![]() Certainly, if this could sound better than the sonically stupendous Jazz issued a year earlier, it would be amazing! My first brush with digital recording occurred a few years before that AES when in 1979 Warner Brothers issued Ry Cooder’s Bop ‘Til You Drop advertising it as the “first digitally recorded rock album” (using 3M’s 50kHz/16 bit 32 track tape recorder).įrom everything I’d read up until that point, my expectations led me believe this was going to be sonically incredible: the recording had no noise, no hiss, no wow and flutter and ultra-wide dynamic range. Not for me and not for a lot of music lovers-including many engineers who know what their recordings are supposed to sound like and who prefer vinyl, despite its well-known flaws-as if digital doesn’t have its share, currently measurable or not. Today the best I can do is show respect for some CDs and especially for files of 96/24 bit resolution and higher, by calling them “listenable” and “enjoyable”-as listenable and enjoyable as vinyl? Though admittedly digital sound has gotten better through decades of improvements, I choked on it back then. Just as most people can enjoy a PB&J sandwich while others choke to death inhaling just the smell of peanuts, some people obviously do enjoy listening to digitally reproduced music while others are left gasping for air. Yes, this is cranky talk in most of the world but that’s hardly my concern, or yours obviously, if you’ve read this far. Can there be a better expression to describe the extinction of an ill-conceived format where music is stored on a spinning disc as 0s and 1s represented physically by plateaus and pits etched into plastic? In other words the CD is really an “analog” format! I once described the sound I heard at that event as doing to music what Krypton’s justice system did to criminals before spinning them off into outer space-pressing them flat between sheets of glass.Īnother time I wrote that digital preserves music the way formaldehyde preserves frogs: you kill it and then it lasts forever, except as we came to find out CDs hardly last forever, physically or conceptually. A later acquisition, the original UK EG edition (EGHP50) marketed by Polydor, sounds best.Īll of these editions clearly sounded better than that non-commercial CD, which sounded terrible by any quality standard of reproduced sound. I knew every tiny percussive nook and cranny and where every element fit into three dimensional space on the original Bob Ludwig mastered Warner Brothers pressing and on the even more spacious and dynamic sounding Japanese Polydor edition. The convention was where I believe the compact disc had its American debut using what I remember as a nearly washing machine-sized non-commercial player and a one-off digital transfer of Roxy Music’s Avalon-one of my favorite albums then and now. ![]() My invitation was courtesy the head of the sound department at Walt Disney, where I was then supervising the soundtrack to the movie TRON.” I’m neither a recording engineer nor an AES member. It’s a nerdy question, but do you remember where you were when you heard your first Compact Disc? For me it was at a Los Angeles Audio Engineering Society convention in 1982.
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