Didn’t We Almost Have It All - Whitney

I'm bringing this subject (from another thread 4 years ago) into its own topic. Aaron wrote:

"Whitney Houston - Didn't We Almost Have It All - On the Greatest Hits CD, and on my TM Century library, this song sounds awful! The vocals are very distorted, and it sounds as if the tape was bad or like it was transfered from a bad vinyl source. It's noticable throughout the song, but it's really bad from the 3:30 point to the end...and especially at 4:08.
Does anyone know if the original Whitney album has this problem, too?>

At the time, I'd never noticed anything. After Aaron pointed it out, now whenever I listen (at least on headphones) the distortion does sound terrible. And it's even on the original CD - "Whitney". Aaron pointed out it's also on the edited version on the "Greatest Hits" CD. Tonight I tried to use X-crackle on most of the vocal distortion parts and probably reduced it by a third or so, but not nearly enough.

So does anyone know - is there an import CD that doesn't have distortion on this song? Funny that I never really noticed it before Aaron's post. Never even heard it on the CD back in 1987 when I played it frequently. Is it possible that CD rot caused the distortion on my CD (and other Whitney CDs made at the time) and that's why I didn't notice it then and do now? (But that doesn't explain why the Greatest Hits CD has the same problem - unless they edited it from an old Whitney CD). Could all the CDs have rotted?

aaronk wrote: I'm sure this has nothing to do with the CDs. Actually, the last time I listened, it sounded to me as if only the vocal track has the distortion issue, while the instrumentation is okay. If I had to guess, I'd say this song was mastered and/or recorded this way.

Right. I don't think CD rot would manifest as vocal distortion. I don't recall the distortion, but I haven't listened to this song in a while.

Possible culprits for distortion in a case like this would be either overload when recording the vocal (you know Whitney and her loud voice), or overloading the levels during the mix. However, it would be unusual to encounter technical flaws of this nature in a big budget production like this in 1987.

Roscoe wrote: Possible culprits for distortion in a case like this would be either overload when recording the vocal (you know Whitney and her loud voice), or overloading the levels during the mix.

I was suspicious of this at first; however, the distortion occurs not only in places where Whitney is belting out the notes, but also where she sings softer passages. I could see this being possible if the vocals were overmodulated going into a certain piece of equipment, such as a processor. Maybe the input gain was way set too high, which would still allow the levels to look "okay" on the output, during recording and mixdown. You would think that the engineer would've noticed the horrible sound, though, especially when playing the vocal back in "solo" mode.

I still think it's also possible that the multi-track tape was bad (near the outer edge, for instance, so that only one or a couple of tracks were affected).

It's distorted on the 4:33 45 version on the UK The Hits Album 7 CD from 1987.

If it's got the distortion there, it's safe to say that the distortion will show up on every copy of the song, everywhere.

fyi...This track on the vinyl LP of "Whitney" is also distorted.