Forbidden Planet (Re: Jean-Michelle, Vangelis)

[J.D.McEachin]

At 09:38 AM 3/21/99 -0600, Bill Layer wrote:

>After the way Japanese SS gear made records sound in the late
>70's/early80's it's no wonder that CDs were welcomed in, with their lack of
>transient noise. But I'll bet you couldn't sit through one on my system!

Back in the 80's I had a friend w/ a very expensive audiophile turntable 
(he gave me his $300 cartridge when he bought a $500 one!).  The transients 
were still a problem.  I think what made me so aware of it was that I always 
taped my vinyl albums on the 2nd play (1st play to pop/smooth micro-bubbles)
to preserve the high frequencies.  Little did I know that the cassette's
filtering/compression was preserving my hearing.  I'm pretty sure this is
one of the main reasons why my ears are working better than most of my
late-30's friends' ears.

I had forgotten how awful vinyl sounds until I started to transfer some vinyl
rarities to CDR.  I have to monitor after AD/DA at low volumes until I can 
do the pop removal.  It was very enlightening to take the original file, 
subtract out the denoised version, and listen to the resulting noise-only 
file.  Ohmygod! The surface noise and crackling is unreal - it's amazing 
how much music tends to mask it. (I'll have to do this w/ an Original 
Master Recording of DSOTM to see how much of it is due to recycled vinyl).

I suppose vinyl would sound fine if your ears are filtering for you, but
man, those pops make it impossible for me to enjoy.

Has anyone ever figured out how quickly the high frequencies degrade on a
vinyl recording?  I'm on a maillist where people are always bitching about
their favorite records sounding dull...

>CDs are a silly joke; they fall apart like a chinese motorcycle when cast
>in the light of day.

They're more than adequate for musical enjoyment.

JDM