[78-L] True in Sound, was Cassettes

[Steve Williams]

I'm sorry, I think painting all 78s as not being high fidelity is totally
incorrect.  One has to define what the term actually means..  Listening to a
pristine laminated late Okeh Electric, such as of Louis' Ballroom orchestra
with "Tight like This," is an experience that can't be recreated.  The
single mic picks up the ambience of the recording studio perfectly, and with
a decent playback system it seems like the band is right in the room.. It is
a simply lovely sound - and an accurate representation of what the band
probably actually sounded like live.  Many Okehs have that "you are there"
quality.  Also, while different, mid-30 HMVs have a gorgeous rich sound to
bands such as Hylton's.   And there's the stepping Tones label, whose late
30s recordings have transients and range equal to any modern stuff.  Even
today tube electronics is preferred over all-solid state for cutting.
 
A little thing about noise, the middle ear REQUIRES just a bit of noise to
act as dithering to keep the bones mobile during soft passages, otherwise
the sound seems to come out of a sound-deadening limbo. Literally it's the
biological version of "crossover distortion." In fact, any cleanup or even
just playback from CD of the above-mentioned Okeh sides loses that ambient
immediacy..I've never heard any CD of "Tight.." that was as good as the 78
disc on a V15MkIII elliptical.  I'm not dissing digital, 192/32 and 92/24
through a good Da retains the source qualities near-perfectly, CD just
doesn't have high enough sampling, plus it's what is done in post-production
that is the problem.  Yes the Umbrella label and others put out good DD
LPs...

And cassettes are no comparison with direct-to-disc 78s.

..  Steve Williams  ..

Message: 3
Date: Fri, 21 Oct 2011 13:48:09 -0700 (PDT)
From: DAVID BURNHAM <burnhamd at rogers.com>
Subject: [78-L] True in Sound, was Cassettes
To: "78-L at 78online.com" <78-L at 78online.com>
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	<1319230089.46802.YahooMailNeo at web88616.mail.bf1.yahoo.com>
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Kristjan Saag wrote:

>So why do we play those noisy, hissing, cracking, warping 78's? Bit of?
>nostalgia involved, too - no?
>Besides: being an audiophile (lover of sound) does not necceseraly mean?
>you define audio
> fidelity (true sound) as a measurable entity. That's?
>why it was perfectly reasonable that many audiophiles, in the early?
>digital era, claimed that LP:s sounded better than CD:s, despite the?
>surface noise, which usually is absent in the concert hall or recording?
>studio. Some audiophiles still do.
>>Kristjan

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

>I was surprised nobody had mentioned this before in this discussion, that
we 78rpm collectors also collect a medium which, by today's standards, is
lower fidelity and >noisy. ?A good audio cassette recorded on a properly
alligned machine can have superb sound quality and background hiss which is
less obtrusive than reel-to-reel tapes. ?>But that being said, I have no
desire to record on or listen to audio cassettes again. ?One reason we
collect 78s is because they were state of the art in their day, >whereas the
cassette was not introduced as an improvement in audio reproduction but as a
convenient sound carrier. ?

>Audio fidelity doesn't exactly mean "true sound", it means "faithful
sound", (which, I guess is roughly the same thing). ?If you want an
expression meaning "true sound", >you need "Orthophonic" or, a little less
accurately, "Viva~Tonal".