[klaatumail] Re: pandora.com plays a version of Calling Occupants at a noticeably reduced pitch
- From: Erik Samuelsen <erik_samuelsen@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <klaatumail@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 8 Jul 2009 21:28:50 -0700
Hole not centered...
Remember good old record clubs? Buy one get 12? I think that they had their own
pressing plants with licenses to press LP's & make tapes. I think that if a
record was removed out of the press too soon & the vinyl was still too warm it
got stretched making it off center. Remember RCA's ultra thin vinyl? talk about
wow & flutter & tracking problems...
Got to go now, I am suddenly missing my vinyl collection...
> From: mitch@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: [klaatumail] Re: pandora.com plays a version of Calling Occupants at
> a noticeably reduced pitch
> Date: Wed, 8 Jul 2009 11:03:18 -0700
> To: klaatumail@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
>
> 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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