In recent threads we've been dancing around the elephant in the room, which is that DDD productions sound different (usually...) than AAA ones.
Tim47 says that he hopes his thread doesn't turn into an anti-Wilson thread, tommy_n_chucky says that Steven Wilson is a genius whether you like his music or not. Recent threads on whether LPs are mastered from digital files, or whether digital lathes are used in LP production, pre-suppose some inherent differences in sound between the two technologies.
But the difference hasn't really been spelled out. I've listened to a few Steven Wilson remasters. They DO sound different.
I thought perhaps it might be fun to discuss how people define or hear those differences???
For me, his remasters sound "more analog." Wikipedia has this to say of another remastering engineer's technique:What is the effect of five passes through a vacuum tube process? It smooths out the waveforms. It makes the output sound "more analog."[Steven] Hoffman's method of transferring tapes is minimalist. The adjustments he makes depend on the quality of the tape source and the equalization choices of the mixing engineer. While he avoids compression, limiting, and noise reduction, he does add "colorations" through subtractive equalization and up to five layers of vacuum tube distortion.
If you've ever sat in front of a saxophonist, or an oboist, or a bagpiper, you know the sound of their instrument is harsh, raspy, biting. On a digital editor the waveforms look very spiky, with lots of sharp edges. Just like they sound.
OTOH looking at the waveforms of analog recordings from 1950s-1970s the waves tend to be much smoother, more rounded, more symmetrical. On speakers the sound is less grating, less edgy. With most speaker systems this is an improvement, because the hardest thing for speakers to reproduce is spiky waveforms. The moving mass of the speaker cone (or tweeter dome) just doesn't want to move in spiky directions. The result of putting a spiky waveform into them, unfortunately, is often DISTORTION, or movement that wasn't in the original music signal. Distortion, in other words, that is inherently non-musical. So adding "musical distortion" by smoothing out the waveforms is preferable.
High-compliance tweeters -- like ribbon tweeters and electrostatic tweeters and the like -- are better at reproducing non-linear waveforms. But at the expense of lower sound pressure levels, due to the difficulty of moving the membrane in non-linear patterns.
I suspect that most people who prefer "the analog sound" do so because a) they don't get out to live music much, b) their stereos don't reproduce difficult waveforms well, and c) they've never heard a "live sound" reproduced correctly in their living rooms before. All they've heard is the unmusical distorted attempt from non-compliant speakers.
Yes, there's another whole issue of brick-walled compression on many CDs (because CDs will hold 0dB content without distortion, unlike LPs). But this issue is really completely separate from the accuracy of the original recording. Giving up on CDs because some of them are mastered by cloth-eared nincompoops is throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
Another whole issue is the philosophy of mastering. Some mastering techniques -- like adding five layers of "tube sound" -- are a matter of personal taste and compromise and playing to the lowest common denominator. Wilson's remasters of Tull, for instance, remove all of the "bite" from the acoustic guitar and the rasp from Ian's flute. Some people, a lot of people, prefer this smoother sound. But I don't. On a good stereo "listener fatigue" isn't what you get from playing live-sounding recordings. Quite the opposite -- I find music played through a thick carpet is dull and lifeless.
But that's just me. Would love to hear other opinions.
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Originally Posted by rcarlberg
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