INFORMATION BELOW ABOUT THE POLL AT THE TOP OF THIS THEADSo as I prepare the first A/B test, I've been working with Ed Pong of UltraAnalogue Recordings because in my experience he makes the highest resolution, most pure live two track recordings on the planet. (I'm pretty sure he and I would both love it if I were wrong because you can't have enough of this kind of recording quality / musicianship / acoustics on the planet.). I'm pretty sure I'm right though.
Anyway, the ultimate acid test for the High Fidelity Sound Labs process would naturally be one of Ed's recordings, because if you can take something that is virtually perfect and make it better or different without ruining it, well, trust me, that would be the ultimate achievement.
Remember the process is designed to create audiophile versions of existing masters that for whatever reason sound congested, dry, perhaps a little flat, or cold, or hard. Hard is the worse one. Basically, designed to make less than perfect recordings sound better. So that obviously leads one to wonder what will happen if it's applied to recordings that don't need any help, or are otherwise unimproveable?
I realized many years ago during the Spring Street Studio years that when it comes to recordings, the information is in there. The recording is like a code that contains the information, and your playback system is like the decoder. It's all about phase angles across the frequency band at every stage of the chain that both create the code and solve the code. So it is usually possible to extract good sound from seemingly hopeless recordings if you have the tools to make the adjustments.
So the first attempt at creating this acid A/B test basically failed. It failed because Ed's tape didn't sound right. It sounded hard. Dimensionality was congested and compressed, the Piano, stage left, was struggling and didn't sound anything like Ed's actual piano. Yet, you couldn't actually find anything wrong with it. How many times has that happened to you?
Nevertheless, desperate to hear the damn tape sound good on that particular night, I decided to apply the process to it and monitor it live which I did. That made it sound good which was a real achievement, at least to me, even though I traded some top end deliberately out of desperation, to the average listener it would probably sound better.
I have since found the cause of the less than perfect sound from the tape, and believe it to have been a cable connection on the left channel on the particular night.
So to let you experience in real time the testing of this process with the final results still unknown, I though it would be fun to start with the damaged recording and my attempt to fix it. Sample A and Sample B respectably. Then we'll get to the real stuff. So in the next post I will set up a poll where you can listen to both Sample A and B on headphones or your stereo and vote on which one you like better overall.
There are two samples:
One is the Direct Dump From Tape 24/96 wav format that I suspect was crippled by a cable.
The other was the High Fidelity Sound Labs process inserted between the tape and digital recorder in an attempt to fix the sound. 24/96 wav format.
Here are the links to the files:
SAMPLE A -
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xKFXm6YEDORKF4hOdt0ib-WaV2Eikvka/view?usp=shari...SAMPLE B -
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xmaFKr0tZ87ZWRt5CnElAx2nT8UNncTg/view?usp=shari...Listen to these both and then vote in the pole. A great way to do it is to load each into an audio player on the computer so you can hit play on one then hit pause... hit play on the other then hit pause... and go back and forth as many times as you want to do direct A/B comparisons measure by measure.
I am intersted in peoples results on all types of playback systems, lo-fi, mid-fi, hi-fi and on both headphones and speakers.
Thanks your participation is appreciated. This test will be repeated once we get sample A sounding so good it would be stupid to mess with it. Of course that is all on the playback side. Tonight I am listening to it without the cable issue and having a hard time staying in my body.
Steve