Recently I received a comment from a reader named Alex that I really appreciated. After reading that he’d “read almost everything” I’d posted so far and that he tended to “agree with a lot” of my observations I was was thrilled to know that not only was there someone out there who actually reads this blog but also someone who had a genuine enthusiasm for what I’m writing about. On top of that Alex also made some interesting observations and posed some good questions that have inspired me to delve further into the question “why do modern reissues almost never sound as good as good vintage pressings?”
Alex writes:
“Like you, I’m finding many recent reissues and pressings lacking something that a lot of the original pressings have in spades. It’s hard to put my finger on what exactly is different between the old and the new, but the differences are definitely there.
However, in all fairness, every now and then I stumble upon a new pressing/reissue that does not sound that different from the original pressing. This is puzzling to me, because it precludes me from making some generalizations.
I used to think that the reason new pressings and reissues sound different is due to the ‘lost art’ of ‘baking’ vinyl records. Either the hands-on engineering skills have vanished during the ‘ice age’ of the vinyl productions (late 1980s to mid 2000s), or the tooling had disappeared (many pressing plants closed during the ‘ice age’ and the machinery and the parts were sold for scraps). But if that is the case, how to explain some brilliant (albeit rare) pressings that had recently hit the market?
So it’s a big mystery to me. Regrettably, I approach every purchase of the new pressing with a lot of trepidation. Most recent example — the other day I bought Marvin Gaye “What’s Going On” pressing from 2007. The vinyl quality is good, but after cleaning and washing the LP in my RCM, I was heartbroken to find that it sounds rather lifeless. The terms you tend to use here are ‘flat, lifeless, flabby, rubbery bass’, which nails the listening experience of many recent pressings.
Why is that? One of my pet theories is that, in case they’re using analog tapes for preparing the reissue, the tape itself had deteriorated (it’s been 40 – 50 years since those recordings were made). The other theory is that even if the tapes are in good condition, modern listening sensibilities, groomed by decades of listening to digital sound, demand that the original recording be ‘doctored’ in the attempt to make it sound as close as possible to a clinically clean CD.
What’s your take on these mesmerizing questions?”
After reading Alex’s comment I was excited to respond, which I did, but AS I did I realized that I had more to say than was suited to the limited scope of a comment. Therefore I promised to write a new post, this one, and in it offer up more of my thoughts on this subject of “vintage vs. reissue” pressings. Intrigued by Alex’s contention that he’s acquired some recently issued pressings that he felt held up to scrutiny, I asked him to let me know which recent reissues he’d recommend and he responded with the following:
“The newly minted reissues that have made a positive impression on me are Gil Scott-Heron’s “Free Will” (The Flying Dutchman) and, of all things, Miles Davis “Agharta” (4 Men with Beards, if you can believe that!) and “Dark Magus” (same publishing house).
I bought two 4 Men with Beards reissues dreading the sound quality (they somehow earned pretty lousy reputation). But I had to have these Miles reissues because the originals are harder to find than it is to find hen’s teeth. So I took the plunge and was shocked to hear decent, muscular sound pouring out of the vinyl grooves.
Sadly, I have only CDs to compare these pressings to. And 4 Men with Beards absolutely destroy the CDs!
I also have Music on Vinyl pressing of “Agharta”, and 4 Men with Beards also completely leave the Music on Vinyl pressing in shambles. It’s not even funny how much better 4 Men with Beards pressing sounds compared to the Music on Vinyl pressing.
Gil Scott-Heron’s “Free Will” reissue sounds very good. Maybe just a tad too much ‘vinyl-y’, if you know what I mean. Someone went a bit overboard with ‘warming up; the sound, but not in a bad way. The original pressing is a bit better, a bit more balanced (but not by much). Overall, pleasantly surprised.”
Then he went on to make the following general observations about modern vinyl pressings:
“In general, I find recent pressings and reissues erring on one of these three fronts:
1. Catering to modern listening sensibilities by striving to make the LP sound as close to the CD as possible
2. Catering to what they imagine is the ‘vinyl crowd’ by muddying the sound, bumping up the mid-bass and making everything sound bloomy, boomy, with annoyingly rolled off highs
3. Just pushing the button and cutting the stamper from a digital file — flat transfer, always ends up sounding completely lifeless.
I think there is an art and a craft and a science to cutting a good quality vinyl. Relying on computers and software alone ain’t going to cut it (pun intended). The difference between a well cut LP and a poorly cut LP is similar to the difference between artisanal, hand-made bread and loaf made in a bread machine with a push of a button.”
