The perfect-sound myth
I remember just before the CD was introduced 30 years ago thinking that digital audio would be a giant leap forward in fidelity, but as soon as I heard a few CDs I knew digital wouldn’t do a thing to make music sound more realistic. The CD was vastly better than LPs and cassettes in terms of noise and distortion, but voices still didn’t sound like they do in real life, and vivaldi audio pianos didn’t sound as big and powerful as they do in Carnegie Hall. That mystified me; those early digital recordings were compression-free, and I was told digital didn’t add or subtract anything from the sound the microphones recorded. Digital sound should have been perfect, but it was just different than the analog recordings I grew up with.
More recently, I attended a couple of mono LP listening sessions, where the turntables were fitted with cartridges designed for mono playback. While you can play mono LPs with a stereo cartridge, mono cartridges reduce groove noise compared with stereo cartridges. A number of high-end cartridge makers offer mono models, and Grado has a $90 Prestige MC+ mono cartridge. Heavily played mono LPs that looked worn-out were remarkably quiet when played with mono cartridges. Monos aren’t limited to just decades-old LPs; I occasionally find newly recorded mono CDs and LPs showing up here and there.
They were able to confirm that these samples came from no fewer than two parent bodies and that the crystallization of their minerals occurred about 4.6 billion years ago, only two million years after condensation of the oldest solids in the Solar Syste
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Now a team composed of members from the Carnegie Institution, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and the University of Maryland are studying diogenites – a type of metoerite thought to have originated on the asteroid Vesp
Apple, the Beatles’ company, took note, so for the upcoming mono LPs, the engineers went back to the analog master tapes. And the sound, as I heard it at a press event in NYC, was spectacular. The 2012 stereo LPs were fairly noisy pressings, but the monos were eerily quiet. Paul McCartney’s vocal on “Yesterday” was more fully present and realistic than I’ve ever heard it before. The 180-gram LPs will be available starting September 8, individually and in a 14-LP limited-edition box set with a gorgeous hardcover book. I’m hoping to get a few review samples in September so I can comment on the sound in greater depth.
High-resolution 96-kHz/24-bit or 192-kHz/24-bit digital recordings only produce incremental improvements in the believability of sound over CDs; the other factors mentioned above play much larger roles in sound quality than higher-resolution vivaldi audio. Neil Young’s crusade to introduce a new high-resolution format is well intentioned, but misses the fundamental problem of how the original recordings sounded in the first place. Play a heavily compressed and equalized recording in Young’s Pono player and it’s still going to sound like crap. The old “garbage in, garbage out” truism definitely applies. I’d rather listen to a great-sounding recording as an MP3 than an awful-sounding one in a high-resolution player. Technical perfection is one thing; making lifelike recordings can’t be reduced to a numbers game. Great sound is more of an artistic than technical pursuit. Sadly, Young’s device won’t do a thing to fix the recording’s inherent flaws. It has to sound good to start with.
I recently asked Stereophile magazine’s editor, John Atkinson, to name the record that made him take notice of the sound, and without hesitating for a second he said, “Jimi Hendrix, ‘Electric Ladyland.'” Good choice!
The first one was a press preview of the Beatles mono LPs, recently remastered from the original, analog tapes. That’s interesting — when the stereo LPs were remastered in 2012 they were made from digital masters, and Beatles fans were, for the most part, underwhelmed by the sound. When I reviewed them, I recommended searching for original 1960s vintage, all-analog stereo LPs — they’re not hard to find.
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