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Digital remastering of CD's

What do you suppose the CD manufacturers are waiting for to put out only digitally remastered to 24 bit discs for older recorded music, classic rock, older jazz, etc? I continually replace all of my older vinyl LP's but only want to buy CD's that have been digitally remasted to 24 bit or HDCD. You can find these scattered throughout a retail CD store but they're still in the minority. These digitally remasted CD's to 24 bit sound SO much better. Example: I just purchased CCR-Willy & the Poor Boys CD. This was one of the LP's I needed to replace. Not digitally remastered to 24 bit but I took a chance on it. Well, it sounds down right awful. Horrible. No bass ext, muffled, etc. How could Fantasy Records even sell this product? Conversely, I purchased Jackson Browne "Late for the Sky" remasted to 24 bit. What a huge difference!!

Why do the record companies not smply remaster all of these older recordings to either 24 bit or HDCD? I realize it can be expensive but with CD sales declining, it could be one way to boost sales and renew interest in buying CD's. It could be a boon to the CD business. Can someone in the know explain this to me? There are so many older jazz recordings alone that I would love to have but I will not purchase because they sound so tinny, muffled, and simply terrible.

pdn
kijanki's avatar
kijanki
4,432 posts
 
Carl109 - I have bad suspicion that the only thing that drives them to create new standard is desire to implement copy protection and raise pricing. SACD has pit modulation technique where watermark of CD is implemented by modulating sizes of each pit. It can be read only by specific device and therefore cannot be copied. What they failed to do is to lower price first to sway people into new standard but instead they put prices over $30 on CD that cost the same to manufacture as regular CD. They shot themselves in the foot but we all are suffering.

In my opinion they will never release 24bit/192kHz recordings since it would deliver perfect master tapes to all countries where copying for sale is done at large scale. I remember even record I had once that was made in Cuba. Russian government was copying for years records from all over the world since they did not sign international agreement. Formats released are always "equivalent" to 20 bits and not more. SACD is equivalent to 20-bits as well even though they store master tapes in wide DSD that contain at least 4x information.

I have never heard master tapes nor I have equipment to appreciate them but I read posts of people who did and they say sound is out of this world.

It is all very sad that bureaucrats and marketers control progress of an audio but I would even settle for SACD if I could afford $30 CDs.

Both HDCD and SACD contain not more than 4000 titles each but HDCD wasn't as expensive as SACD and the sound was decent (never heard one).
pdn OP
438 posts
 
Thanks for all of your responses. It's really too bad that it has to be this way. I'm curious what Absolute Phase Tweak is? Can you explain this Hifisoundguy?
hifisoundguy
630 posts
 
Absolute Phase is when you reverse the hook ups at the source..cd player's outputs and at the other end of the interconnect you (do not) reverse the cable hook ups...you do the same thing to your speaker cables too...amp you reverse the hook ups and at your speaker hook ups you do not reverse the cables....For (some systems) this is one of the best things you can do to it to make it sound better!.........
frankg
176 posts
 
As KOPS suggested,check out SHM-CD. Stands for super high material CD. It's an improved CD material. Makes for better bits and eliminates laser splatter. See Bob Levi's report on Positive Feedback.

Frank
hifisoundguy
630 posts
 
Absolute Phase was done on about 50% of all Recording !.... http://www.6moons.com/industryfeatures/polarity/polarity.html
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