Thank you Barry D. for Led Zep I on cd!

That is a great comparision, thanks for posting.

Sure! Well, I remember being awestruck by the 4 CD big "crop circles" boxset back in '90. I mean it was chock full of supposedly 'improved' Zep. Plus new tracks! And the packaging was great, it was one of the first really comprehensive boxsets at the time. I was upgrading from cassette copies, so it was an improvement for me. It wasn't until a few years ago I made the realization that the originals were better and tracked down the non-remasters.

 

You know, you guys have got me curious...I might have to get one of those old cds and compare again.

I remember Jimmy Page saying how terrible the original cds were. And radio promoted the Hell out of the box set. At least in Detroit.

We'll see...

 

Dave-

You can probably find some in used bins around your area fairly cheap, check them out. Try and find HOTH if you can..thats the biggest difference IMO..

I'd be interested to hear your thoughts.

 

Though not always the case, why is nearly any catalog remastered; $$$$$

 

Thanks. No problem. However, my main goal is to complete my vinyl collection.

 

Well if the record company had supplied the correct absolute original masters to begin with that may not have been a problem.

 

Be sure to crank them. The real magic happens at louder volumes. Barry's get better as they get louder. The remasters s get more annoying as they get louder!

As someone pointed out in an old thread, years of standing in front of a wall of Marshall amps cranked to the max can tend to affect one's hearing. I'm a huge Page fan and have been since the mid-70s but I don't trust his judgement on this call. The only problem I hear with the original CDs is a bit of hiss here and there, which is a result of the masters and the quality of the tapes given to Barry. As Steve Hoffman proves every time he masters a recording, taking the best possible master tape and playing it on the proper equipment, correctly adjusted and with the minimum of modification possible (i.e., EQ, compression) is a more direct path between your ear and the original performance and will sound better. The most direct digital path to those master tapes is Barry's CDs. The most direct analog path is Bernie Grundman's Classic reissues (unless you find original pressings in good shape). The remasters used early 90's digital technology to try and make the music sound up to date circa 1990-93. Had they done something like Abkco did with the Stones then I think we'd be a lot happier but they didn't.

 

Amen to that!

 

A great many master tapes (not to mention copies of those tapes) from the '60s and '70s contain more hiss than many would guess. Most of the great Atlantic jazz, soul and rock I was fortunate enough to have access to hissed.

Personally, if I don't clearly hear the hiss, I know I'm not hearing all the way through to what is on those tapes. I have never made any effort to lessen tape hiss since to my ears, doing so will also lessen the music.

Why were they remastered? There are many reasons, good and not so good. One good reason to remaster is to try to correct for the bad decision made the first time around when original tapes were not made available to the mastering engineer. Another good reason is that converters have gotten better than they were in the earliest days of digital. (This last will hopefully continue into the future so any CD can in theory be better than it was before.)

I am confident I can remaster anything I did in those early days with the gear (and ears) I use today and come back with a better sounding CD. (I could probably just keep remastering the same CD over and over again and it just might keep getting better and better... but I'd miss out on mastering a whole lot of other great music. )

As to the vinyl, I'm not surprised it sounds better than any CD. In those days, I'd often compare a "purist" mastered CD to an over-engineered, compressed vinyl version and find the vinyl, warts and all, still revealed more information. I haven't made such a comparison in many years and it would be interesting to compare a CD master I've made recently, using my current gear and compare that with a vinyl version. Alas, the preponderance of what I've mastered in the past several years has not been made available on vinyl.

Best regards,
Barry
www.soundkeeperrecordings.com
www.barrydiamentaudio.com

 

Another reason to remaster is $$$$. That word sells a lot.

 

Yep. But why? Perceived improvement, meaning "louder"? I know I've fallen victim to it.

When did this trend start? The Zeppelin Box?

 

No, but certainly around this time. I think Aerosmiths Get a Grip was an earbleeder new release in 1993. (Maybe John Kalodner has something to do with it).Pump was loud too.

I agree though that LZI sounds great. There was a lot of distortion/Bass on the next album, but LZI certainly sounds better sonically, even if the tunes weren't mature/confident in the way LZII's were.

 

Love Barry's work on the Zepp discs.

 

Well, after wishing and wanting to get these...turns out my cousin is (for some odd reason) putting all of his cd's on cd-r and selling them off...and he's got the Barry cd's of I, II, III, HOTH and PG (with the cough!), as well as the cd of IV mastered by someone whose name I don't recall. Yes!!!! Thank goodness he's letting me have my pick first. And he even has a mint copy of the MFSL cd of Dark Side Of The Moon. Frankly, I don't have the heart to tell him what he's getting rid of.

 

There are a couple of web sites around that show examples of how the whole thing evolved. Check some of the loudness war threads or Google it to find them.

I don't think the blame can be directed at the LZ boxes. By today's standards, they are quite tame. The trend to remastering did start back around the end of the 80's. I suspect in some cases it was mostly about recycling old material to get new sales.