Absolutely there is a huge difference between an lp pressed from a well cut master and one pressed from a poorly done master, no matter the vinyl quality. I believe this is what Alex means when he refers to the “lost art of baking vinyl records,” and it is a big part of the reason that modern pressings more often than not don’t sound as good as vintage ones. This view was reinforced in a conversation I had with Jeff Powell of Take Out Vinyl out of Memphis (POST COMING SOON!). Jeff is one of about 100 people in the world who cut vinyl lacquers for pressings, and it’s clear that the number of cutters that are actually good at doing this is much smaller.
My understanding of the equipment used and the process of mastering and cutting lacquers is limited and a lot of what Jeff told me about his work went past me, but two things were clear to me from our conversation. One, it takes A LOT of practice to become skilled at cutting a lacquer and two, a mastering engineer’s contribution to the finished record is a BIG ONE that will no doubt be influenced by his or her ear for the music.
Modern listening sensibilities
Regarding that “ear for the music,” Alex hypothesizes in his first comment that “modern listening sensibilities, groomed by decades of listening to digital sound, demand that the original recording be ‘doctored’ in the attempt to make it sound as close as possible to a clinically clean CD.” I think Alex is on to something here, but maybe not in the way he intends it. Certainly the cd listening experience has been hugely influential, but in the age of music streaming that influence has been mainly limited to “audiophile listeners” who listen to cd’s and vinyl lp’s and have become so used to the dead quiet of the cd sound that they are heavily averse to surface noise on their records.
If I dislike hearing surface noise on my records then I will try very much to avoid hearing it and the surest way to do that is to only buy new records and to favor new records that are pressed on good quality vinyl. Therefore this aversion to surface noise becomes a driver for trade in “audiophile” records typically pressed on heavy vinyl (more on heavy vinyl later). If the companies that produce these records are successful at selling them, regardless of the quality of the listening experience these pressings deliver, then they will continue to do as they’ve done in the past and produce records that appeal to audiophiles who want quiet records with an appealing storyline behind them.
Marketing the “audiophile record”
I feel fortunate to have heard the call to vintage vinyl relatively early as a collector so I don’t own many “audiophile” records on heavy vinyl, but it’s easy for me to see why anyone who genuinely wants to have a great sounding copy of a given title would get pulled in by the hype and buy them. Phrases like “remastered from the original analogue tapes” and “pressed on 180 g virgin vinyl at joe shmoe’s pressing plant” abound on the hype stickers on records these days, not to mention the fabulous job that many record companies are doing with everything that isn’t the actual grooves in the record. The quality of jackets, inner sleeves, labels and accompanying artwork is in many cases extremely high. I rarely ever even look at new records any more, but when I do I find myself coveting all the beautiful packaging. It makes me WANT the records to sound good!
The modern pressing is not really for the audiophile
The marketing behind new and reissued vinyl may appear to be meant to appeal to the audiophile, but I would argue that the audience is really the “aspiring” audiophile, not the “true audiophile”. When I say “true audiophile” I mean someone who has brought their system to a place that reveals as many of the virtues and flaws on a record as possible and someone who has trained their ear to hear those virtues and, for better for worse, those pesky flaws. The time, money and obsessiveness required to be a “true audiophile” is somewhat rare, at least rare enough that I’m just not sure there’s enough of these folks out there to buy all the “audiophile” records being pressed.
“Hey audiophiles,” let’s face it, this audiophile hobby and the bank account breaking gear that go along with it are totally ridiculous from a dollars and sense perspective, and the “aspiring” audiophile spends fewer dollars and has more sense that most “true audiophiles”. “Aspiring” audiophiles are the folks most modern records are really mastered for and marketed to, because it’s these folks that have decent to good turntables, reasonable electronics and pretty good speakers that combine to function as reasonably satisfying systems that will get your attention but are not all that revealing. And it’s systems like these that records with overblown bass, compressed midrange, highs that really call attention to themselves and so complete an absence of midrange magic that one doesn’t even know it’s not there, sound “good” on.
Getting back to Alex’s comments, he mentions “modern listening sensibilities, groomed by decades of listening to digital sound” as a possible contributor to the listener bias behind the sonic deficiencies of the modern record. He’s referring to vinyl being mastered to sound more like a cd, and while I would agree that listening sensibilities have changed over the years, I don’t think it’s because we’ve all listened to too many cd’s. The bigger problem is that we’ve all been sold records and cd’s for quite a while now that have been increasingly victimized by compression.
