I need to have a project that is mastered to CD and is not available on any other media. Would it be worth tracking the CD to 1/2" 30 IPS before I take it be Mastered properly. Or should I just let the engineer do his thing with the CD. By the way the material was originally recorded in the 50's and mastered to CD in the 70's.
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The nice thing is my mastering facility is in my home. In the Mo
The nice thing is my mastering facility is in my home. In the Movie watching room, I have a decent 6.1 setup that also serves duty to hear how my mastering stands. Their are 8 other systems as well.
I get huge enjoyment of listening to the most meager of systems. I have an inexpensive boom box, some loudspeakers of various vintages, many receivers, cassette decks, CD players. I even have an industrial foreground system to listen to how my mastering would sound once "muzaked", because Muzak does comprise of a huge chunk of the entertainment realm and your mastering must survive summed to Mono through a typical ceiling speaker. All my critical listening and deep enjoyment (goosebumps) listening is on the System 1.
At the office, we have many many many configurations of systems to listen to..from theater systems to background music to Bar and resturant systems to PA systems.
The worst system I own is the car system. I have the parts to beef it up and make it nice but I lack motivation to do it...simply because the more I am not in it, the better. Traffic in South Florida is a nightmare.
The CD would probably be fine if it is in mint condition and dus
The CD would probably be fine if it is in mint condition and dust free to all practical purposes. No scratches or fingerprints. Actually a .wav file over the web eliminates any "physical CD problems".
I have worked in the digital domain since 1979 but CD's simply were not aval. until July of 1982 and players were not imported to the US until November 1982 and then they were 3000 U$D. It was not until April of 1983 you could buy the Magnavox SL series CD players in the 800 dollar range so I doubt it was mastered to CD in the 70's.
If it were digitzed as early as 1976 (first 14 bit PCM recorders) then going back to the original source would be preferable. If the digitization was between 1983 and 1987, we can have a good go of it as the 16 bit matrix was fully involved.
Try to get the date correct and that would serve as better info to determine if the CD was done originally to a 16 bit recorder or not. Digital recording in the 70's used either betamax VCRs and PCM encoders using the video head as the recorder. U-Matic machines were also used. Many of the PCM encoders of the era were 14 bit, many engineers did not have ample experience with the format and some very poor transfers ensued.
Look into this, I would be happy to remaster it for you. Basically "re mastering" comprises a large part of what I do today. It also helps to be familiar with the works and if this is being done professionally, the copyright release papers to do this need to be in order. Wholesale remastering works for sale has to be done legally. It can get you into a "heap of trouble" to reissue something without having the proper paperwork in order.
Also, if the transfer would be done to tape, you would need a very high-end CD player to do this. One with an outboard power supply and outboard clock and D/A. A precision CD player runs in the 4000 to 25000 dollar price range. CD players differ in sound quality so much that without a top flight playback machine, the tape would have little chance at capuring what the CD "really sounds like"
The image is of a 25000 dollar CD transport.
All it does is read and spin the CD.
You would need the clock and the D/A.
A good Burmester Reference 970 SRC DAC costs about 30 thousand for the D/A.
If you want it done right, it can be done right.