freed@foxvax1.UUCP (D. Freedman ) (02/09/84)
(Reprinted without permission from the Boston Phoenix, Dec. 13,1983.)
Disc debates
High-end arguments against
the Compact Disc
by E. Brad Meyer
The invention of the digital compact disc (CD) marked the begin-
ning of a new era in recorded music. It is smaller and more convenient
than the 12-inch black vinyl LP; it holds more than an hour of music on
its one side; the discs don't wear out; and - most important of all -
the sound is supposed to be indistinguishable from that of the original
master tape.
If you accept the last assertion for the moment (we'll come back
to it later), you might think that the fancier your sound system, the
more you'd appreciate the new medium. Many audiophiles, however, have
strong objections to CD. In The Absolute Sound (TAS) - the biggest and
most successful audiophile magazine - there is universal condemnation
of all things digital, and of CD in particular. Doug Sax, president of
Sheffield Lab and manufacturer of some of the best analog LP's ever
made, has sent an open letter to editors and manufacturers declaring
that the CD "does not match the abilities [sic] of a master tape." Sax
further claims that when an analog master tape (which he considers
superior to a digital master) is the source, then "the LP can blow the
CD out of the water." And Ivor Tiefenbrun, the president of Linn Pro-
duct, the well-known English hi-fi company, insists that the digital
process so degrades the sound that you can no longer tap your foot to
the beat or hum along with the tune.
Many audiophiles seem to agree with these grim pronouncements.
The CD, they say, sounds harsh, grainy, and irritating, and the silence
that surrounds the music robs it of the sense of ambiance or acoustical
space that is the hallmark of the best analog recordings. The sounds
that fill the vacuum, they say, are dull, lifeless and unmusical.
Now, if things are as bad as that, why have so many positive
things been written about the compact disc over the past few months?
TAS's Edward Mendelson claims that writers for the popular hi-fi press
have been co-opted by the big hi-fi companies and their advertising
dollars into "aiding and abetting the manufacturers' deliberate and
systematic sabotage of recorded music."
Those are strong words. They provoke several questions: are these
guys really hearing something they don't like on CDs? If so, why don't
the rest of us hear it too? And why are the compact disc's detractors
so vehement in their denunciations?
We'll deal first with the question of how the CD actually sounds,
and whether it really is the perfect reproduction medium we've all been
waiting for. Then I'll explain why the medium might be anathema to
some audiophiles, even if it is without audible inaccuracy.
The current debate is really a recurrence of a question that is as
old as high fidelity itself, one concerning the fundamental nature of
the recording/playback process: what should the recording sound like
when it is reproduced? A corollary of that question is this one: if
the recording is somehow less than perfect, should we modify the play-
back process to correct it, or should we try to reproduce it
"literally," whatever that means?
The sad fact is, there is no such thing as an ideal recording;
rather, it's a question of how well a recording matches a given play-
back system. There are, of course, many ways to make a recording that
sounds bad on all systems. A microphone preamp with inadequate head-
room, a badly overloaded tape channel, a clumsy edit, a noisy pressing,
or an off-center spindle hole will always result in bad sound. It is
when a record or cassette - or compact disc - has none of these obvious
flaws that things get complicated.
At TAS's 10th anniversary party last spring, I heard one of the
magazine's writers talk about some acoustical treatment he had applied
to the walls of his living room to eliminate reflections. "After all,"
he said, "you want to hear just what's on the record, without anything
added by the room." This goal - to hear everything that's on the
record, and nothing else - has a familiar ring to anyone who thinks
seriously about audio. But what's actually on the record is not music;
it's a bunch of little wiggles. You can't hear them; nor would you
want to hear the air vibrate in a manner corresponding to their pat-
tern. By the time the information in those wiggles reaches your ears,
it has undergone several radical transformations, at least two of which
are so complex that they are impossible to describe completely, involv-
ing as they do a change from one form of energy to a completely dif-
ferent one. The purpose of the playback system is actually to undo
another series of transformations, the ones through which a sonic event
has been changed into a bunch of little wiggles in the magnetic domains
on a piece of rusty plastic. What we want to hear, suitably
transformed, is what's on the original master tape.
Think about the master tape for a moment. The recording engineer
and producer have made many decisions that affect its contents. These
decisions are made on the basis of an experience, not of listening to
the original acoustical event - the engineer is mostly too busy with
other matters to listen to the live music - but of a recreation of that
event in a control room equipped with monitor speakers.
Now we're getting close to some kind of reference. Suppose we
remove the human factor in the equation and assume that your taste in
recording techniques coincides exactly with the producer's. Then your
goal will be to hear exactly what the producer hears in the control
room. That means that your playback system and listening room should
be just like the one at the studio.
