CHANGSTAR: Audiophile Headphone Reviews and Early 90s Style BBS
Lobby => Music and Recordings => Topic started by: Maxvla on January 23, 2013, 09:36:05 AM
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You know you all have one.
For me, it's Grandpa's Violin from .hack//sign Liminality. An absolutely beautiful, simple, emotional song. It's played exceptionally well, but.. on almost any down bow, the violinist lets his/her bow get away from him/her near the tip and it bounces quite noticeably. Surprisingly obnoxious and something I would not expect to hear from someone with the skills shown in the rest of the playing. Poor bow choice, or poor control, or both. In my job I help people every day select bows and this is one of the main criteria, as in the very first thing that will be looked at to eliminate a potential bow from being purchased. Unfortunately, most of the covers on youtube are quite terrible, but one from a child actually manages to capture most of the spirit of the original without the bow hopping. So unfortunate that the original has such a glaring error. As someone who does this for a living it's almost enough to cause me to not listen to it.
Original:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sUVF3W38zI
There are so many of them, but the easiest one to hear I think is at the transition from 0:16 to 0:17. Another one easy to hear about the last half of 1:42 (that particular second).
Best cover I could find:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwWaQPUEbnk
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For me it's the last bars of A Day In The Life (Beatles) when they sustain the E chord on 5 pianos at the end. As it fades you can hear Ringo move his feet and the wood floor squeaks. I used to think it was cool, because I could hear it, now I find it annoying. p:8 Still a great song.
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Everytime I go and audition a piece of gear (not anymore because I lost interest in audio gear) and I say I'd like some Jazz, they would have "Kind of blue" and ALL of them would remind me that the intro is not of bad equipment.
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Isn't the Jazz at the Pr0nshop the definitive hi-philitic benchmark?
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Frank Sinatra and Antonio Carlos Jobim - The Girl From Ipanema:
There is a tape error/flutter on ALL the versions out there. It sounds like a bad skip. It pissed me off that NOBODY could or would fix the damn thing. Had to do it myself.
Louis Armstrong - La Vie En Rose:
Another extremely noticeable problem. It's also on EVERY SINGLE VERSION out there. Had to fix it myself as well.
Miles Davis - Miles Ahead - Entire album (BOTH MONO & STEREO):
The mono suffers from drop outs and a few bad edits. The stereo suffers from a heap of bad edits and tons of drop outs. Spent over a month fixing each one.
Bill Evans - Portrait In Jazz - Entire album (Stereo):
Certain songs suffer from multiple high pitch tones. EVERY SINGLE version has them. Also had to fix them.
The Beatles - I Am The Walrus (Stereo):
The stereo suffers from being partially mono. Half the song (the second half after the PA effect) is in fake stereo. Even though it was a BITCH to do, I have a full stereo version. ;D
Bob Dylan - Like A Rolling Stone (Stereo):
There is a drop out where Dylan's voice falls out of the left channel. On all of the versions I have heard...including the Hoffman. It's an easy fix too.
Miles Davis - Kind of Blue (Stereo):
It has some slight drop outs here and there, peppered all over the place. On ALL the versions. Not THAT noticeable but it drove me nuts on headphones and IEM's.
There are a ton more but these are the ones that come to mind the most to me...
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There are a couple of tracks on the vinyl version Jay Farrar/Benjamin Gibbard album, "One Fast Move or I'm Gone," that are littered with bad, bad sibilance--to the point where it almost sounds like the album is mis-tracking.
Would love to clean up the AIFF file that I created.
LFF, any suggestions for software and techniques? I've been hesitant to spend the $400 for a copy of Izotope Rx, but none of the less expensive software I have available (Audacity, VinylStudio, Pure Vinyl) are remotely up to the task.
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Great thread! Need to compile a list.
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There are a couple of tracks on the vinyl version Jay Farrar/Benjamin Gibbard album, "One Fast Move or I'm Gone," that are littered with bad, bad sibilance--to the point where it almost sounds like the album is mis-tracking.
Would love to clean up the AIFF file that I created.
