"Crystal Illusions" remastered

[John Henry Wheeler]

Hey A&Mers... I've recently put up some demos of my new remastering process and it includes "Crystal Illusions". Pop over and give it a look. This is a demo site for record companies and online music providers, but I love to have hard-core fans visit just to hear the process. www.regroove.audio

 

[Harry]

John, I must tell you that "The Look Of Love" by Sergio Mendes & Brasil '66 was originally released without the HAECO-CSG processing on the LOOK AROUND album. It DID receive the HAECO-CSG processing on the GREATEST HITS album, but it's appeared many times on various comps without the processing.

Harry

 

[John Henry Wheeler]

John, I must tell you that "The Look Of Love" by Sergio Mendes & Brasil '66 was originally released without the HAECO-CSG processing on the LOOK AROUND album. It DID receive the HAECO-CSG processing on the GREATEST HITS album, but it's appeared many times on various comps without the processing.

Harry

Hey Harry,
Interesting. I had a discussion with Bernie Grundman about this very thing a couple years ago. According to him, the only way that HAECO would have appeared on CDs is if the CDs had been taken from the mastering engineer's reference dub instead of the actual mix master. I'm finding that 90% of the CDs I process seem to have been taken from reference dubs. I'm guessing the thinking is that the mastering engineer's original 'corrections' are desirous on the CD, but in all honesty, that is the problem. First of all, the azimuth accuracy of a dub is halved, plus the tape wobble as it's going through the machine is doubled. Many of these old tapes wobble like crazy, and every time a splice goes through for a mix working part, it sometimes changes dramatically. These Crystal Illusions cuts, for example, were off 2 samples (45 microseconds or so) between left and right, and the NAB EQ was off by 2db consistently, which could have either been a bias level setting on the original recorder or the mastering dub recorder, or simply a playback calibration issue. The Regroove cuts (both HAECO and not) are now corrected to down to essentially zero microseconds, and the EQ is +- .1 db matching between left and right.

This isn't particularly unusual for a CD... most CDs I work from are off 22-100 microseconds. When they're on the top end of the scale, I sometimes wonder if the reference tones themselves are off, or if no one even bothered to calibrate to the tape.

The bigger issue is the spectrum itself. The top end was rolled off with a 3db/octave curve starting around 5kHz, probably to hide the noise. When that's removed, you can see the noise floor of the tape, so I then know what the original master originally sounded like (incredibly noisy ). By using correlation and envelopes, all that gets removed, so you're essentially hearing what the output of the mix console sounded like. I hope you like hearing that.

-John