7 Apr
2013
7 Apr
'13
8 p.m.
On Sun, 7 Apr 2013 11:30:52 -0600
Bearcat M. Şándor <hometheater(a)feline-soul.com> wrote:
I've got music ripped to my hard drive (hybrid
wavpack for the curious),
and i'm a little obsessive about my tagging. I've got a 'mastering' tag
wherein i put the name of the mastering engineer and whether or not the
track is an "original master recording".
I know a number of people who would shake your hand. With the trend towards
digital streaming distribution, there's a lot of metadata about an album that
is going missing. Engineering and other credits that used to find a way onto
an album or CD cover are not as likely to be passed on now.
Most recent CDs were mastered digitally, therefore is
the original
master equivalent (at least in quality) to the CD i own?
Yes. As long as the file's not gone through any transformations, but
simply copied, it's the same as if you were listening to the originally
rendered final mix from the studio.
I *swear* i remember buying CDs when they came out and
they used to tell
you how things were mastered. Didn't they used to indicate AAD, ADD, DDD
for (recording, editing, mastering)? Why did they stop doing this?
That's the SPARS code: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARS_code
I think that it died as it became increasingly irrelevant and fewer people
cared. It was never a measure of quality and as the digital audio tech
improved it lost much of the stigma it used to have.
It's sort of like the way that we used to hear about 8-bit, 12-bit, 16-bit
and 1-bit D->A converters on CD players. It used to matter because the
hardware worked hard to try and keep up with the reading, processing and
error handling of the data stream, so it mattered, and average ears could
tell the difference. As the hardware improved and the DSP became more
sophisticated, such things didn't matter any more.
Is there any way to tell/reasonably guess if a CD has
been digitally
mastered without those codes?
Unless noted otherwise, I always assume a full digital chain, though that
can easily be incorrect. I know that when the band A Troop of Echoes (from
Providence, RI) had their first album (all digitally recorded) mastered,
the engineer(*) chose to print it to a tape recorder and pull it back into
digital from tape to get a certain compression that he liked. That is
an analog step that was not noted in the liner notes. I don't know that
anyone can listen and tell that that conversion had been part of the process.
(*) Jeff Lipton @ Peerless Mastering
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Joe Hartley - UNIX/network Consultant - jh(a)brainiac.com
Without deviation from the norm, "progress" is not possible. - FZappa