Re: [ARSCLIST] SACD fans -- some discounts

[Parker Dinkins <parker@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

on 5/8/07 8:21 PM US/Central, Tom Fine at tflists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

> But I don't see this as much worse than the early days of Sonic Solutions when
> every two-bit knob-turner felt he needed to remove all that "bad" tape hiss,
> and thus suck every bit of room tone and air out of the sound.


Just for the record, in the early days the Sonic Solutions NoNoise package
sold for over $220,000, so there's some cognitive dissonance there.

Even today NoNoise is one of the most powerful audio tools available to
reduce broadband noise. Quite obviously, it takes quite a bit of skill to
operate properly.

It is far more important (in the first place) to obtain good quality
transfers, and this is where many, many record producers have fallen short -
in my very direct experience. Quite often a collector is contacted, and
instead of the original, some 'garage style' transfer is done by a neighbor
or a friend, even to a cassette. Since money has already changed hands, the
deed has already been done.

In fact, I've had one record producer tell me not to worry about hum removal
at all, that the extra time to remove it wasn't in his budget, and anyway he
had a flight to catch. CEDAR Cambridge's Debuzz module - which I own
outright - would have eliminated it faster than real time. It would have
been less than $100!

By the very nature of obscure, non-commercial reissues, many producers are
totally ill equipped to handle or understand technical issues. For many
years, we had a producer who could not understand why CD mastering took more
than real time. We have done literally hundreds of such rushed mastering
jobs, in which we have thankfully been left uncredited.

But your comment about NoNoise proper is quite off the mark - perhaps you
are referring to the O.J. Simpson recordings, or to transfers through
Packburn?

-- 
Parker Dinkins
MasterDigital Corporation
Audio Restoration + CD Mastering
http://masterdigital.com