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Smokin'Tom Gary
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| Posted: 07 February 2010 at 11:13am | IP Logged
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I bought this package and was disappointed in the mastering of 5 tracks. Disc One, Track 5 "I Put A Spell On You", Track 15 "Travelin' Band" and Track 16 "Who'll Stop The Rain" all have phasing problems. If you play these in Mono, which all cuts are supposed to be on Disc One, you will hear phasing problems. In other words, they sound bad in mono. Tracks 13 & 14 on Disc Two "45 Revolutions Per Minute" which are supposed to be stereo also have poor mono compatibility. One can describe phasing issues as loss of high end, swishing and hollow sounding.
Why is this important? By profession I am a broadcast engineer. FM car radios have a built-in feature which collapses stereo separation and reduces the high end automatically as the signal gets weaker. As it gets weaker, these tracks will sound worse. That's the technical side. On the consumer side, if Disc One is advertised as mono in the booklet, I want mono! (OK, I won't kiss you!).
There was another technology that proved horrible in mono compatibility. It failed and is no longer used. It was called Q Sound.
I returned my CD for credit. I tracked down (no pun) the mastering engineer, George Horn. He said he would look at it, however, based on our conversation I seriously doubt it will be properly remastered and reissued.
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jimct
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| Posted: 07 February 2010 at 8:28pm | IP Logged
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Thanks for your fine-tooth-comb analysis, Tom! Based on your findings, let's hope that we don't see George Horn's name popping up on any future "single version" collections! Looks like us accuracy/perfectionist types will have to locate a stone mint original Fantasy 45, and then do the best de-vinylization we can for it, at least for their big two-sided hit, "Travelin' Band/Who'll Stop The Rain".
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aaronk
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| Posted: 08 February 2010 at 8:36am | IP Logged
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If I understand Tom's post correctly, the songs do not have phasing problems unless you sum both channels together. Assuming that the disc one tracks really are in mono, you could always take either the left or right channel only, which would eliminate any phasing issues.
Of course, only folks like us would know how to do that or would even bother to check. So, any radio programmer who loads those versions into their automation system may run into the problems that Tom mentions above.
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Roscoe
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| Posted: 08 February 2010 at 10:07am | IP Logged
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I tried several other "mono" tracks from this set and the L/R channels are not 100% identical...in fact, there's a lot of audible music when you invert one channel onto another.
I'm not enough of an audio expert to identify what happened here. Perhaps the engineer performed the transfers of mono tapes on a stereo machine and forgot to digitally sum to mono. Or maybe the tapes themselves weren't 100% mono. Even the "stereo" mixes of some of those CCR hits were pretty narrow, so maybe there was a mixup.
In any event, the other mastering problem is the all-too-common excessive dynamic range compression. I don't why they went to the trouble on this one, as I suspect many of these mixes were already compressed to begin with.
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Brian W.
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| Posted: 08 February 2010 at 3:19pm | IP Logged
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Yes, this comes from using a stereo tape head to play back a mono tape, and not having the heads properly aligned. But it's easy to fix yourself... just open the tracks in an audio editor and get rid of one channel, then sum the remaining channel to mono.
Roscoe wrote:
| In any event, the other mastering problem is the all-too-common excessive dynamic range compression. I don't why they went to the trouble on this one, as I suspect many of these mixes were already compressed to begin with. |
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Agreed. I've seen worse limiting and compression, but it's still more than it needs to be here.
Edited by Brian W. on 08 February 2010 at 3:21pm
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Todd Ireland
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| Posted: 29 November 2011 at 9:17pm | IP Logged
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Smokin'Tom Gary wrote:
| I bought this package and was disappointed in the mastering of 5 tracks. Disc One, Track 5 "I Put A Spell On You", Track 15 "Travelin' Band" and Track 16 "Who'll Stop The Rain" all have phasing problems. If you play these in Mono, which all cuts are supposed to be on Disc One, you will hear phasing problems. In other words, they sound bad in mono. Tracks 13 & 14 on Disc Two "45 Revolutions Per Minute" which are supposed to be stereo also have poor mono compatibility. One can describe phasing issues as loss of high end, swishing and hollow sounding. |
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I'm wondering if I may have a "corrected" CD pressing of Creedence Clearwater Revival's The Singles Collection because I honestly cannot detect any of the phasing issues Tom Gary has described hearing on his copy. The matrix number on the inner ring of my CD pressing is: DIDX-239542 1. There is also a smaller number that reads: IFPI 1329.
I agree that the sound quality is not the greatest on this set, but I attribute that more to the excessively loud and overcompressed CD mastering than anything else.
**EDIT** I just went back and re-read Aaron's post and now I realize that the phasing issues supposedly occur only when the L/R channels are summed together. If that's the case, then I may not have a different pressing after all.
So if the phasing issues aren't detectable during normal CD playback, then is it really necessary for the database to have comments about certain tracks being slightly out-of-phase? Thoughts anyone?
Edited by Todd Ireland on 29 November 2011 at 9:35pm
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aaronk
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| Posted: 29 November 2011 at 10:33pm | IP Logged
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I agree with you, Todd. There are, I'm sure, hundreds of examples of database CDs that have phasing problems when the track is summed to mono. I run into these fairly often whenever my DJ system is in mono mode. I don't think it's necessary to include such comments in the database if the track sounds fine when played back normally.
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The Hits Man
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| Posted: 30 November 2011 at 8:40am | IP Logged
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George Horn likely used a stereo head stack instead of a
mono stack, or the heads were mis-aligned.
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SoCalDrew
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| Posted: 30 November 2011 at 9:06am | IP Logged
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Any suggestions as to which channel might provide the
better SQ when deleting one or the other?
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KentT
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| Posted: 07 January 2012 at 8:11am | IP Logged
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Smokin' Tom Gary and I share the same profession. And with
the music, it must fold down to mono and keep the
essentials. Phase issues are the bane of broadcasters
everywhere. I think the azimuth of the tape machines the
problem tracks were recorded on were off. Which does it
every time. This set is a poster child for why you need to
transfer mono masters with real full track mono heads.
Edited by KentT on 07 January 2012 at 8:12am
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Top 40 Music on Compact Disc : Chat Board
Topic: CCR: The Singles Collection
