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Comment by noonespecial | Hacker News Reader

I, a creature of a different age, suffer a similar phenomenon. I have cherished old mix tapes that I prefer the sound of. I've tried recreating those tapes with playlists of perfectly ripped flac from cd's and they just don't have the same life.

I've gone so far as to record the tapes straight into flac and listen to those on my ipod instead.

I know every warble, wow, and flutter from those old tapes, I even have a rough chronology in my mind of when the tapes developed their defects. The too hot car stereo in my friends camero that summer day... that lousy walkman that tried to eat it.

I can play the modern digital copies in the right order till the cows come home and be unmoved but even a whisper of the noise between tracks on one of those old tapes and its '94 again and I'm back on the beach at sunset with that girl in my arms...

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There was an episode of Everybody Loves Raymond about this. Ray buys his dad a really nice, new CD system along with CDs of his favorite music. His dad hates it, they get in a big argument, and the episode ends with the dad in the basement listening to the scratchy sounds of his old record player with his eyes closed, obviously taken back to memories of his youth.

"I've tried recreating those tapes with playlists of perfectly ripped flac from cd's and they just don't have the same life."

See the story from a day or two ago about how badly CDs are being mastered.

Personally, I listen to a lot of non-English music and I'm beginning to wonder if part of the reason might be that non-US music companies seem to be much less likely to utterly destroy their music in the quest for illusory volume, because the "foreignness" is not something that I particularly care about either way.

Try your experiment on a CD from the mid-nineties. It is highly likely that what you are experiencing is a result of atrocious mastering, and not a digital-vs-analog result. Note that it has to be a CD that physically dates from the mid-nineties, not merely an album from the mid-nineties, as companies have been going back and destroying the old music on re-releases.

Of course that doesn't address the issue of your personal memories and if you like that, hey, great. I'm not going to complain or tell you it shouldn't be that way.

Could you provide, please, the link of that story about CDs?

I can't see that article (you can use searchyc.com to search) but there are lots of articles around if you search for loudness war. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war

I had a post on that story, but I can't get through to my threads display (HN seems to cut that off when load is high, makes sense, not complaining). But I'll endorse aoeu's Wikipedia link. Between that and some of the article Wikipedia links you can get a pretty good idea of the problem and the scope.

Until this problem goes away, CDs are no longer the choice of discriminating audio enthusiasts.... but not because "digital" is worse than "analog", but rather because "destroyed digital" is simply bad. Right now in the "digital vs. analog" war, CDs aren't bringing their A-game.... they're not even bringing their D-game.

A further thought occurs to me; maybe people prefer "Crappy 44KHz originals with clipping softened by MP3" to "Raw crappy 44KHz originals". This ought to be controlled for, if it wasn't, as this might be the rational choice even by audiophile standards. (Yes, it's crap vs. crap, but there may yet be a distinctly less crappy one.)

Here it is: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=505321

The reality is that CD's used to be mastered to produce a "sound stage" - because the target was the hifi in people's homes.

Now the target is iPods, Cars and maybe Radios. So they mix to make it sound good in those scenarios (well, in lots of cases).

Also, whilst this sounds interesting, knowing more about the experiment might help. AAC compression can do more than just compress the music (might be doing some other form of levelling, and/or adding punchiness in some other form).

I didn't think about it until you mentioned it, but I would love to have my mix tapes back from high school.

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