Kodak Warning + Later Clarification

[BrianShaw]

I hope someone clears up whether CDs were/are a con or not…

 

[gbroadbridge]

The problem is that cell phones no longer take pictures in the traditional sense. They increasingly use machine assisted processing - aka "AI" - to make the picture you wanted vs. what you actually took.

Only if you let them.

Disable those options and they are a perfectly good camera for most folks.
Just like the 110/135 P&S of the 80/90's, but with vastly improved resolution, colour fidelity and usability.

 

[chuckroast]

I hope someone clears up whether CDs were/are a con or not…

The driver for CDs was Classical Music (and those of us who were/are fanatics about it). The story goes that the head of Sony at the time dictated that the capacity of the disk should be such that a full Beethoven symphony could be played without changing disks. CD were first embraced in a big way by this community.

The problem is that a lot of early CDs were mastered with analog source material which then exposed every flaw in the older recording process. This is analogous to sticking a pre-war Elmar on a modern Leica M11.

Moreover, vinyl was mastered with a correction mechanism called the "RIAA" curve. It purposely emphasized high frequencies in the mastering recording (preemphasis) which your phono playback system then reversed (deemphasis). This was done to reduce noise in the reproduction chain. HOWEVER, if you recorded a preemphasized master onto a CD - wherein the reproduction chain had no deemphasis - you got very bright, hard sounding playback. If memory serves, the first CD release of Cream's "Disraeli Gears" suffered from this.

The combination of old masters and dumb recording processes initially gave CDs a bad rap. This got corrected when (over time) the entire recording chain after the microphone was entirely digital. Those CDs are marked "DDD" and many phenomenal CDs of classical music bear that stamp.

Pop music mostly matters a lot less unless it is acoustic. Electronic instruments mostly lack the soundscape, dynamic range, and frequency response to really push CDs.

Source: Worked in a recording studio right before CDs went mainstream, lifelong Classical Music nerd.

 

[BrianShaw]

Thanks, Mr Roast!

 

[Kodachromeguy]

The driver for CDs was Classical Music (and those of us who were/are fanatics about it). The story goes that the head of Sony at the time dictated that the capacity of the disk should be such that a full Beethoven symphony could be played without changing disks. CD were first embraced in a big way by this community.

The problem is that a lot of early CDs were mastered with analog source material which then exposed every flaw in the older recording process. This is analogous to sticking a pre-war Elmar on a modern Leica M11.

Moreover, vinyl was mastered with a correction mechanism called the "RIAA" curve. It purposely emphasized high frequencies in the mastering recording (preemphasis) which your phono playback system then reversed (deemphasis). This was done to reduce noise in the reproduction chain. HOWEVER, if you recorded a preemphasized master onto a CD - wherein the reproduction chain had no deemphasis - you got very bright, hard sounding playback. If memory serves, the first CD release of Cream's "Disraeli Gears" suffered from this.

The combination of old masters and dumb recording processes initially gave CDs a bad rap. This got corrected when (over time) the entire recording chain after the microphone was entirely digital. Those CDs are marked "DDD" and many phenomenal CDs of classical music bear that stamp.

Pop music mostly matters a lot less unless it is acoustic. Electronic instruments mostly lack the soundscape, dynamic range, and frequency response to really push CDs.

Source: Worked in a recording studio right before CDs went mainstream, lifelong Classical Music nerd.

Very informative summary. I've bought some CDs that were too harsh. They sounded awful. Looking at the date, I could see that they were early vintage CDs based on older recordings, probably 1 inch magnetic tape.

But some of those performances on LP played via a Linn Sondek turntable sound great.

 

[chuckroast]

Very informative summary. I've bought some CDs that were too harsh. They sounded awful. Looking at the date, I could see that they were early vintage CDs based on older recordings, probably 1 inch magnetic tape.

But some of those performances on LP played via a Linn Sondek turntable sound great.

It's less about the tape width, than it is about the recording methods/technology used. Wider tape was mostly used when they wanted to record multiple tracks. So 1/4" tape was for 2 or 4 tracks, 1/2" for 4 or 8 tracks, 1" for 8 or 16 tracks and so forth. The nicest analog tape deck I ever worked on was a 24 track 3" transport that was a sight to behold when it flung the tape around.

The important thing was how the original was recorded, mixed, and mastered.

For example, a CD marked AAD means it was recorded and mixed analog and mastered digitally. (A CD is always marked as being digitally mastered.)

A CD marked ADD, was recorded analog, but mixed and mastered digitally.

It is entirely possible to have a superb analog recording but it has to be done with tremendous care for every small detail because it's nearly impossible to fix properly later. Think about the difference of an image shot on a Leica M2 vs an M10, for a good analogy.

Probably the best I've ever heard was the Sheffield Labs direct-to-disk of Harry James' big band on "The King James Version". They recorded in a church and went directly from the mixing console to the laquer master used to make the resulting vinyl records - no tape recording in the middle of the process.

What CDs really did was show - with punishing detail - every mistake or poor decision made in the recording and mastering process. Bad mic placement? You hear every rustle of someone's pant leg being crossed. Too close to an entrance? You hear street noise. Badly adjusted analog tape recorders? You can hear the hiss.

But the old recording engineers at Telefunken and Deutche Grammaphon knew their business. When transferred to CD, the resulting AAD recordings were still amazingly good. I have a bunch of them done by the Bach Choir & Orchestra of Munich conducted by Karl Richter that remain favorites in my rotation. They recordings are AAD and thus not pristine but the performances were captured perfectly. Even an 1945 Elmar on a IIIf body can take amazing pictures in the hands of a master.

