New Rhino Audiophile series announced: High Fidelity (inc. The Cars, John Coltrane) *

Bro as much as this question is likely Jamie's wet dream soapbox invitation there must be another thread for this discussion.

 

Thanks for the review. Still haven't received mine yet. Did you have an original to compare it to?

 

Maybe eventually ? Probably not anytime soon in this format, as they have other titles to work on and hoping to sell through. Three months available was an easy time to grave a copy so I don’t see them feeling the need to repress right send.

 

Maybe a bit off topic, but I just wanted to say that Elliot Easton is one of the most underrated guitarists. His leads on Candy-O and other Cars albums are epic.

 

True! He definitely gets his due within the guitarist community though. He's viewed as a very tasteful player and one of the rock archetypes to study to learn how to 'play for the song' more. And also....he always has great tone. Consistently.

So many great little guitar parts that aren't overly embellished. A true 'color' guitarist. The man has an innate talent for it....and you can't teach that!

Some of his best tones are on Candy-o, actually, to wrangle this somewhat back on topic. That guitar tone for the intro to 'Since I Held You'....*chef's kiss*...and he stretches out a bit more on this album too and displays a little bit more fireworks than usual...some nice speed runs...cranked Ampeg tone.....tasty stuff!

...and he cut all his guitar parts in a day and a half while suffering food poisoning.

 

Oh shoot I didn’t know I was providing a soapbox crap. I was hoping for insights from those who heard the tapes. Directly. Like some quote from an engineer saying “those tapes are 1:1 with the OG, full stop”. Ah well, can’t delete my comment so I’ll just ignore all follow-ups !!!

 

Still available at Warner Australia website, but you’ll pay $100AU (65USD) plus shipping for it.
Marquee Moon (Rhino High Fidelity) | Television

 

Everyone that has an opinion on sound counts. Like you, most people that are playing vinyl have very nice systems capable of accurately reproducing what’s in the grooves. What you are hearing is valid in my book.

 

So, I just ordered AB from their site…I get an OOPS, something went wrong try again

then I get a confirmation email saying everything is fine…

I guess it went through but kinda odd…

 

This is what happened to me on the Cars S/T. After the OOPS I assumed I needed to place the order again. I ended up with two.

 

I don't. I kind of always thought the Mofi Candy-O was blah in comparison to my other Cars albums.
I have OGs of Heartbeat City and Shake It Up

These other originals sound fantastic. Marino Sterling masterings if I recall correctly.

 

thanks…!

 

If it helps any, I managed to find an interview with Kevin Gray where he talks about cutting Dark Side Of The Moon. This is an album he (and millions of people) are intimately familiar with. Nevertheless, he had this to say;

"When I threaded the tape up and hit play and heard the heartbeats at the beginning, it made the hair stand up on the back of my neck."

https://www.caropop.com/post/the-gray-side-of-the-moon

Then, there's this extensive story about Kind Of Blue.

"Wilder pushed Play. We heard session producer Irving Townsend say, "The machine is on . . . here we go." [...] To say the least, it sounded extraordinarily immediate. The stereo SACD is, in contrast, two generations removed: first, a three-track to two-track analog tape intermaster (to allow for sequencing the tracks), and second, the SACD itself. You can't get closer on this earth to what happened at the Kind of Blue sessions than we did. [...] But the center image, Davis' trumpet plus Paul Chambers' bass, was solid as a rock—so shockingly solid that at first I thought the center speaker was on. It wasn't."

The Fifth Element #34

Considering the above 2 examples of iconic recordings being heard again by experienced people in the industry for the millionth time but listening to the master tapes for the first time and expressing surprise, plus the well-known degrading SQ of copies, it is unsurprising to me that there is inherent loss in fidelity when listening to anything but the actual master tape directly, live. Obviously, none of us will ever have the opportunity to hear this stuff in our homes so the realistic compromise is to put on a copy of what was on there, mastered in the best possible way to make it sound as great as possible, while realizing that the purity of the original can never be matched.

 

Quite a few interviews with Bernie where he says there's substantial drop-off listening to the LP, but it's a very close matchup between the lacquer and the master tape

 

AB #3344/5000 arrived today and it sounds great. The only other copy I have is the MOFI SACD so it's nice to have on vinyl. Vinyl is clean, flat and the jacket has no blemishes.