The impact of the loudness war
A couple of months ago there was an article in the NY Times about the loudness war. If you’re unfamiliar with this term, you can read about it here. Basically the loudness war is a trend in mastering music that is based on the belief that a song that plays with more of its elements at a higher volume will be more attention grabbing and therefore more likely to be a hit.
This is not a new idea. Back when jukebox’s were a common feature in bars and restaurants, mastering engineers were using compression to increase loudness on 45 rpm records so they would stand out more when played in noisy environments. This also happened with lp’s, typically when the album had become a hit and new lacquers were cut to sound better on the radio. Boston’s first album is a great example of this. Some copies of the record are mastered with greater dynamic range than others, and those that are more compressed have been mastered that way to improve the experience of listening to that album’s HUGELY popular songs on the radio.
In modern mastering the “advances” in computer-based digital audio effects processing have allowed mastering engineers to push loudness further than ever through EQ and compression. I propose that this trend has had the effect of recalibrating the ear of many in the industry, making among others the mastering engineers themselves less sensitive to the effects of compression.
Bob Dylan more or less sums up the frustration of myself and other audiophiles when he says:
“You listen to these modern records, they’re atrocious, they have sound all over them. There’s no definition of nothing, no vocal, no nothing, just like—static.”
Recently there has been a backlash to the loudness war with some in the industry coming out against it. Mastering engineers working today such a Bob Ludwig and Doug Sax who were mastering records at a time when uncompressed, full dynamic range records were being made with terrific regularity are pushing back against the trend, as are the musicians who’s music these gentleman are mastering records for. Hopefully this leads to more good sounding new records coming into the marketplace, but will it be enough to compete with the quality of the best vintage pressings? Will it satisfy those of us who have heard what top quality pressings really sound like?
I had a recent email exchange with Tom Port at Better Records where I asked him the following question:
“This phenomenon, if we might call it that, of compression bias, is something I find rather fascinating. I’m sure the master cutters at MoFi and AProd are setting out to make the best sounding records they can, but for some reason they seem to regularly fall short. Could it be that their ears and the ears of many other folks in the business have been inadvertently tuned to enjoy a more compressed sound? I can’t help but wonder.”
Tom’s response was as follows:
“I would be very surprised if their playback equipment was not overly compressed, most audiophile equipment is, and audiophiles tend to make records with the same faults over and over, a good reason not to let them make any of your records!”
Of course Tom is in the business of selling records so that clear bias must be accounted for, but he makes an interesting point. I haven’t heard nearly enough “high end” audio systems to make second his assessment, but if what he suggests is true then it would seem many of the mastering engineers working today are themselves victims of compression bias, and that bias is being fueled by the companies that are building much of the audio equipment on the market today. Perhaps there is a kind of feedback loop in the record / high end audio industry where modern vinyl remasters are being used as reference discs by those building the equipment and then that equipment is being used by mastering engineers to master more “audiophile” records.
Has compression bias infiltrated high end audio?
Based on my experiences demo-ing equipment it would certainly seem that using modern records to assess gear is an issue. A year or so ago I was looking to upgrade my electronics and went into the shop I’d been doing business with for decades to demo an integrated amp. It was a hot day and I was running several other errands that day and didn’t want to risk bringing records with me that might warp in the car. When it was time to hear the amp, the gentleman who arranged the demo, we’ll call him George (not his real name), brought in a recent MoFi reissue of Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue.
Now I have not heard a lot of MoFi reissues, but the ones I have heard ARE COMPRESSED! I quickly looked through some records stacked in a corner of the listening room and picked out a couple of vintage records from the pile, suggesting we play those instead. George looked a bit confused and a bit more put off, but he indulged me. Not being my records I had no way of knowing if the copies I picked up were any good, but since I mostly listen to vintage vinyl I thought they would give me a better feel for the sound of the amp than a MoFi which in my experience generally tends to give a good first impression but one that degrades rather quickly with further listening.
When on a separate trip I auditioned the amp I eventually did buy, I had my own records with me and it made all the difference. With records that sounded the way I want my records to sound, I was able to find an amplifier that drove the sound of my system in the direction I wanted it to go. I’m not the most knowledgeable guy when it comes to gear, but I’m clear about what I want the gear I buy to do for my system. If I wasn’t and I was using MoFi’s or some other compressed “audiophile pressing” to audition equipment then maybe I’d choose equipment that sounded better with compressed remasters or modern pressings and therefore maybe I’d end up moving further away from the open, dynamic, natural, three dimensional sound that lives in the grooves of the better vintage pressings.