And that's another thing. The old engineers understood that the room was part of the performance and placed a few microphones to hear all of the performance as you would if you were there - the performers AND the room sound are captured. But contemporary recording engineers used to working with digital and a lot of pop music, shove dozens of microphones in the room and mic everything individually with the theory that they'll reconstruct the sound later when they "fix it in the mix" and manually mix everything together into two coherent stereo tracks for the final sound. It pretty much never works well.

One last thing that contributed to all this is that CDs were SO good at reproducing very fast changing sounds (think of the uptick of a cymbal crash, for example), it exceeded the ability of even the best amplifiers of the day from keeping up with the so-called "slew rate". The amp manufacturers had long before solved the problem of Total Harmonic Distortion (THD) and Intermodulation Distortion (IM). But now they had to go back to the drawing board to solve two new nasties that the fast dynamic response of CD threw at them, Slew Induced Distrortion (SID) and Transient Intermodulation Distortion (TIM). The analogy here would be a 100 Mpix digital camera that renders pictures flawlessly, but cannot keep up with fast moving video so the result is blurred and distorted.

But, as I said in my post above, most contemporary music doesn't have to worry about it. It has neither the dynamics nor the frequency response demands that remotely push digital music recording very hard. Most everything ever made outside of Classical Music from Elvis forward could pretty much be recorded entirely analog with little disadvantage. The one exception would be anything acoustic. But I'm a Classical snob so ...

P.S. The mathematical principles for signal-to-noise in a radio transmission, music recording, or digital imaging are more or less the same. They're just applied in slightly different ways.

 

[gbroadbridge]

But contemporary recording engineers used to working with digital and a lot of pop music, shove dozens of microphones in the room and mic everything individually with the theory that they'll reconstruct the sound later when they "fix it in the mix" and manually mix everything together into two coherent stereo tracks for the final sound. It pretty much never works well.

That pretty much describes many photographers shooting RAW with digital photography.
Fix it in post.

Sorry, couldn't help it.

 

[chuckroast]

But some of those performances on LP played via a Linn Sondek turntable sound great.

Beyond all the other stuff I prattled on about in the prior posts, there is something else also going on here. The analog systems that were finally delivered via LP had limitations, that's true. But those limitations limit your ability to hear the flaws in the recording - they place limits in both the material itself and the imperfections in the recording.

When the analog aficionados talk about analog having a "warmer" sound than digital, what they're really saying is that the recording/reproduction chain is preventing the nasties from being heard whereas digital will reproduce them with painful accuracy.

The RIAA thing I mentioned was just silly. The people mastering CDs from older masters originally made for LPs should have been quick to realize they needed to get rid of the RIAA preempahsis when going to CD. Mostly, they did, but a few did not, hence the bad rap...

 

[chuckroast]

That pretty much describes many photographers shooting RAW with digital photography.
Fix it in post.

Sorry, couldn't help it.

Yeah, that doesn't work all the well either and for much the same reasons

 

[MattKing]

Moderator hat on:
And now we return to our regularly scheduled thread topic.
Which you may recall relates to the recent financial report language issued by Eastman Kodak.
I personally wouldn't be adverse to a separate thread in the Lounge that deals with sound recording and reproduction, but as that would be unrelated to photography, I could be outvoted by the rest of the moderation team.
Perhaps people could talk - in that Lounge thread - about one of my favorite recordings - "The Trinity Sessions" by the Cowboy Junkies.
The Wikipedia article on that has lots of detail.

 

[mshchem]

Moderator hat on:
And now we return to our regularly scheduled thread topic.
Which you may recall relates to the recent financial report language issued by Eastman Kodak.
I personally wouldn't be adverse to a separate thread in the Lounge that deals with sound recording and reproduction, but as that would be unrelated to photography, I could be outvoted by the rest of the moderation team.
Perhaps people could talk - in that Lounge thread - about one of my favorite recordings - "The Trinity Sessions" by the Cowboy Junkies.
The Wikipedia article on that has lots of detail.

Thanks Matt!

 

[chuckroast]

Moderator hat on:
And now we return to our regularly scheduled thread topic.
Which you may recall relates to the recent financial report language issued by Eastman Kodak.
I personally wouldn't be adverse to a separate thread in the Lounge that deals with sound recording and reproduction, but as that would be unrelated to photography, I could be outvoted by the rest of the moderation team.
Perhaps people could talk - in that Lounge thread - about one of my favorite recordings - "The Trinity Sessions" by the Cowboy Junkies.
The Wikipedia article on that has lots of detail.

Well, I DID try to use photographic analogies, but the point is taken

 

[dcy]

That pretty much describes many photographers shooting RAW with digital photography.
Fix it in post.

I've noticed that. Incidentally, that attitude contributed to me moving away from digital and toward film. One of the things I want to get from photography is to get out of the house, or at least away from the computer and do things with my hands. But so much of digital photography seems to be about taking gazillion shots, and then painstakingly combing through them on a computer, selecting the best ones, and then spending hours tweaking them. The whole process felt like the opposite of what I was trying to accomplish.

My epiphany came when I bought a photo printer. Holding an actual physical photo in my hands bought back memories of the analog era. Then I began to discover that apparently film photography still existed, Polaroid had been reborn, etc etc.