Why recordings made before 1965 sound better.

From the book of Geoff Emerick "Here, There and Everywhere". About a new SS mixing consol:

 "As it happened, the first week of the Abbey Road sessions were quite peaceful without John and Yoko's presence, though  a bit tentative because of equipment problems. The new mixing console had a lot more bells and whistles on it than the old one, and it gave me the opportunity to put into practice many of the ideas I'd had in mind for years, but  it just didn't sound the same, mainly because it utilized transistor circuitry instead of tubes. George Harrison had a lot of trouble coming to terms with the fact that there was less body in the guitar sound, and Ringo was rightfully concerned about the drum  sound-he was playing as hard as ever, but you didn't hear the same impact. He and I actually had a long conversation about that, which was quite unusual, but after a good deal of experimentation I came to the conclusion that we  simply couldn't match the old Beatles  sound we had be- come used to;  we simply had to accept that this was the best we could achieve with the new equipment.  Personally, I preferred the punchier sound we had gotten out of the old tube console and four-track recorder;  every- thing was sounding mellower now. It seemed like a steр backward, but there was nothing we could do-there was an album to record and we simply had to get on with it.

@emrofsemanon,

Interesting points.

Perhaps it is the heavy handedness of certain jobbing engineers that’s the real problem.

I’ve got a couple of oxygen deprived CDs (Nat King Cole and Marilyn Monroe) that have almost been ’nonoised’ to death.

There’s no hiss remaining on either of them - nor is there is wish for me to ever play them back again.

Despite all of the acclaim for the Steve Hoffman Nat King Cole remasters, and they are good, I still prefer some of the versions on the slightly hissy Bear Family box set.

It's borderline sacrilegious to say it, but there's simply more natural bloom and air on some of the tracks.

"ya just gotta do the job right in the first place."

Perhaps someone should have told that to the Beatles remastering team!

No doubt the conversion from tubes to transistors affected the TIMBRE of the sound, but I don’t think it had a lot of bearing on the openness.

I think the openness is the result of the aforementioned mini miking, and the absence of Dolby.

It is not just tubes vs SS.

Before 1965 year record were made with a small amount of microphones, console schematics were much simpler with shorter signal path. The signal path become longer in number of times! And each addition electronic stage adds distortions, deteriorate micro dynamics, transparency and tone of instruments.

Moreover they use natural reverberation of hall or studio room before, but started mix signals from different microphone and add artificial reverberation after. 

@onhwy61 has it right. Done correctly, Dolby does NOT change the original tonal structure (timbre) of instruments or vocalists. It takes the original signal and boosts the high frequencies for recording, in playback reducing the high frequencies by the same amount, thereby restoring the original tonal structure. And the hiss encoded into the recording is simultaneously reduced by the same amount, the very rationale for the Dolby process.

By the way, the RIAA recording and playback curve was invented and employed in much the same way, with the addition of a generous bass cut in LP mastering (to reduce bass-induced groove modulation size), a generous boost in LP playback via your phono stage’s RIAA compensation filter.