CCR: The Singles Collection

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.

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.

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.

Agreed. I've seen worse limiting and compression, but it's still more than it needs to be here.

Edited by Brian W.

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.

Any suggestions as to which channel might provide the
better SQ when deleting one or the other?