 

I respect that you're a very accomplished engineer, and I'm an ordinary slob with no technical expertise; and I recognize that digital does have certain advantages over analog. But when you assert digital is closer to the artist's intent on a record that is from the 1970s, before any digital existed, you raise a whole bunch of issues that are not so clear cut. You assume Jerry and the boys did not understand or account for what you describe as "well-known losses in the vinyl". This is kind of naive and/or insulting to the artists and engineers who recorded the album.

I think artists of the time had a clear understanding of how their music would translate to vinyl, modified their processes for this, and that we should accept that as their intent. Our systems today, both analog and vinyl, may be "better", even better than Bob Weir, just for example, could have hoped. But let's not assert Bob's intent in 1970 was for playback on 2020 technology. Neil Young has been pretty emphatic on this point in other contexts

 

Excellent questions. We're (as is Dave Glasser) in the unique position to be able to hear the tape and the digital directly from it, and then the result of the Plangent DSP processes. The ADC changes it slightly, but not as much as two different make/models of cartridge. Some years back it was an obvious loss. Now it's really tough to make that case. For sure the results after the DSP speed and phase corrections are beneficial, definitely offsetting the intervention of the converters. And there is no way to achieve these benefits any other way. We contend firmly that the tape correction beats the tape. That is our contention with regard to AAA. That is the crux of what we believe to be a crucial matter for ongoing reissue procedures.

No cutting engineer will tell you that the vinyl matches the tape, it simply doesn't. It doesn't match the cutting console output. Much of the skillset in lacquer cutting is in minimizing those losses. No-one could or should contend they don't exist.

We at Plangent have had experience with putatively flat test pressings e.g. of the Springsteen material vs the mastered (Ludwig) files, as cut by Chris Bellman. I was pleasantly surprised how close those particular pressings were, kudos...but there were losses.

There are ways that cutting can appear to have a beneficial result, but that is where the source is *further* mastered by the de-essing, vertical limiting and compression and of course the cutting engineers' taste.

Bottom line is - we feel strongly that the advanced digital methods to vinyl surpass the AAA to vinyl, all other things being equal. And further that the best representation of the art is via listening to the file using that method.

 

Here's where I'm a little confused -- why wouldn't you maintain the best thing is to simply listen to well-mastered digital files where there is no 'loss' through a subsequent transfer to vinyl? I have a lot of respect for the Plangent process, and have purchased many of the Dead's shows to which this process has been applied. I buy vinyl because I like it -- but I would have assumed you'd assume any vinyl transfer only results in a loss...

 

Neil Young is someone we've worked for, so I don't want to contradict him, he has spoken positively on the work we've done and we're grateful for that.

The artists heard the tape, approved the tape, and nobody thought the LP or the radio play was equivalent to the master. Their intent was to make the highest fidelity rendering regardless of format, but at least during the best days of analog artists made no concessions or considerations of how (other than sequencing) the vinyl would change the sound of the tape. In fact the opposite: the goal was to make the lacquer reflect the intent of the mix as closely as possible.

 

That is exactly what I am saying, but I'm a bit out in the wilderness with that viewpoint.

 

#199/5000 of American Beauty arrived the other day and finally got a chance to play it loud and uninterrupted. Just sounds beautiful in every aspect.
Only version I can compare it to is my 2 on 1 1982 cassette copy with Workingman’s Dead on the flip side. LP sounds better!

 

As much as I'm enjoying this 2nd vinyl wave, my guess is this too will ebb and digital will eventually become the standard. Eventually the physical media used as master recordings will degrade and the advantages of DSD are too great to ignore. I seem to recall reading somewhere that the major players in the music industry are already archiving their collections to DSD. Honestly, if there were more releases available as straight DSD files I would probably start investing in more compatible hardware.

 

Nice formulation! lol fair knock.

 

Pretty hard to find a really bad sounding copy of AB I would guess. My first exposure was actually an 80’s reissue on vinyl and I was so blown away I didn’t stop until I had a NM OG. The OG sounded similar to that reissue actually but it was an OG. When the MoFi came out, no brainer. I really liked what MoFi did with the recording but it never really “shocked” me like the first time I played this album.

This new Rhino I’ve played on three different tonearm/cartridge combinations now. It delivers a very similar experience to that first time. Today was a vintage Ortofon M20-fl Super. Probably the same cartridge many played this on back around that time. Trust me, this album has always sounded very good.

 

I Cannot believe people complaining on this release, especially if they liked the RHF Cars debut. Everything you could ask for from the tapes.