Does vinyl thickness matter?
Speaking of open, dynamic, natural sounding records, I’ve begun to wonder if the sound I’ve heard on some of my better vintage records is even possible on a 180g or 200g vinyl record. I’ve begun to wonder if there isn’t something inherently flawed in the way a heavy vinyl record plays on a turntable. I started researching the subject and time after time I read the same basic argument about vinyl thickness: thickness doesn’t matter and thick or thin records have the same capacity for groove depth and transfer of signal.
After investigated this question a bit more I found a thread on Steve Hoffman Forums in which Steve himself weighed in saying that any difference in the playback characteristics of a heavy vinyl record vs. a thinner record should be resolved by adjusting the VTA and that there should be no other difference. This makes perfect sense and leads me to my next point.
To what thickness of record is your VTA adjusted?
I hesitated for a long time to play make adjustments to my VTA. The gentleman who originally set up my turntable has a golden ear and I trust it immensely, but eventually I felt the need to play with tracking pressure and VTA if only to try to push myself a bit more to increase my skillset and improve my ear. My first attempts at adjusting the VTA were not great, but one day I was reading one of Tom Port’s “What to Listen For” posts on Steely Dan’s Pretzel Logic and I was able to use his cues to dial the VTA more accurately.
That adjustment dramatically improved the sound of just about ALL of my vintage pressings. In fact I believe that my turntable sounds better now than it ever has, but that adjustment did nothing to improve the sound of the few 180 g pressings that I own and listen to. I can’t help but wonder if the gentleman who set up my turntable did so with a 180 g record. I doubt he even remembers.
The improvement in sound on my system with this latest VTA adjustment is one I’m now reluctant to fiddle with. When I play a heavy vinyl record I don’t adjust the VTA for that record because I don’t want to spend the time to get back to where it is now. I admit that this leaves me open to the question of fairness when I offer criticism of records pressed on heavy vinyl and I accept that, but even if the VTA is a bit off for a record I can still get a pretty good idea of what the potential for sound quality is on that record. My experience, based on having the VTA setting off the mark for several months, is that good sounding records still sound good even when the VTA isn’t optimal, but they sound great when the VTA is set right. Average and bad sounding records just sound slightly less average or less bad with the VTA adjusted properly.
This brings me again to my next point. Given the poor track record of so many 180g and 200g modern pressings, perhaps somewhat less dedicated audiophiles such as myself should just set up our turntables for thinner records and be done with it. I don’t change the VTA when I play records of different thicknesses. I’ve decided for now that I’d rather just collect and play thinner records and leave the 180g and 200g records to everyone else. If another collector who had a good system with a turntable that had a VTA adjustment asked for my advice, I would recommend s/he do the same. Who knows? If enough of us stop buying 180 and 200g vinyl records maybe the industry will take notice and stop pressing so many records on heavy vinyl. That way if clear evidence is ever discovered that heavy vinyl records ARE in fact fundamentally sonically inferior to thinner ones then those of us in the know will be way ahead of the curve!
Am I overgeneralizing?
Perhaps I’m making too big a generalization. Maybe there are, as Alex says, “new pressing(s)/reissue(s) that does (do) not sound that different from the original pressing(s)”. Actually, I’m sure this is true, but not necessarily because the modern version has the same potential to sound good as the original or earlier reissue, but because the vintage pressing that it’s being compared to is not a very good copy or a very good version to begin with.
Not all copies of a title are created equal, even copies with the same stampers! I wrote a post a couple of years ago after I had inadvertently ended up with two of the same French original pressing of Bowie’s Pin Ups. Instead of just being annoyed at at the seller who sent me two of the same record, neither of which was the UK version I was ordering (read the long story here), I decided I would just shoot them out against each other and see if there was a clear winner. It turned out that one copy clearly sounded better than the other, and I had a blast doing it! What a great record!
Speaking of great records and vintage vs. modern pressings, I had never heard the Miles Davis record, Agharta, before Alex mentioned it in his comments. Thus far I have only previewed the album on Spotify in my car, but WOW! What an amazing recording and what incredible music! I’ve asked Alex to buy a vintage copy, shoot it out against his FMWB’s pressing and then write up a guest post for this blog. I for one am eager to hear Alex’s assessment, so check back for that soon to hear more about Agharta and some of the pressings available.