On Sun, 7 Apr 2013 11:30:52 -0600 Bearcat M. Şándor <hometheater@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > I've got music ripped to my hard drive (hybrid wavpack for the curious), > and i'm a little obsessive about my tagging. I've got a 'mastering' tag > wherein i put the name of the mastering engineer and whether or not the > track is an "original master recording". I know a number of people who would shake your hand. With the trend towards digital streaming distribution, there's a lot of metadata about an album that is going missing. Engineering and other credits that used to find a way onto an album or CD cover are not as likely to be passed on now. > Most recent CDs were mastered digitally, therefore is the original > master equivalent (at least in quality) to the CD i own? Yes. As long as the file's not gone through any transformations, but simply copied, it's the same as if you were listening to the originally rendered final mix from the studio. > I *swear* i remember buying CDs when they came out and they used to tell > you how things were mastered. Didn't they used to indicate AAD, ADD, DDD > for (recording, editing, mastering)? Why did they stop doing this? That's the SPARS code: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARS_code I think that it died as it became increasingly irrelevant and fewer people cared. It was never a measure of quality and as the digital audio tech improved it lost much of the stigma it used to have. It's sort of like the way that we used to hear about 8-bit, 12-bit, 16-bit and 1-bit D->A converters on CD players. It used to matter because the hardware worked hard to try and keep up with the reading, processing and error handling of the data stream, so it mattered, and average ears could tell the difference. As the hardware improved and the DSP became more sophisticated, such things didn't matter any more. > Is there any way to tell/reasonably guess if a CD has been digitally > mastered without those codes? Unless noted otherwise, I always assume a full digital chain, though that can easily be incorrect. I know that when the band A Troop of Echoes (from Providence, RI) had their first album (all digitally recorded) mastered, the engineer(*) chose to print it to a tape recorder and pull it back into digital from tape to get a certain compression that he liked. That is an analog step that was not noted in the liner notes. I don't know that anyone can listen and tell that that conversion had been part of the process. (*) Jeff Lipton @ Peerless Mastering -- ====================================================================== Joe Hartley - UNIX/network Consultant - jh@xxxxxxxxxxxx Without deviation from the norm, "progress" is not possible. - FZappa _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list Linux-audio-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-user
