[Audio_Empire[_2_]]

On Saturday, February 23, 2013 8:15:59 PM UTC-8, Dick Pierce wrote:
Audio_Empire wrote:
Due to a peculiar competition between record companies of late, which
has been named "the loudness wars" by the industry press, most modern
CD releases (and even re-releases) are so drastically compressed in
volume that they have less dynamic range than a cheap LP of the
1970's.

Well it depends upon what "most" means. In terms of sheer numbers,
"most" means primarily pop-oriented releases and, yes, "most" of
them and thus "most" CDs are compressed.

But I find that "most" classical CD releases do not suffer this
unfortunate fate.

No, they don't. Thank the fates. But even most classical CDs don't
sound as good as they could or should sound This is even true of most
SACDs and DVD-A's as well as audio Blu-Rays. One of the reasons I
believe that many audiophiles are so impressed with hi-res downloads
is due to the fact that many of these are straight A/D conversions of
either the master tapes (both analog and digital) or something very
close to a master tape with no compression or limiting. I suspect that
this aspect of what is as yet still very much a "cottage industry" is
much more responsible for the enthusiasm that many express about this
delivery medium than is the 24-bit/96 KHz or 192 KHz bit depth and
sampling rate.

I was able to finally grab (becasue, after waiting about 15 years,
I finally looked) the complete set Beethoven Symphonies conducted
by Ansermet with the L'Orchestre de la Suisse Romande on Decca.
VERY satisfactory set, and compared the 7th to my almost pristine
LP copy from the early 70s, and my opinion is that every last bit
of dynamic range on the LP is available on the CD, 'cept for the
lack of surface noise.

Well, it ought to be. I do a lot of recording. Even though I capture
in DSD, my deliverable product to my clients is via 16-bit/44.1 KHz
CD. They sound not just good, but spectacular. I get comments all the
time from people un-used to a CD sounding that good! Many fellow audio
enthusiasts for whom I've played these CDs have seemed astonished by
what they hear, and many assume that I'm playing an SACD or a DVD-A
(mortals can't burn the former, the software is stratospherically
expensive, but I do have software that allows me to burn DVD-As.
That's what I make for ME to listen to, but I take regular old Red
Book CDs to play for others at their locations)

This is true of the the vast mojority of my classical CDs.

Thankfully! I wish it were as true for most jazz. I have a lot of jazz
on JVC XRCD and it sounds spectacular (mostly Rudy Van Gelder stuff
from the late 1950's and early 1960's sourced from Riverside, Blue
Note and other small jazz labels. But the stuff from the major labels
such as Warner-Electra, MCA, Sony, etc. is lousy.

Perhaps classic music represents such a small part of the total
market that they're not worth spending any time or effort
"improving" them, save the same is true of more recent
recordings.

That's possible, but I think it's more likely that it is a totally
different division with wildly different marketing strategy from the
"pop" side of the house. This doesn't make classical music immune from
the excesses of multi-mike and multi-channel though. I still hear a
lot poorly recorded classical music with lousy sound caused by that
disgusting practice. Luckily the GREAT stuff from the golden age of
classical recording still sounds wonderful when remastered properly.
After all, the decent stereo mike technique is there and multi-track
hadn't made any inroads into classical recording yet when these
recordings were made.