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OMG. The horror is finally revealed. Did this also apply to the .5 "audiophile" LP series? They sounded lousy to me. -----Original Message----- From: Association for Recorded Sound Discussion List [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Jon Samuels Sent: Tuesday, March 25, 2014 11:41 AM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] Fwd: [ARSCLIST] "Why Vinyl Is the Only Worthwhile Way to Own Music" Early CD transfers had another problem. At RCA (and, from what I understand, to differeing degrees at other record companies), edited reels from the recording sessions were never used in the early CD days. The main reason had to do with bookkeeping (and Jack Pfeiffer's belief that no one could hear the difference, and therefore was not worth the trouble to track down, find and physically restore the edited masters). From it's earliest LP days, RCA maintained a system where every LP side (and later every CD) had to have its' own tape. That meant that if an LP was re-issued with a different number, the later LP master would at best be a first-generation dub of the previous LP. Unfortunately, they took this a couple of steps further. Three-track (and higher) masters were always mixed down to 2-track for the LP. (One of the reasons this was done was to deliberately reduce the dynamic range in the LP master before the cutting stage.) Each new re-issue's tape master was a dub of the most recently released LP tape master, not the original one. They continued this practice with early CDs. Also, in later LP years, they often dubbed early 30 ips tape masters to 15 ips, and used those for later LPs with the same issue numbers. The consequences of these factors was that early CD masters were sometimes as much as seven or eight generations down from the original session tapes. (It also explains why collectors often prefer earlier LP issues.) The first RCA CDs that used the edited session tapes (called workparts in RCA parlance) rather than dubs as their source material were the Artur (now Arthur) Rubinstein CD series released in 1984, which was produced on CD by Max Wilcox. That didn't become pretty much standard practice around RCA/BMG until around 1988/9 (and even then, not in every instance). This doesn't even allow for the improvement in the quality of digital gear over the past thirty years (a subject written about here many times). Best, Jon Samuels