The Most Digital Recording You Ever Heard


You can generally tell them by weight. In the early days of the CD when they really had no idea of how to put music on a disk they also used to put a lot of plastic in the jewel cases. Sometimes I pick a CD I haven't listened to for a while, get a feel of it and think, "Oh, one of these." Any initial release year starting with "198" will give you a certain sense of trepidation. The question I put before the house is, what was the digital recording that your view epitomized everything that was wrong with digital. Some that come off the top of my head:

Any Proper box set.
Any Collector's Choice reissue.
The original issue of These Foolish Things by Bryan Ferry.

The Angel Broadway Classics series was particularly frustrating because on the one hand you finally escape from fake stereo but on the other the mastering was pretty sketchy.
 
heretobuy
Beginning of digital era with a good exmple. But it is not the worse. DG has plenty.
+1 on DG.  Always liked their vinyl in the past, but their digital is never very good. 
"I put before the house is, what was the digital recording that your view epitomized everything that was wrong with digital"

That's a fairly leading question, innit?
In a general sense, most cd's  from 80's- early 2000's. Analog to digital converters in studios pretty bad in this era. And this with both remasters from analog tape and pure digital recordings. I have any number of cd rips from this era, streams from newer iterations of same recordings nearly always sound better, sometimes dramatically so.

So everyone accepts the premise that "digital" is derogatory. Digital does have a sound, and it ain't good. The sound it has is in fact so well known to be bad that even here in a digital forum everyone takes it for granted, and no one argues about the word "digital" being used in lieu of "bad".    

Fascinating.