facts of life "sometimes"

OK, I had our resident audio engineering expert Mark Mathews take a listen to "Sometimes" as it appears on my Facts of Life's Just the Facts: The Complete Kayvette Recordings 1975-1978 CD. He said he compared it to the same track on Santi's Sweet Dreams Where Country Meets Soul Volume 2 disc. Mark's conclusion is that they are both from a pristine sounding vinyl source but mastered differently.

Now, here's how Mark is able to tell these CDs were mastered from vinyl... There is a slight "thump" noise that occurs in regular two second intervals and is most audible through headphones between the 1:15-1:50 mark. This noise is due to a slight physical imperfection on the vinyl LP surface, most likely a small bump. Each time the stylus needle hits the imperfection with each full vinyl rotation, the "thump" noise occurs.

Mark says the mysterious rattling noises at the end of the recording are indeed guitar notes that begin plucking in the right channel from 3:40-3:42. That "paper sack shaking" quality I described previously is due to noise reduction applied to the song when it was mastered for CD. A filter was evidently used to remove low-level groove rumble, but in the process also carves out some of the audio at a very low volume. The audio ends up as low as the noise-floor and this is why the guitar obtains that peculiar sound at the tail end of the fade. Mark credits the engineer for applying the hiss reduction at a low setting and confining it only to the track's final :03. If more reduction had been used to try to remove the "thumps", it most likely would have ruined the bass line.

Finally, Mark attributes the hiss on "Sometimes" as most likely being present on the vinyl record itself. He says a greater amount of hiss reduction was used at the end of the song on the Country Meets Soul Volume 2 CD which actually fades out before the final guitar notes can be heard. Meanwhile, if there's a drawback to the Just the Facts disc, it's that the audio levels are peak-limited due to the track being mastered at loud levels. Yet despite that, Marks says he prefers the sound quality of "Sometimes" on the latter CD.

Edited by Todd Ireland