vinyl LP's offered superior sound, and had no qualms about saying so"
It didn't have to be like this. But as it stands now, many of the
popular CD's you buy aren't made to sound like what the artist
created in the studio.
People in the music business know that roughly 70% of the time,
CD's are played on boom boxes, portable CD players, and car
stereos. So it should really come as no surprise that most CD's are
made with this market in mind. It makes perfect business sense.
But does it make musical sense, especially for those who listen to
music on high quality home stereos? To answer that, we first
need to get a basic idea of some things that happen to the final
mix that comes out of the studio. As you'll see, the various ways
that the music gets doctored often amount to radical surgery
being performed on the artists' studio sound.
The core of the problem is that producers and labels want their
artists' CD's to sound as loud as possible on a typical boom box
(even when the volume control isn't set very high) so the CD grabs
your attention when you put it in and push "play". So when the
mix is finished and the recording goes to the mastering house for
final preparation, the pressure is usually on the mastering
engineers to make this happen. Of course, if they were to record
the music at a very high level and nothing else were done, then
much of the sound would distort badly whenever the louder parts
of the music came through. To help avoid that, engineers use
compressors and limiters on the music, "squeezing" it into a
narrow volume range. (Compression is also used in studio on
individual tracks like bass guitar, vocal, drums, etc., as well as
some on the overall mix. But here we're referring to additional
compression that's added after the final studio mix is done.)
Now, since the needles on the control panel barely move while
the song plays, engineers are free to crank up the recording
levels without worrying about overload. From the early 90's
onward, this kind of treatment has been applied like a
sledgehammer to many popular music CD's. And when
compression is overused like this, the sound that was recorded
and mixed in the studio is completely squashed. You aren't
hearing the band's studio sound, you're hearing a pale imitation.
But wait--there's more.
When compression is used, one other result is that some of the
treble gets chopped out of the music. So as a patch, engineers
will compensate by adding certain parts of the treble back in with
an equalizer. But while the treble that was lost was only lost
during musical peaks or transients, the added-back treble is there
all the time. Moreover, since the ear is very sensitive to certain
high frequency ranges, engineers know that by adding even more
treble boost in those ranges they can further boost the apparent
loudness of the music, so of course, they do. Also, low bass (not
just subsonic junk) often gets cut, since bass eats so much power
and the low stuff is impossible for boom boxes and portable
players to deal with anyway.
So back to our question: What do all these things have to do with
serving the music? Nothing. What does it have to do with
marketing CD's to boom box owners? Everything. All of this gets
done at the behest of producers (and usually the artists), because
making CD's that sound as loud as possible and also as bright and
catchy as possible on 70% of the equipment that plays them is
good business. So from a dollars and sense standpoint, you can't
blame them. But making CD's that sound more like the studio
mix--for those people who have the high quality home stereos
that can do justice to that mix--is not a priority. Talk about tyranny
of the majority; that 30% "minority" still translates into millions of
music buyers, all of whom are forced to live with a product that
often times sounds bad on their systems.
PERFECT SOUND FOREVER, OR GLASS IN
THE DISPOSAL...?
Here's one way you can demonstrate all this to yourself very
clearly:
It's Friday, the end of a long week. You glance across the room at
your stereo and say to yourself, "Let's have some fun..!" At times
like this, do you ever feel like popping in a CD and really turning
it up? Well, if you do and you have a quality home stereo system,
your ears will likely start to rebel as the kind of surgery engineers
have been performing on the music now feels like surgery on
your ear drums. This is because at higher volumes, your ears are
even more sensitive to all of this over-engineering, and the sound
becomes REALLY harsh. What kind of sound are we talking
about? Turn on your garbage disposal. Now, pour in a bucket of
broken glass. (Of course, you don't need to listen at high volumes
to hear this effect; we just wanted to use the most 'glaring'
example.)
As already stated, this pronounced over-engineering is mostly a
90's phenomenon. (Today it's worse than ever; ask any engineer
from a big mastering house and they'll tell you.) So what about
CD's made in the 80's? Well, these earlier CD's suffer from a
different set of problems. For one, the quality of digital equipment
was much lower in the 80's. Early digital gear just couldn't capture
the music as accurately as today's equipment can. A dry, overly
bright sound was common even on good production jobs, and
low-level detail didn't come through well at all. In addition, the
digitized signal wasn't always handled carefully as it made its
way step by step through the recording and production process,
partly because it was thought that with digitized signals you didn't
have to worry. (In practice, you do.) As a result, the signal would
become further degraded. Lastly, the source tapes used were
usually not the best available, particularly when record labels
were in a rush just to "get the stuff out" on CD. Unfortunately, this
can still happen today. Even with CD's (new or old) that are
engineered well, some of the bright, hard digital sound usually
remains. Vinyl simply delivers a fuller, more natural and more
complete sound.
So if you hadn't realized it by now, the hype behind "Perfect
Sound Forever" has never matched reality. But don't blame the
techies who came up with the CD standard. These designers knew
back then that the CD wasn't really all that, sound-wise, when
compared to good vinyl LP's. "Wait a minute," you're probably
saying. "The people who created the CD said what??" You read
correctly: The people who designed today's CD standard twenty
years ago knew that vinyl LP's offered superior sound, and had no
qualms about saying so. This is because at the time, CD's were
primarily targeted at the market share then owned by
pre-recorded cassettes, whose convenience and portability led to
strong sales despite sound quality that was markedly inferior to
vinyl LP's. So who came up with "Perfect Sound Forever"? You
guessed it--the marketers. Have you spotted a trend yet?
While we're on the subject of digital versus analog, you might
also have thought that your favorite artists were all recording in
digital by now, since CD's themselves are digital. After all, it's
Y2K, right? Everything is digital these days....
Is that your final answer? Just checking. Because more often than
not, the music that you see coming out of the big studios is
recorded and mixed onto analog tape, even to this day. Analog
has a richer, more lifelike sound, and when analog tape is pushed
to its limits, artists generally feel the sound is more appealing that
that made by digital equipment. Just listen to what Courtney Love
said recently:
"I don't care what anybody says about digital recordings. At this point
they're good for dance music, but try listening to a warm guitar tone on
them. They suck for what I do." 1
1 excerpted from her speech to the Digital Hollywood online entertainment conference,
given in New York; May 16, 2000.
This Article is Courtesy of http://www.vinylvoice.com/
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