EMM Labs on Bad Redbook

Despite the obvious flaws in many older analog tape recordings (SN ratio, audience noise, splices, etc.), they may in fact capture the musical information of the event, and therefore be quite enjoyable.

A poorly made digital recording, despite its superior specifications, may have left a lot (most?) of the music in the studio, and captured nothing but a hollow shell of the event.

The manner in which these recordings are mastered plays an equalling important role in the final product/sound. I have piles of CDs that I just can't listen to anymore as my system has improved. They just sound worse with every improvement. Of course the good recordings/masterings just sound better with every improvement.

Don't know how well the Meitner does, but I can say that it is not a truism that the better a system gets the worse badly recorded CDs sound. Though I also had this misconception, over the years we have found that, like everything else in this hobby, blanket statements of fact are rarely true more than, oh, say, 50% of the time.

This concern of how to build a system that allows us to play (yes, and even listen to) older CDs is one which we share - as we were young(er) and no smarter then than we are now at the time of the early 80s and so foolishly bought up new CDs as if they actually had the music on them that was displayed in the pciture on those tiny little pieces of paper showing through their often cracked and chipped plastic containers; this picture (and, as we came to discover, the music on the CD itself) often resembling in some lilliputian way the covers (and music) of LPs that we knew and loved. ;-)

Luckily, some tube digital seem to have a way of creating music out of too-few-bits and somehow do it in a way that is able to communicate the original feeling and instensity of the music. Luckily, it also helps that in a lot of the badly recorded music of the early to mid 80s, not a heckuva lot was really going on in terms of the complexity of the music (though, of course, there is also stuff like King Crimson, Frank Zappa, etc. are just plain hard to render on any system - no matter how good the recording is).

For example, we have found the Audio Aero Capitole to be excellent and making bad recordings sound decent, the Audio Note DAC 3.1x Balanced and 4.1x Balanced also, though slightly less so. It would seem that other tube CD players (like the Cary) and DACs (like the Zanden) might also do a good job (I have no extended experience with these regarding this matter of The Infamously Awful Sounding CDs).

This is not to say that solidstate digital is unable to render a bad CD in a listenable fashion - just that it seems that many do not (Levinson, Krell, Wadia, etc.) and do infact do as badly or worse than cheaper CD players.

Enjoy!
-Mike (Audio Aero and Audio Note dealer with lots of bad - and, yes, quite a few good, as well - sounding CDs)

Mike of Audio Federation,

You had me till the end of paragraph 3. Paragraphs 4 and 5 could have been condensed to:

“If we don't sell it, it must be crap.”

Congratulations, you have succesfully proven your initial deduction about “blanket statements.”

VVrinc, VVrinc, VVrinc, ...

“If we don't sell it, it must be crap.”

This "blanket statement" would perhaps be a truism, regarding digital, if we ever add the Burmester, Meitner, Ensemble, MBL, Zanden, Weiss, and perhaps the Northstar and Audio Synthesis lines and mods of various others and who knows what else.

Many people *do* try to optimize the sound of good recordings and do not give a care about how bad those bad old recordings sound.

But, oh yes, the topic was whether high-end digital sounded worse than low-end digital playing horrible recordings. I said nay and provided examples and counter-examples. Sorry this offended you.

Later,
-Mike

The Infamously Awful Sounding CD

Mike,

I wouldn't mind if you could list a couple of seriously bad sounding CDs you have. It would be fun to try some of those nasties in my system - I'm sure I could find a copy at the used CD store. Unless, of course, I already own them. ;-)

Regards,