albums ruined by Sonic Solutions' NoNOISE

They certainly shave that "blankets thrown over the speakers" sound. What's funny is that those two albums are some of the best sounding DCC's, IMHO. I know that Steve is very proud of his work on those two--I've read some posts here about how much fun he had doing them, how much work went into them, and how pleased he was with the results. Just goes to show you, "it's all in the mastering."

 

On the contrary, NO DICE (mastered credited to Mike Jarrett) seems to have no NR applied to it. I've even posted samples here in the forum in the past where the Apple CD sounded a tiny bit better than the DCC on some tracks.

Something truly evil seems to have happened to STRAIGHT UP (mastered credited to Jarrett and Peter Mew) after it left Ron Furmanek's hands. I believe it was due to the infamous Mr. Mew.

Derek

 

I heard Neil Aspinall listened to it and insisted NR be applied.

Anyway you slice it, Straight Up was a disaster on the Apple CD.

Thank god for the DCC.

 

That isn't noise reduction.

Does The Best of Bandfinger utilize different mastering? There is most certainly noise reduction on Without You on that CD.

Also, "left Ron Furmanek's hands"? Did he actually do anything hands-on? I thought the likes of Jarratt and Mew were the ones who did the actual engineering.

 

That's a crime !

 

Well the whole Sinatra Catalog - Entertainer of the Century Series and the parallel Capitol Box that was the full shibang.

 

Going back in time, the UK Beatles rarities LP from 1979, which was the first time I heard She's A Woman without Dexterecho - but that track was very obviously noise reduced with something simple like DNR, and probably the others were DNRed, less obviously.

 

My understanding is that it was a separate mastering. I don't have that CD so I can't tell you more.

After the digital master was completed it was given over to EMI for mastering. Ron said it sounded fine when it left his hands. IMO, NO DICE is OK and a very nice alternative to spending big $$$ for the DCC. STRAIGHT UP I suspect was ruined in mastering by Peter Mew.

Derek

 

What do you mean, "after the digital master was completed"? Wasn't all of the work done at Abbey Road? You're saying Furmanek didn't work with other staff?

FWIW, apparently the master was not used for Straight Up (it was for the DCC though).

 

A (late) jazz-record collector friend of mine called this "The Infamous Victor Squeak." This sound is the result of the wax master cooling too quickly during the record cutting.

 

The first 12 discs in the big Duke Ellington Centenial box.
First of all the transfers from metal/shellac are wretched like they were done using a cheap pivit arm turntable with the wrong stylus, arn't 78 transfers done using a linear tracking setup for zero tracking error. Every tranfer is quiet in the beginning but noisy at the end. With No Noise applied, it's almost listenable at the start of each track, but halfway though each track, you begin to hear a high ringing sound. By the end of each track the ringing from too much noise reduction is overwhelming that you are running for the high pass filter on the pre-amp, or turning down the treble. Why RCA let this abomination out is beyond me. Thank God I still have my complete Duke Ellington French RCA set that has great sounding transfers of the 1920s-1940s material. It's 24 CDs, I'll trade it for a Beatles mono box. Any takers

 

The No Dice and Straight Up DCCs are a godsend. However, I don't really hear that much of a difference between the two No Dice CDs, with the exception of the beginning of Without You.

 

I don't know if they had it back then. The UK mix of She's A Woman had no reverb.
The first use of noise reduction I can recall was "Soundstream" back in the late 70's that RCA used on the Caruso reissues.

 

That was some kind of digital signal processing done by Soundstream in 1976. I am a big fan of Soundstream digital recordings (especially the Telarc discs) but have not heard any of the archival releases "restored" by their DSP process. How do they sound?

 

Well, not an album per se, but this series of 70's comps (released by an offshoot of EMI - shocker!) are a textbook example of disastrous mis-application of noise reduction. Just listening to the cymbals on "Signs" or "I Just Want to Celebrate" will make you motion sick...

 

The UK Rarities LP was released Nov. 1978; the Philips DNR system was banging around from the "late 60s or early 70s":

http://freespace.virgin.net/ljmayes.mal/comp/philips.htm

(DNR is just DNL on one chip)

It was used in a Philips/Norelco cassette deck around 1972, their competitor to the Advent 201, and there were some outboard units, including one from Radio Shack(!) which I have. It can work OK for some materials but it can easily be overused. Fairchild had a more primitive system in the early 1960s.

Anyway DNR/DNL, or something like it, is very audible and over used on the UK Rarities "She's A Woman" at least.

The "Soundstream" process used on those Carusos was a virtual fraud, but that's another story. Originally Stockham claimed he had separated out Caruso's voice completely and restored it; then he claimed that "Soundstream" would compensate for the "resonances" of the acoustic recording process; but those "Soundstream" Complete Carusos were just highly eq'ed. And unfortunately they are still in print on BMG CD, slightly more eq'ed. No real noise-reduction other than cutting off the high end. Notably when RCA did their CD version "Complete Caruso", they used new and more standard transfers for the non-Victor sides. (Get the Naxos set now.) And nobody ever has used "Soundstream" on acoustic sides again.

 

Does anyone know what events started the noise reduction trend on CDs? I remember the original CDs of Led Zeppelin IV and Coda being singled out for having excessive tape hiss in the 80s, but was it those CDs that prompted it or was it others or a combination of releases and the reviews of those CDs?

 

I have heard some people say that they prefer these noise reduced CDs to the EH brickwalled CDs.

I won't say which I prefer. I will only state that I don't consider any of my Hendrix vinyl or CDs to be definitive.

 

Soundstream was a company, not a technology or even a process. I assume what you are talking about here is that nobody used Soundstream's noise reduction (whatever in fact that was) again. To say that "Soundstream" was never used again is not correct. Soundstream digital recorders were used on many, many albums from the mid-70's through the early 80's, and Soundstream digital tapes form the basis for many of Telarc's SACD releases.

 

(Yes I know) Whatever it was, it was never used on acoustic sides again. The Caruso bit "Blind Deconvolution" indeed.