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Impressions of the Stones SACDs

I bought the Hot Rocks compilation just to dip my big toe in the remastered waters. I don't have an SACD player, so the purchase was based on good reviews of the Red Book sound.

So far, I'm far from sold on it. The recordings do sound open and detailed and crisp in ways that I haven't heard before, but overall they sound too bright and very, very hard. Songs like Honky Tonk woman have a thin and glaring vocal quality that makes me run for cover. The guitars are edgy too.

Has anyone else experienced this? I'm trying to tell if this is just weekness of my system right now (It can sound bright and hard with bad recordings, but is usually pretty good sounding with good recordings).

Paul
paulraphael
jeffj
7 posts
 
Hi:

Exactamundo.

I am in the music business, and that is what's done, usually (and unfortunately).

I'm betting that the original masters for "Hot Rocks" were compressed like CRAZY to fit 'em onto two LPs, and I am ALSO guessing that the "Hot Rocks" compilation featured radio single versions of the songs, as opposed to original album tracks.

That being the case, radio mixes were compressed even FURTHER (to make 'em sound louder on the radio -- to "cut through", if you will), and the Hot Rocks masters are/were aso surely COPIES of the original masters, removing even ANOTHER generation (or two, or three) from the original sound.

Believe me, if you ever saw what we in the music biz do to recordings, you'd give up high end (unless you're crazy, like me -- and if you're even ON this site, then.....well, welcome!)

Thanks - Jeff
phasecorrect's avatar
phasecorrect
2,013 posts
 
SACd or not...a recording is only as good as the master tape...SACD will not perform miracles in this regard....
onhwy61's avatar
onhwy61
5,289 posts
 
The 12/02 issue of Mix magazine carries a story about the remastering of the Stone's catalog. The article points out that the master tapes for the albums were quite scattered around the globe. They even resorted to e-bay auctions to secure some. The process involved transfering the masters to work copies. They used three systems - a 30ips Ampex ATR102 for analog, a Sonic Solutions workstation using Mytek converters for 24/96 PCM digital and a Sony Sonoma workstation for DSD/SACD. They corrected the speed on albums that had been originally released at incorrect speeds ("Beggar's Banquet" and "Let It Bleed"). The work copies were then given to Bob Ludwig (Gateway Mastering) who then compared every song to the original releases, both singles and album versions. Ludwig made the decision to use the single versions as the reference standard, even though he acknowledges that some of them were over EQed for AM radio play. He consciously chose to make the work copies sound as close as possible to the single versions, the thinking being that it's the Stone's sound that people grew up with. The 16/44.1 version was downsampled from the DSD/SACD version using Sony's Super Bit Mapping process.

This is a link to the full article:
[url]http://mixonline.com/ar/audio_satisfaction/index.htm[/url]

Here's a link to the Gateway website:

[url]http://www.gatewaymastering.com/[/url]
jafant's avatar
jafant
20,127 posts
 
Paul-

this is an excellent set from 2002. Us Beatles fans wished that they would have followed The Stones lead-in on this one.
tpreaves's avatar
tpreaves
2,687 posts
 
The SHM-SACD's from CDJapan sound much better than the Abkco releases. The Hot Rocks SACD sounds terrible to me too.
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