Pat Farrell;268296 Wrote: > It is very bad form to play mono tapes with stereo heads. You are > supposed to use mono heads. They are twice as wide. > > Of course, most re-issue labels care about getting your money, not > sound quality. > > They also usually compress the hell out of the signal, see Loudness > Wars. There were no loudness wars back when the Beatles, Steppenwolf, > etc. were recording and releasing record albums. > Playing back mono tape on a stereo machine is more common than I would have thought! And I'm not talking about some cheap, re-release label in this case. I'm talking about the official Beatles CDs produced by EMI and supposedly approved by George Martin. According to legend, an EMI engineer (I forget his name at the moment) decided the mono tapes "sounded better" on a stereo machine. Not to mention that a few other tracks appear to have been played on a mono machine, but somewhere there was apparently a word clock inversion (I would have not thought this possible) resulting a one sample delay between channels on the disc! Whether Sir George actually had final approval, well, that's another story! In fact, when playing back these CDs, IMHO it sounds better just to take one channel. It gives much more stable and "solid" mono.
I've fixed many of these type of problems on popular music from the 40s, 50s, 60s and even the 70s using Cool Edit after ripping before I encode to FLAC. I routinely check when I suspect the source tape was mono before running the FLAC encoder. Back to the original topic. What I see in the editor while "fixing" these mono tracks gives me confidence that I'm not seeing the type of problem which might be created by the ripping process, and futhermore, that the ripping process is probably more accurate than what happened some of the time at the CD plants before the mid 1990s. So its kind of a double edge sword, there was not so much of a loudness war back then, but the data quality was probably not as tight. Who knows, the AccurateRip comment about "a different pressing" may be a reference to the 1630 not playing back exactly the same bits when they cut a subsequent glass master... -- Timothy Stockman ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Timothy Stockman's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=8867 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=43348 _______________________________________________ ripping mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/ripping