Or does it? In most recording situations, the engineer and pro-
ducer work in cramped quarters that don't sound like any living room
would. And the speakers, most likely chosen primarily for their abil-
ity to play very loudly without blowing out, probably won't sound much
like what you have, either. Some producers, like Jack Renner of Telarc
Records, carry their own monitoring systems around with them, for the
sake of consistency. Most, however, just work with what they have at
the moment and try to compensate for the sound of the monitors in mak-
ing the recording.
If you ask the producers how they make recordings, they generally
reply that they simply try to make things sound good in the control
room. But what most of them are really doing is tailoring the record-
ing to the average system on which they think it will be played. One
thing this is likely to mean is the recording will be brightened - that
is, the upper midrange and lower treble, between about two and 10 kHz,
will be accentuated - to compensate for losses later in the
record/playback process of an average low-fi system.
But most elaborate speaker systems will overly emphasize this
added brightness. Audiophiles spend a lot of time and money buying
equipment that minimizes the harshness of commercial recordings.
(That's why certain expensive moving-coil cartridges are so popular:
they have a broad upper-midrange sag in their response curves, which
reduces hardness, and a rise above 10 kHz, which adds air and detail.)
So, after an audiophile has worked on getting just the right result
from his records, along comes the CD, which, because its response is
flat, sounds hard and aggressive, just - as advertised - like the mas-
ter tape.
The question of whether a given compact disc sounds good is
answerable, then, only if the playback system is specified. The system
I use to evaluate CDs for review tends to reveal a lot of harshness,
and I have frequently complained in print about bad sound. It's not
hard to find releases that sound better in their LP versions, espe-
cially when played back with a good moving-coil cartridge, then they do
in CD form.
The Dire Straits album Love Over Gold is an especially good exam-
ple. TAS gave it a rave review, praising its very clean and natural-
sounding midrange. The CD release is quieter that the LP, of course,
and has simply phenomenal dynamic range, which is limited only by the
very soft hiss of the 30-ips analog master tape. The vocals on the LP
are artificial in the manner of most pop productions, but they are not
unpleasant. The CD, on the other hand, is just brighter and harsher
enough to be slightly repellent; you simply don't want to turn it up
very far. I believe it is this repellent quality to which the gentle-
man from Linn refers to when he says you "can't hum along with the
tune."
With some very careful tweaking of a parametric equalizer, the
hardness of the Dire Straits CD can be tamed, rendering it thoroughly
listenable. Of course, considering the cost of the player and the
discs, such measures shouldn't be necessary. But these are the very
kinds of measures audiophiles have, in effect, been taking for years
when they play with cartridges, arms, turntables, mats, connecting
cables, and electronics, in their attempts to make records sound right.
For those interested in pursuing the subject of digital versus
analog, I refer you to an article in the December, 1983, issue of Audio
magazine by electronic engineer and audiophile Richard Burwen. Burwen
has spent years designing and perfecting his own excellent analog
recording system, and he explains in detail the slight modifications in
his recording technique that make a Sony digital recorder - which he
acknowledges is more accurate - sound like his analog machines.
What all this boils down to is that the very accuracy of the com-
pact disc - its ability to reproduce exactly what is fed to it - is,
for some people, more curse than blessing. Many people just don't want
to hear the master tape. But is the CD really that accurate? If we
weren't at the recording session, how can we know what the master tape
sounded like in the first place? The only way to find out is to com-
pare the CD to the master tape from which it was made.
The New York chapter of the Audio Engineering Society performed
such a comparison recently at one of their monthly meetings, using a
master tape, the regular LP, and the compact disc. The tests were con-
ducted double-blind, meaning that neither the testers nor the subjects
knew what the source material was until after the test was over. The
audience could easily distinguish the master tape from the LP, but no
one could tell the master from the CD - even before the meeting, when
the room was empty and very quiet.
Such a result is at best inconclusive; after all, maybe on a
better playback system some golden-eared audiophile could hear the
difference. But if an audience of trained listeners - many of whom
were biased against the CD - fails to hear any degradation, it indi-
cates pretty clearly that there are no major changes being wrought on
the sound by the digital process. There may be slight differences
between CD players in their ability to correct for bit errors or to
apply the de-emphasis curve required for some discs, but any com-
petently made player should sound almost exactly like any other.
And there, in the end, may be the biggest problem of all. If the
CD player is working properly, there's not much for the dedicated hob-
bist to do. No need to worry ever again about arm height adjustment,
cartridge alignment, stylus wear, record mats or clamps, or whether the
latest $1500 cartridge will give you more inner detail than your paltry
$1000 model. You don't even need to clean your records or treat them
with anti-static compound. All you do is put the little shiny disc in
the little tray and push the button. If you like the recording, fine;
if you don't, that's tough. It's not enough to keep the audiophile on
his toes, really, is it?