Unfortunately, a lot of it has to do with the general public, the "unwashed masses" or whatever you want to call them. There've been studies done that show these folks often equate loudness with sound quality. Part of it is also the equipment. For example, last Saturday I picked up Ann Wilson's excellent new solo album, Hope and Glory. On the drive home listening to it on my Corolla's built-in player, it sounded quite nice, obviously mastered loud but clear and well recorded. Then when I got home and listened through my Grado SR-80s, it had that familiar stressed out sound of a 2007 release. It's loud and clear, but there's an edgy, in-your-face, fuzzy sound that actually masks the fine details of the recording instead of boosting them!

The LZ remasters don't have that sound. They just have a rough-around-the-edges kind of "splodgy" sound (if that word makes any sense to anyone). When I listen to Barry's (and Joe Sidore for the 4th album) CDs, I get a sense of refinement on things like the ride cymbal durng the Rain Song, or the acoustic guitars. When I listen to these on the remasters, there's some sort of edgy blurring of the sound that happens, like a camera lens slightly out of focus and then subjected to an overly bright halogen lens. Or to take the visual analogy a bit further for those who know Photoshop, imagine that Barry and Joe were given a photo of an original photo and told to scan it using an older scanner with a maximum resolution of 150dpi. The photo they scan is already slightly less in quality because it's a photograph of the original, but it's not bad. They do the best they can given the equipment they've got and do slight adjustment to brightness and contrast but don't mess with the original too much. A few years later, George is given the original photo (or else a better photo of the original) and uses a similar 150dpi scanner but then decides to use a lot of "unsharpen mask" in Photoshop because the current trend in photos is towards a very sharp, stark appearance. This trend continues and people miss the warmth of the original software edges. A few years later, Bernie Grundman is given the original photo and instead of scanning it, he uses a really good camera to take a nice photo that will appeal to a market of people willing to pay for softer images that more closely match the look of the original (Unfortunately, in the case of LZII, he's given a photocopy of the original so all he can do is take a picture of it).

Ok, weird analogy perhaps, but this is very much how I "see" the LZ catalog as issued on CD and on vinyl reissue. I have no idea about the new LZIV 180g disc out of Warner Germany. Whether it's sourced from the original analog masters or the digital remasters I'm not sure. The CR reissues are now out of print, so I assume something will happen. There's way too much money left sitting on the table if LZ doesn't issue something on vinyl.

 

I meant more the "remastered!!" gimmick more than the loudness war, but they are related. "Remastered!!" seems to have started with Zeppelin, or not?

 

Hi Spirit Crusher,

I believe the remastering phenomenon predated the Zeps.

For me it began in the 1970s when some labels started remastering popular vinyl records. (Some claimed to create flat transfers from original masters, which is something I got a good laugh at when I was at Atlantic and got to compare their work with the tapes we'd sent them. They were something other than flat transfers for sure. And the tapes they got were not always "original masters".)

With CDs, I can't recall the first remasters I knew of. I believe the Marleys I did for Tuff Gong in 1990 predated the Zeps and the Marleys were not the first CD remasterings I'd heard of.

Best regards,
Barry
www.soundkeeperrecordings.com
www.barrydiamentaudio.com

 

Barry,
Were you given instructions to make these "louder" by the record company?
Thanks
Darren

 

They were remastered because Jimmy Page is a control freak and simply didn't like the sound of the original CD's, for whatever reason.


Evan

 

Does Jimmy Page still have good ears?

The general public possibly thought that a lot of back catalogue material when first released on CD was a little quiet and unimpressive. Sure it was convenient, but how did it sonically stack up against vinyl?

I think the Record companies made use of this as a marketing tool to "tweak" the originals and re-sell the same product again (much like VHS to DVD), because people believed Cds could sound better, even when they had already bought the product once!
By 1993/4 we had the Pink Floyd Shine On box, Led Zeppelin Remasters and the 20th Anniversary Queen Remasters (and they're just the bands I'm interested in).

 

Actually this thread has got me thinking back to those days in the mid-80s when we all anticipated these albums coming out on CD.

There was a lot of buzz about CDs. As has been mentioned here in countless threads, the promise was "perfect sound forever." CDs were supposedly indestructible perfect copies of the master tapes. As a Led Zeppelin fanatic, I couldn't wait to get my hands on what must surely be some magical experience, listening to actual perfect copies of those hallowed master tapes. Wow! Somewhere around 1984 or so, I took the plunge and bought my first CD player. I rushed to a nearby store and picked up LZIV (the only LZ I could find) and Tears for Fears' Songs From the Big Chair. To be honest, I wasn't as thrilled as I thought I'd be with the LZ CD. It was good, but not that much different from my battered LP (which had survived four years in a university dorm circa 1978-82. you do the math! ), other than the lack of scratches, etc. I was more impressed when I got House of the Holy. It had this beautiful, ringing richness to the acoustic guitars and such a wallop to those drums. However, since these digital discs were supposedly "perfect copies" of the tapes, if there was a problem, then of course, it must be on the tapes. It never occurred to us that the problem might just be in the mastering or the medium.