LFF, any suggestions for software and techniques? I've been hesitant to spend the $400 for a copy of Izotope Rx, but none of the less expensive software I have available (Audacity, VinylStudio, Pure Vinyl) are remotely up to the task.
I would honestly have to listen to it.
One simple way to remove sibilance is to select the sibilance only and EQ it out. The bad thing is that it affects the entire sound. However, if the sibilance is brief, the effect is not noticeable. You can always try to gate it too.
Izotope RX and many, many others make themselves out to be better than they actually are. You can always try Cedar as well but you really need to know how much and where to apply to the fix, otherwise you get nasty artifacts.
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Tool - Vicarious
There is an obnoxious crackle at multiple places throughout the track that used to make me mad with trying to find the problem with my gear. The same problem rears its head in other tracks as well but on Vicarious it is most evident. The crackle is fairly high frequency so I can bear it on the HD650 but on the TF10 it's a no go.
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I can't think of any. I guess I don't think about music this way. Just a handful of recordings I wish were better overall.
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There's a Cat Power album, The Covers Record I think, that's got an "nagging" artifact.
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http://decibully.listeningpartyrecords.com/album/decibully-2
Can someone please take a listen? The music is great imho, but there's something that bugs the hell out of me. First time I heard it I immediately unplugged my headphones as I thought that my amp was malfunctioning. The drum track on most of these songs contains some peculiar distortion that I have heard once in my life- when I had mis-biased the output stage on my amp.
A malfunctioning preamp or a mixing deck?
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One simple way to remove sibilance is to select the sibilance only and EQ it out. The bad thing is that it affects the entire sound. However, if the sibilance is brief, the effect is not noticeable. You can always try to gate it too.
Izotope RX and many, many others make themselves out to be better than they actually are. You can always try Cedar as well but you really need to know how much and where to apply to the fix, otherwise you get nasty artifacts.
You can also do the "select the sibilance" thing semi-automated - combine a noise gate (or a similar way of finding hard attacks) with a bandpass to find where it is, then reject wideband passages (compare level in sibilance band with levels on the others), equalize only elsewhere.
I haven't found a fully automated effect doing that - when I did fix a thing or two like this, I used a Cool Edit macro. (it was called that before being bought by Adobe and renamed Audition) Probably could be done via scripting in Audacity too.
Sounds somewhat similar to a pop filter on everything - most instruments aren't affected.
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The distortion in this Decibully album is harmonic distortion in large amounts in all orders. Sounds like someone is overdriving microphones. Recording made with cheap mikes placed way too close to the instruments, vocalist also chews his one.
Alternatively, a very overdriven tube console.
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You know you all have one.
For me, it's Grandpa's Violin from .hack//sign Liminality. An absolutely beautiful, simple, emotional song. It's played exceptionally well, but.. on almost any down bow, the violinist lets his/her bow get away from him/her near the tip and it bounces quite noticeably. Surprisingly obnoxious and something I would not expect to hear from someone with the skills shown in the rest of the playing. Poor bow choice, or poor control, or both. In my job I help people every day select bows and this is one of the main criteria, as in the very first thing that will be looked at to eliminate a potential bow from being purchased. Unfortunately, most of the covers on youtube are quite terrible, but one from a child actually manages to capture most of the spirit of the original without the bow hopping. So unfortunate that the original has such a glaring error. As someone who does this for a living it's almost enough to cause me to not listen to it.
Original:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sUVF3W38zI
There are so many of them, but the easiest one to hear I think is at the transition from 0:16 to 0:17. Another one easy to hear about the last half of 1:42 (that particular second).
Best cover I could find:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwWaQPUEbnk
Maybe it was an intentional effect? The song IS called "grandpa's violin", maybe the violinist was trying to capture the frailness of an old man playing the tune. Doesn't bug me at all, in fact I kinda dig it.
Anyway my biggest "great recording with nagging error" is the static near the end of "Stairway to Heaven".
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It isn't intentional, once you learn how to bow properly it's actually near impossible to do on purpose. She's a professional violinist so I would hope she would have a properly mated bow by now. Usually that gets sorted when you buy your first bow that isn't for a beginner.