Why do CD remasters take so long if it is just converting analogue record to digital?
Posted by: Consciousmess on 22 April 2009
Hi,
As this forum has great collective wisdom, I thought I'd ask this question. Essentially, on my home PC I could convert any signal into 16bit 44.1KHz in minutes, so why do record companies take years to digitally remaster analogue material??
Surely it is a case of pressing 'play', switching on the converter and then 'record'. Simple as now the master analogue has been made into a CD.
Am I completely missing something???!!!
Many thanks for your responses!
Jon
As this forum has great collective wisdom, I thought I'd ask this question. Essentially, on my home PC I could convert any signal into 16bit 44.1KHz in minutes, so why do record companies take years to digitally remaster analogue material??
Surely it is a case of pressing 'play', switching on the converter and then 'record'. Simple as now the master analogue has been made into a CD.
Am I completely missing something???!!!
Many thanks for your responses!
Jon
Posted on: 22 April 2009 by Consciousmess
Thanks for the feedback, Munch, but what am I missing???!!
Posted on: 22 April 2009 by Consciousmess
(apart from a 555PS, which I'm getting soon!)
Posted on: 22 April 2009 by 555
Posted on: 22 April 2009 by u5227470736789439
Not generally speaking for the terrible quality of CD transfers all too often accorded to the more popular genres of music, but of the classics and jazz ...
Firstly the best master parts have to be found and restored.
This may be a sixty year old tape recording, a set of accetate discs, original metal master parts [for 78s recordings], or even a unique and sole surviving commercial pressing ...
Then this the best possible master material will be restored so that the transfer will yield the finest achievable quality, often never even hinted at in the original LP or 78 issues.
Pressing play, as you put it involves playing the original tape or discs at the correct speed, which itself may be variable. In fact according to AC Griffith, he has never made a transfer of an old recording that did not rquire continuopus attention to pitch correction on the fly!
This frequently involved checking the transfer against a tuning fork as a starting point ...
The original material must be replayed using a tape machine or stylus [and turntable] that is optimally matched to the groove, or EQ characteristics of the tape, and this is only the start for having a raw transfer master is merely the begining of the restoration process.
Keith Hardwick [like AC Griffith was one of the best transfer and restoration engineers, and both are now retired from EMI] commented that it could take forty hours of a man's time to restore four minutes of a 78 side once transferred ... Even in these days of computers to fix the more obvious problems, such as distortion overload, pops, EQ, and mechanical or tape noise, etc.
The issue is no less problematic on times with tapes than with 78 mrpm metal masters [which in anycase will be used to make new vinyl pressings to be played just once in the transfer process very often] ...
It is not to be forgotten that analogue tape is a temporary storage medium for recordings and master tapes even from the 1960s that have not been correctly stored, and spooled every so often, have irreversible damage by now, and this is why quite a lot of the more popular issues sound worse in transfers than our memories off the original issues, as the need to make the master usable at all for commercial release leads to processes being used that are literally emmergency opperations that would not have been considered satisfactory at all if there was any alternative.
Luckily for jazz and classics the storage of the master materials tends to have been very comptetently managed, and tapes of 60 and more years old often produce transfers of a quality never dreamt of at the time of the original releases. This is because what was recorded was not regarded as entirely of its day ...
Fortunately the metal parts for 78s are very durable, and with direct cut recordings these now veteran recordings are still able to show us how dreadful a medium that analogue tape all to often was in comparison. It may be interesting to note that many 78 recordings were too strong to be trackable in the LP microgroove and it has taken the robust acuracy of dynamic and general quality of PCM digital recording systems to reveal just what a step back the adoption of the vinyl LP and the analogue tape recording systemm was compared to what had gone before. Fortunately digital recording when done with similar competence to that of the work of the old engineers in the direct cut domain at last allows us to move forward in quality away from the technical tripe that was the commercial LP as a medium especially when compounded with the music destroying qualities of a great deal of analogue tape recording!
Analogue tape recording was adopted for reasons of convenience rather than quality and the drop in quality that resulted caused the engineers great heart ache [see the writings of both Hardwick and Griffith, who were both active in the recording rooms at the time of the change-over]. Rightly analogue tape should be regarded as a method of delaying a broadcast as intended with the original development of tape recorders in the UK and later in Wartime Germany and for which purpose they served well enough, and allowed some fascinating "off air" recordings to survive, but like the compact cassette, which was conceived as a dictaphone device, tape was pushed well beyond what could reasonably be consistently expected of it, unless the opperators were true dedicated craftesmen. Understandably, all too few working in the field of popular music were such craftsmen, which incidently results in such widly varying quality of recordings in the pop field. Sometime a good recording emerges, but more often the result was ill-focussed, over-modulated, and poorly balanced, which makes any attempt at radical restoration even mopre variable in its successes. The situation is other in the main with the classics and jazz, where the recording industry used to put its most expert engineers.
I hope this helps a little in undertanding why a restoration may take a year or several to emerge once it has been planned.
ATB from George
Firstly the best master parts have to be found and restored.
