Mastering Vinyl, Myths, questions, discussion Options

[Axon]

This is a split of a discussion Hancoque and I had, which desperately needs to be elaborated on.

First of all, I've dumped my thoughts on the matter into the Wiki: http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?ti...Vinyl_Mastering. Please comment on it.

A couple of the points there are explicitly worth starting this topic off:

• There is no consistent, unambiguous way to identify the provenance of a vinyl master. Most methods - but most of all, the zoomed-out waveform plot - are inaccurate in one way or another. Visual examination of clipped samples is fairly telling, but not applicable or effective in all cases. How can a vinyl master be accurately observed as being the same or different as a CD master?
• Even if a difference exists, whether or not it is audible is another question entirely. IIRC, brickwall limiting of 3-4db, correctly applied, may not be audible. If so, Hancoque's Slayer waveforms might not mean anything, because his peaks are all within 4db of the CD peaks. What audibility thresholds exist for clipped signals?

That said, I may be eating a hearty dinner of crow tonight, as I just examined one of the records I thought was of the same master as the CD (Battles - Mirrored), and I was able to observe pretty strong differences in clipping between the vinyl and CD versions. I'll reply later with some visual examples.

[analog scott]

This is a split of a discussion Hancoque and I had, which desperately needs to be elaborated on.

First of all, I've dumped my thoughts on the matter into the Wiki: http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?ti...Vinyl_Mastering. Please comment on it.

A couple of the points there are explicitly worth starting this topic off:[list]
[*]There is no consistent, unambiguous way to identify the provenance of a vinyl master. Most methods - but most of all, the zoomed-out waveform plot - are inaccurate in one way or another. Visual examination of clipped samples is fairly telling, but not applicable or effective in all cases. How can a vinyl master be accurately observed as being the same or different as a CD master?

One has to get the info from the source, the mastering engineers. You will be pretty hard pressed to find examples of CDs and LPs that are actually mastered from the same exact feed. That would be in effect be the same "mastering." The one prime deliberate example still being the James Boyk Pictures at an Exhibition" LP/CD comparison package. Steve Hoffman tells us he performs certain tweaks to each version when mastering the same title both for LP and CD and/or SACD in an attempt to get them to sound as much alike and like what he wants them to sound as possible. So he masters the two differently in an attempt to make them as similar as possible and to his ears as good as possible. There are a lot of mastering engineers that will offer up a great deal of info on how they mastered various titles. But you won't get anywhere through forensics IMO. That won't tell you what a tape they used, what deck they used to play the tape, what they did to get the propper alignment, etc. etc. There is a fair amount of general info on the mastering that went on in various facilities and on various labels throughout their histories when it comes to vinyl. That can be marginally useful.

But after all that one still has to consider the often stark differences in the sonic signatures of various vinyl playback systems. This renders results far from universal. Any results you get have to be with an asterix stating that this is with whatever specific vinyl playback equipment was used.