The 2012 Vinyl Re-Issues Were From 44.1khz Source

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Lord Reith
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Re: The 2012 Vinyl Re-Issues Were From 44.1khz Source

Post by Lord Reith »

The problem with Spotify and iTunes and all those guys isn't that their encoding is lossy, is that it's poorly done. Even at 320kb/s premium quality, they still sound mediocre.

I imagine this is because for speed they use the absolute fastest, lowest quality encoder settings possible. Think of youtube, where you upload a video and they recode the whole thing in like 2 minutes where normally it would take 2 hours to do yourself with decent settings.
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Re: The 2012 Vinyl Re-Issues Were From 44.1khz Source

Post by tdgrnwld »

Forgive me if this has already been said - I didn't read all of this interesting thread.
>And that is the only difference between the two: 24 bit has less noise, which means for music with tremendous dynamic range (like a grand piano or orchestra) the faintest parts will never ever approach the noise floor of the format. That is why it is used by sound engineers too, so that no matter how many times the signal is processed it won't accumulate any noticeable digital noise.

While this is true, I believe it misses an important point. In addition to a lower noise floor, a higher bit depth enables quiet passages to be encoded at higher resolution. At 16 bits, quiet passages may be encoded in only a few bits, which means fewer increments of volume (amplitude) from zero to the loudest that passage gets. Whereas at, say, 32 bits, the same passage would be encoded in twice as many bits, encoding changes in volume in more increments, so the resulting waveform is truer to the analog signal (though still lower-res than louder passages). There are techniques to "exercise" more bits at lower volume levels, such as dithering, but I believe what I say above is basically accurate.
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Re: The 2012 Vinyl Re-Issues Were From 44.1khz Source

Post by Lord Reith »

That's right but the noise floor of vinyl is much higher than the point at where that happens. An lp never gets anywhere near down to -96db where 16 bit runs out of bits.
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Re: The 2012 Vinyl Re-Issues Were From 44.1khz Source

Post by therowdyman »

This was a mini controversy at the time. I can't remember if it was Sean Magee that said it, but at the time, someone from the Abbey Road team said the reason they choose the 24bit/44.1kHz digital masters for vinyl over going back to the analogue tapes was they decided to use the masters that already had the "fixes" and edits done to them in 2009.

https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques ... ng-beatles

https://web.archive.org/web/20120326122 ... index.html

The stereo masters were transferred at 24bit/192kHz, but the final masters were bounced to 44.1Hkz for CD.

Here's a gear rundown:

* Master tapes played back on 1972 Studer A-80
* Full track head for mono mixes; 2 track for stereo
* Transfers captured digitally using a Prism Sound ADA-8XR
* Bit Depth/Sampling rate of transfer: 24/192
* Digital capturing and editing software: Pro Tools HD
* Noise Reduction using Cedar Cambridge, Cedar Retouch
* Cleaned up 24/192 digital copies of the masters used for playback into analog EQ and limiting.
* EQ applied in analog using vintage EMI TG Console and Maselec MEA-2
* Limited with Jünger D02

So, the clean-up stage was all done within DAW and after the final edit, the mastering was done out-of-the-box on analogue gear. What I can find is whether masters were being recording in 44.1kHz or 192kHz session when the signal was going back to Pro Tools.

If it was in 44.1kHz - well - there's your answer as to why the vinyl and USB drive were all in 44.1kHz. The mastered audio was recorded on Pro Tools at 44.1kHz and that's as good as it gets. If that's true, then it would make sense that they didn't want to do a whole new remaster for 192kHz, because that would mean doing the whole mastering process again. In 2012, while vinyl was somewhat making small headlines of still having a following - it was not considered as popular as it is today. Also, Hi-Res audio was very niche at the time. I can remember the arguments for tech geeks about "wasted hard drive space".

Was that a consideration in 2009? USB sticks then were commonly 4GB to 8GB, 16GB at that time. Here's an article from 2009 on USB drives.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2009/05 ... e-roundup/

The Beatles USB is 16GB.

