Why recordings made before 1965 sound better.

@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.

cleeds,

thanks for the info about cartridges, I have read in several places over the years that 8 tracks were developed by Lear, for radio ads, so I am guilty of repeating bad info, it's good to know more.

consumer pre-recorded 8 tracks, bad as they are, were a revolution because of portability. the 1st time I took one apart, I couldn't believe the mechanism. how does tape come off the inner diameter and go on the much larger outer diameter? 1 revolution, very different lengths of tape on and off???  took me a while to understand the slip sheet and gradual tightening involved. then yanking the tape up and over the top of the spool of tape, OMG.