Suddenly a few years later, we started hearing about "remastered from the original master tapes" along with stories about how the first batch of CDs were not from the absolute best CDs (not just LZ but everyone's). Of course, since we still believed that these discs were perfect because they were digital, these new and improved remasters became the object of our musical lust. I recall the joy of bringing home my 4-disc crop circles LZ box set and going through these new, wonderful, perfect copies of the master tapes. Word had it that Jimmy Page himself had personally sat down with George Marino and guided him through the task of making perfect copies of the hallowed LZ mastertapes. To paraphrase Voltaire, all things work for the best in this most perfect of worlds and especially these shiny new perfect Led Zeppelin discs. To be honest, I don't recall even comparing the original CDs to the new ones because I trusted that these were, as I said, perfect in every way! Anything I heard that didn't sound perfect must be on the original tapes. and due to that nasty old analog equipment they were forced to use in those pre-digital dark ages! Consequently, I gave away or sold my original Led Zeppelin CDs. It was a drag not having the original albums with the songs in order, but eventually, I'd get the Complete Studio Records, a perfect monument of perfection from my favorite band!

Anyway, enough of this rambling on. The original CDs were not perfect, but the remasters were even less so. Again, to my ears, it comes down to the most direct, unmolested path between the sound on the master tapes and your ears. Because he worked in a higher resolution medium, the best studio Led Zeppelin recordings you can (or could) buy in the new millennium has been the Classic Records vinyl reissues (except for II), simply because they were done with a much higher resolution medium. The closest sound to these in digital has, in my experience, been needledrops of the CR LPs. Closely following these are the original CDs mastered in the 80's.

 

Good posts Stefan, I think that's how we all felt at the time.

 

Hi Darren,

No one ever gave me any instsructions on how to master a CD. When Atlantic bought the gear to create CD masters, I was assigned the task and for the first several years, was the CD mastering department. At the time there were only about 3 or 4 other engineers I knew of in the world who were mastering for CD.

When they gave me copies (or worse, EQd limited copies) to work from, I regularly asked for original masters but on many occasions was told the copy I got was all we had. For example, with the Zeps, I was told Jimmy Page had the originals and I had to work with the copies Atlantic had.

Remember too that in the early days of CD, when vinyl mastering houses started purchasing the necessary gear to create CD masters, many mastering engineers were approaching CD mastering the way they approached vinyl mastering and used their VU meters to set their levels instead of the peak meters on the Sony converters. In those days, my CDs were louder. This was not because I strove for loudness, which I never did and never will. It was because I approached CD mastering differently and was using the peak meters on the device to set digital levels.

The madness for louder CDs didn't start until several years later. That's when I gently started referring folks who wanted loud CDs elsewhere.

Best regards,
Barry
www.soundkeeperrecordings.com
www.barrydiamentaudio.com

 

Then again, it could also be the effect of using LP production masters as sources for CD. One the one hand, these will probably sound more like the LP than any other CD version. On the other, the sorts of mastering moves made for LP might not sound so hot in the merciless spotlight of digital.

Not perfect, but certainly free from problems associated with LP playback.

Again, I don't recall anyone advertising these as 'perfect'. Your'e setting up a straw man.

Seems to me that any 'problem' with these CDs is not because they're CDs. It's because of mastering choices. As is virtually always the case.

Regarding 'perfect',. I've often wondered if 'remastering' tends to involve tweaking
because , in fact, even if you go back to the original master tapes, and do a 'pure' mastering, some CDs just won't sound 'different enough' from their original issue. Even with a better converter or a better source tape.

Neither were the LPs. Rather far from it, if 'perfect' transparency to the source tapes, is a goal. They might, however, be the sound you grew up with, so they're perfect in memory.

Certainly in measurable terms, the resolution of CD exceeds that of LP -- or analog tape for that matter. Resolution boils down to the ability to hear differences in level, and that's related directly to signal-to-noise and dynamic range. It's only in audiophile circles that audio 'resolution' takes on another meaning.

What you are calling resolution is more likely differences in EQ, though on modern CDs, the dynamic range can easily be less than that of LP.

 

Hi SiriusB,

Most of the Zep tapes I was given to work with were flat copies of the originals, not "LP production masters". They did not contain any of the changes made for LP mastering.

Possible exceptions (emphasis on "possible" because I'm no longer sure) would be "Presence" and "In Through The Out Door", that's it.

This depends entirely on exactly what is being measured. The best way I know to answer the question would be to create simultaneous, flat transfers to vinyl and CD, then audition these against the original master. Any time I've had such an opportunity (the last time was several years ago), the vinyl won by a country mile. To my ears, CD does not have anything close to equal resolution with vinyl. 24/96 digital is another story but CD? To me that's like entering a race of rocket powered cars and showing up in a Geo with one spark plug missing.
;-}

Best regards,
Barry
www.soundkeeperrecordings.com
www.barrydiamentaudio.com