Using this audio file calculator - if The Beatles catalogue is around 10 hours of music, then uncompressed that's 41.472GB of data. Compressed at FLAC (1772 kbps), that's 7.974 GB. Even adding the 320kps mp3 files and that's only an additional 1.44GB.
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Re: The 2012 Vinyl Re-Issues Were From 44.1khz Source

Post by Lord Reith »

They should just do new analogue releases of the lps. My blue box rips from circa 1984 leave the 2009 versions in the dust.
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Re: The 2012 Vinyl Re-Issues Were From 44.1khz Source

Post by robbmacc »

Are they your personal tips, or rips done at the time?
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Re: The 2012 Vinyl Re-Issues Were From 44.1khz Source

Post by RalseiDeltarune »

Lord Reith wrote: Mon Sep 04, 2023 11:26 pm They should just do new analogue releases of the lps. My blue box rips from circa 1984 leave the 2009 versions in the dust.
I agree. The 2009 masters are becoming not only obsolete, but are becoming expensive and hard to find; just the other day, in fact, I found a 2009 remasters box going for over $100. (And that's if they're pricing it liberally.) I've heard good things about the Revolver 2022 Mono Vinyl, and my 2019 Singles Box sounds great! I know that they're still able to do this. Not only that, but the vinyl market has been really booming lately; so there is definitely a market for vinyl today.

I would love it if they made another Beatles vinyl box today, or maybe just another well-mastered/transferred CD collection. The mono mixes I think especially deserve a new re-issue of some sort, since they're all very highly regarded. Maybe Apple should take the mono transfers used for the Pepper and Revolver boxes and issue those separately.

Reminder: We are currently heading towards the 10th anniversary of The Beatles in Mono 2014 Box Set, so now would be a better time than ever!
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Re: The 2012 Vinyl Re-Issues Were From 44.1khz Source

Post by RalseiDeltarune »

Another thing that I think they should improve on is including the original 1965 mixes of Help! and Rubber Soul. The 1986 mixes are all well and good, maybe even better sounding than the original mixes, but I would still prefer it if the original Stereo mixes were included.. Mainly for archival reasons.

Sorry if I went on a bit of a tangent, M'Lord.
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Re: The 2012 Vinyl Re-Issues Were From 44.1khz Source

Post by Diego82 »

Lord Reith wrote: Thu Apr 15, 2021 2:48 am
ianbuckers wrote: Wed Apr 14, 2021 1:35 pm Lord over on BZ you shared a method for removing the limiting on the 2009 remasters in Audacity. Could you please repeat the method as I didn't note it down...thanks. If I remember correctly you potentially could get the best sounding versions using your method on the 24 bit files on the 'stick', yes?
Yes, if you have audacity set up in 32 bit mode (in quality settings) you can perform a function which makes the tracks look exactly like the tracks on the 2012 vinyls (which we know for a fact didn't have limiting).

Now, csnyfan poured water on this and said that it didn't get rid of the limiting, but it certainly does something positive and as far I'm concerned if it looks, walks and quacks like a duck, then it is a duck.

- import the track into audacity
- highlight it and from EFFECTS select "high pass filter" and set it to 20hz and a 48db/8ve cutoff
- apply the filter
- with the track still highlighted, select "amplify" from EFFECTS and you will usually see a positive number in the top field and a negative number in the bottom field. Click ok.
- export the track as a 16 or 24 bit file.

If you do this to an ordinary file, it doesn't really do anything. But when you do it to the remasters, it changes the eq for some reason I can't entirely fathom, and it also releases the flattened peaks and raises the DR value to the same value as any of the old analogue versions. Surely not a coincidence?

Hello Lord Reith and Beatle Friends

I did this method and the gain was incredible, I've heard the Please Please Me and With The Beatles LPs and I believe that the sound improvement is above 90%, can't wait to hear from A Hard Day's Night onwards.

I have one doubt. Does this method also works with the the CDs from the Mono Box Set from 2009?

Thank you for the answer and have a good day everyone
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Re: The 2012 Vinyl Re-Issues Were From 44.1khz Source

Post by Lord Reith »

Diego82 wrote: Wed Sep 06, 2023 1:32 pm I did this method and the gain was incredible, I've heard the Please Please Me and With The Beatles LPs and I believe that the sound improvement is above 90%, can't wait to hear from A Hard Day's Night onwards.

I have one doubt. Does this method also works with the the CDs from the Mono Box Set from 2009?

Thank you for the answer and have a good day everyone
I'm not sure it makes any actual difference to the sound but it does make the audio respond better to any subsequent restoration. For example, if you try to use a declipping filter on the straight 2009 mixes, it doesn't really work at all. I don't know why. EQ matching software also doesn't work (it gives false readings). But if you apply that above process first, every subsequent process works better. Maybe it's because the DR reading increases, even though logically it can't but the subsequent processes behave as if it has.
Last edited by Lord Reith on Thu Sep 07, 2023 1:11 am, edited 2 times in total.
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