taco "puttin’ on the ritz"

Thanks for the concise summary.

I wasn't going to mention it, but I did stumble across a foreign mastering out in file-sharing land, on a custom compilation, and can't figure out where it came from. Sadly, it's not perfect either:
it has a lengthy tape dropout in the right channel during the intro, resulting in almost the same kind of effect as the NR on the 45 masterings mentioned above. But the rest of the song does not have
excessive NR; it sounds like what was probably intended for the 45 all along.

We could re-create the 45 mix from the album version easily enough, and it would sound better (IMHO) than how it was ever heard in the '80s. But is that inauthenticity desirable?

When evaluating or making my own transfers and remasters, I'm always having to decide how much authenticity I really want. Do I want this song to sound like it did when it was played from a 45? Do I
want to faithfully reproduce what is on the record by undoing as much of the playback system's coloration as possible? Do I want to go further and try to make it sound like the best master tape (or
what I think is on such a tape)? Do I want make it sound competitive and good, by today's standards? Do I want it to match a particular CD mastering? Am I willing to reconstruct any of it using
CD/digital sources?

These are all competing "sounds"! And regardless, the authentic sound of the past is even more complicated because many of us would still mess around with tone controls/EQ to get it sounding "just
right" on our sound systems when we played the records, or we were listening to it on the radio, which has its own aesthetic.

Anyway...

Edited by mjb50

I'm 95.7% sure it's not a different mix.

They just used razor blades and tape, but of course they did not cut up the precious original tape; they used a copy to
work on, and probably also made a copy of the finished edit. Who knows how many copies were made, what decisions were made
along the way to reduce noise and preserve fidelity, and how well calibrated their equipment was.

In the end, at the very least, we can say the Canadian-made 45 ended up with the exact sound and speed as what we hear on
the CDs. The only difference is the unwanted clicks on the CDs. It's easier to remove those clicks than it is to figure out
the exact expander settings they used...although I have a pretty good guess that they were using the dbx 3BX; I used to
have one and it does what I am hearing in this track (basically concentrating the expansion effect in the upper midrange,
affecting drums and cymbals more than vocals and other instruments).

Edited by mjb50

Not sure what you mean.

The last 1:30 of the LP version is a medley which incorporates parts of Broadway Rhythm, Always, White Christmas, Alexander's Ragtime Band, and There's No Business Like Show Business. 35 seconds of this medley were
cut out for the 45 by removing several short sections, but I don't think there was any change to what was left.

Edited by mjb50

mjb50 wrote: Not sure what you mean. The last 1:30 of the LP version is a medley which incorporates parts of Broadway Rhythm, Always, White Christmas, Alexander's Ragtime Band, and There's No Business Like Show Business. 35 seconds of this medley were cut out for the 45 by removing several short sections, but I don't think there was any change to what was left.

I just mean to say that the various parts on the LP
version don't sound like they merge as naturally, whereas
the single sounds more merged together naturally.

For example, go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=TMstTM01m28 (or pull out an LP version). At 3:31 and
3:42 sound like awkward junction points. I recall the LP
version of Loverboy's "When It's Over" sounding a hair
clunky on "cause ... deep deep down inside" where on the
45-rpm disc the song is edited by jumping to the chorus.
So I wonder if sometimes, content is actually added
rather than edited out.

aaronk wrote: I actually think you're more accurate by describing it as noise reduction. If it were just reducing/gating the volume, I wouldn't expect the loud volume passages to sound different, but they do. Take a listen to the synths on each version starting at 0:05. The 45's synths are muffled from the NR, whereas they are clear sounding on the LP version.

Yep! Well, we're both right, because it's noise reduction for tape, which was achieved in that era mainly by way of dynamic range expansion. Ideally you'd compress the dynamic range and maximize the SNR when recording, and then expand the dynamic range in a complementary way on playback; this would reduce the relative level of the tape hiss and keep the music mostly the same. Normally one Dolby, dbx, or Telcom "compander" unit would do both functions for you (you'd press a button to say which mode you wanted—recording or playback), but there were also standalone expanders (by dbx and others) which were intended to improve the sound of any hissy, clicky, or overly compressed audio, not just audio that had been pre-processed in exactly the opposite way.

My first experiment just involved using the built-in Dynamics Processing effect in Adobe Audition, which as I mentioned, got me pretty close, and reminded me of how my old dbx BX3 expander sounded.

Your comment spurred me to do some more experimenting, though, and I remembered I have the Satin VST plugin (not free), which emulates the classic tape noise reduction systems Dolby A, Dolby B, dbx I, and dbx II (all without mentioning them by their true names).

Playing around with the plugin, I found that applying Dolby A decoding to the After Eight CD album version got me even closer to the 45 version's sound right away, so it seems that's probably the mistake they made (leaving Dolby A decoding on during playback of a non-Dolby-encoded tape).

For fun, I ended up doing a reconstruction of the 45 like this:

1. roll off the high end (simulating a mediocre tape copy)
2. apply Dolby A decoding (via Satin)
3. boost high end (undoing step 1, and then some)
4. apply more dynamic range expansion to 2 kHz+ range (Satin's Dolby A wasn't enough)
5. overlay a light amount of white noise (simulating final tape)
6. interpret sample rate as 44502 (~0.91% speedup)
7. make all the edits to match the 45
8. boost high end a little more
9. temporarily roll off 3 kHz+, reduce volume 40 dB, reduce right channel volume another 8 dB, copy to clipboard, undo all of that
10. starting 1.058s after beginning of first beat, mix-paste 60% clipboard + 100% existing audio (simulating the tape print-through!)
11. resample to 44100
12. more EQ to approximate the poor fidelity of the 45

I wouldn't blame anyone for not going to that much trouble to reproduce the noise reduction, though. I'd rather just make the necessary edits to the album version, set the speed either to match the 45 or to get the proper key, and enjoy how it was supposed to sound all along.

(I'm happy to share my files or detailed settings; just PM me.)

[this post edited in 2022 to fix word wrapping]

Edited by mjb50