This may be a sixty year old tape recording, a set of accetate discs, original metal master parts [for 78s recordings], or even a unique and sole surviving commercial pressing ...
Then this the best possible master material will be restored so that the transfer will yield the finest achievable quality, often never even hinted at in the original LP or 78 issues.
Pressing play, as you put it involves playing the original tape or discs at the correct speed, which itself may be variable. In fact according to AC Griffith, he has never made a transfer of an old recording that did not rquire continuopus attention to pitch correction on the fly!
This frequently involved checking the transfer against a tuning fork as a starting point ...
The original material must be replayed using a tape machine or stylus [and turntable] that is optimally matched to the groove, or EQ characteristics of the tape, and this is only the start for having a raw transfer master is merely the begining of the restoration process.
Keith Hardwick [like AC Griffith was one of the best transfer and restoration engineers, and both are now retired from EMI] commented that it could take forty hours of a man's time to restore four minutes of a 78 side once transferred ... Even in these days of computers to fix the more obvious problems, such as distortion overload, pops, EQ, and mechanical or tape noise, etc.
The issue is no less problematic on times with tapes than with 78 mrpm metal masters [which in anycase will be used to make new vinyl pressings to be played just once in the transfer process very often] ...
It is not to be forgotten that analogue tape is a temporary storage medium for recordings and master tapes even from the 1960s that have not been correctly stored, and spooled every so often, have irreversible damage by now, and this is why quite a lot of the more popular issues sound worse in transfers than our memories off the original issues, as the need to make the master usable at all for commercial release leads to processes being used that are literally emmergency opperations that would not have been considered satisfactory at all if there was any alternative.
Luckily for jazz and classics the storage of the master materials tends to have been very comptetently managed, and tapes of 60 and more years old often produce transfers of a quality never dreamt of at the time of the original releases. This is because what was recorded was not regarded as entirely of its day ...
Fortunately the metal parts for 78s are very durable, and with direct cut recordings these now veteran recordings are still able to show us how dreadful a medium that analogue tape all to often was in comparison. It may be interesting to note that many 78 recordings were too strong to be trackable in the LP microgroove and it has taken the robust acuracy of dynamic and general quality of PCM digital recording systems to reveal just what a step back the adoption of the vinyl LP and the analogue tape recording systemm was compared to what had gone before. Fortunately digital recording when done with similar competence to that of the work of the old engineers in the direct cut domain at last allows us to move forward in quality away from the technical tripe that was the commercial LP as a medium especially when compounded with the music destroying qualities of a great deal of analogue tape recording!
Analogue tape recording was adopted for reasons of convenience rather than quality and the drop in quality that resulted caused the engineers great heart ache [see the writings of both Hardwick and Griffith, who were both active in the recording rooms at the time of the change-over]. Rightly analogue tape should be regarded as a method of delaying a broadcast as intended with the original development of tape recorders in the UK and later in Wartime Germany and for which purpose they served well enough, and allowed some fascinating "off air" recordings to survive, but like the compact cassette, which was conceived as a dictaphone device, tape was pushed well beyond what could reasonably be consistently expected of it, unless the opperators were true dedicated craftesmen. Understandably, all too few working in the field of popular music were such craftsmen, which incidently results in such widly varying quality of recordings in the pop field. Sometime a good recording emerges, but more often the result was ill-focussed, over-modulated, and poorly balanced, which makes any attempt at radical restoration even mopre variable in its successes. The situation is other in the main with the classics and jazz, where the recording industry used to put its most expert engineers.
I hope this helps a little in undertanding why a restoration may take a year or several to emerge once it has been planned.
ATB from George
Posted on: 22 April 2009 by King Size
quote:Originally posted by Consciousmess:
Essentially, on my home PC I could convert any signal into 16bit 44.1KHz in minutes, so why do record companies take years to digitally remaster analogue material??
Surely it is a case of pressing 'play', switching on the converter and then 'record'. Simple as now the master analogue has been made into a CD.
Am I completely missing something???!!!
Jon,
You have answered your own question. What you are doing is simpyl 'converting' a signal from one format to another. You are not re-mastering it in any way.
Speaking as a record company person, it has to make financial sense for record companies to re-master something.
The cost of re-mastering (and repackaging) has to be considered vs. potential incremental sales increases, how the new item would be marketed etc.
So as far as 'what' is remastered (and when) it is a business decision.
Posted on: 24 April 2009 by JohanR
quote:Surely it is a case of pressing 'play', switching on the converter and then 'record'. Simple as now the master analogue has been made into a CD.
Should be.
Check out the steady stream of remastered fifty years old jazz on VINYL recordings that Steve Hoffman is doing:
http://store.acousticsounds.co...note_reissue_AP_2008
http://www.musicmattersjazz.com/
http://www.becausesoundmatters.com/
According to his site ( http://www.stevehoffman.tv/ ) Steve is cutting directly from the analogue master tapes. So, then, what are the CD-mastering people doing that takes so much time and effort (except fucking up the music with loudness war compression techniques)?
JohanR