[klaatumail] Re: pandora.com plays a version of Calling Occupants at a noticeably reduced pitch
- From: Mitch Bray <mitch@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: klaatumail@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 8 Jul 2009 11:03:18 -0700
Dave and Jaimie,
Hey thanks for the thoughts on that slow Klaatu track!
Some other musings:
- Pandora.com never existed as anything other than a pure digital
radio outlet, so there was probably no 'transition' from vinyl for them
- Their catalog displays metadata for each track (such as the name of
the album of origin) that will hot link you to more information about
that particular album, group, or song, including a link over to
iTunes or Amazon to buy it, both in CD and often MP3 download formats
(I think Jaimie will like that). This seems to imply that they spent
some time developing a proprietary library, or they made a deal with
iTunes or Amazon to access their digitized libraries.
- The version I heard of "Calling Occupants..." did not seem to be
transferred from vinyl (if so, it was the cleanest vinyl ever), and
the mix was a little too good (e.g. clarified and up front) not to be
the remastered one that you guys did for the 3:47 EST reissue in this
decade.
I'm particularly intrigued by Jaimie's comment:
> Sounds to me like someone ripped the album track at poor MP3
> quality...a side effect of which is, on occasion, a slower playback
> speed.
Hmmm I've never heard that - but I also don't rip below 128 kbps ever
(and I don't often rip, period). That's interesting!
And Dave's comment about the digitizing process:
> I also know of a certain record label that took a 48
> KHz wav file and put it directly onto a CD-R test pressing via some
> software that didn't automatically detect it was putting the wrong
> sample rate file on an audio CD and actually transferred the 48 KHz
> data
> as 44.1 KHz data with no conversion, making the playback sound slow
> and
> just plain "wrong". :-) It can happen in the digital age with as
> much
> ease as it happened in the analog age.
I suspect one of these is what's going on here. In the plus column,
the effect, as I said, is not so bad as to ruin the track to my ears
(so pandora still might end up turning someone on to Klaatu with this
admittedly imperfect rendition). Dave actually points out in his post
one of my most hated vinyl distortions: eccentric pressings (the hole
is not centered). This was RAMPANT on 45s, moreso than LPs, and my
brother and I, at his record store, used to carefully select our
copies to NOT have this defect. With some pressings, you would find a
whole case or lot that was defective in this way. Since there were 2
sides, sometimes the problem would only be on one side (annoying).
And Dave points out that it sure was way worse when you got to the
center of a record versus the beginning outer edge, particularly with
LPs where the linear velocity is at its smallest ratio relative to
the perpendicular velocity of the offcenter pressing toward the end
of the side (due to the larger size disc). Many vinyl collectors will
accept varying degrees of other defects to avoid this one in
particular - it's a dealbreaker to a lot of people's ears.
Oh- and thanks for not assuming I was just so high or something that
I was hearing things (hahaha)!
-Mitch
Santa Rosa, CA
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