when I could afford a CD palyer, what a great
=> device. What a great signal to noise ratio, sounds so much better than
=> vinyl, which sounds dead in comparision, that is pure fact and not
=> just my opinion ;)

Some of the earlier Hawkwind CD releases were awful---they sounded
like they were taken straight from the vinyl masters, with RIAA phono
equalisation left in and all.  As a consequence, they sounded terrible
when played, at least compared to their vinyl counterparts.  Unless
I'm misremembering, _Chronicle of the Black Sword_ springs to mind,
here...

Now that vinyl is a niche market, and pretty much a collector's
medium, the new vinyl releases tend to be very well pressed, often
using virgin vinyl.  I've not had the benefit of hearing any (my
turntable is many, many miles away), but I'd imagine such audiophile
pressings would sound superb.

I'd heard that one of the contributors to awful vinyl sound quality
(excessive crackles and surface noise, etc.) was the routine use of
recycled vinyl and the use of poor, worn-out master discs when
pressing.  (That's one reason to try and buy the initial release of an
LP; you often get better quality.)  It didn't help much that Nth
generation releases also sometimes used very poor master tapes as
source.  I remember a low-priced Rush LP reissue I had that had
unbearably high tape hiss, making me think they must've used the
umpteenth copy of a safety master when going to re-press that one. :-(

Cheers,

Paul.

e-mail: paul at gromit.dlib.vt.edu

"Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production
 deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid."
        --- Frank Vincent Zappa