sro100 said:

I'll tell you that I was prejudiced against Sign O The Times because at the time I owned the cassette, and the tape was stretched to the max to accomodate the lengthy project; I got used to Sign sounding flat and the CD did't do all that much to change it.

Purple Rain seems to be the best sounding; not necessarily including the remaster.

Sign underwhelms on CD quality.

i never noticed that with sott on tape, 1999 was though, for sure, see what i mean? back then people weren't so picky, try to release a format that isn't equal to another in the cd age and people would go nuts.

lurker316 said:

ufoclub said:

Compare all the CD's and The Black Album is hands down the worst sound quality of all of them. Sounds like all highs and lows are cut down. I have one of the re-ssues on vinyl, but I haven't played it to see if the midrange emphasis is there too.

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I said the same thing earlier in this thread. I'm no audiophile and have a very unsophisticated ear, but even I can tell the sound quality of the Black Album is horrible.

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EXAMPLE:

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At the 6:18 mark in the song Le Grind all of the instruments cut out for a couple seconds to highlight a quick bass riff. It should be awesome, but you can barely hear the bass it's so quiet; and it's so muddled the individual notes blurr together.

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Seriously, everyone should queue it up to about 6:15 mark and listen to the next 10 seconds. You'll hear exactly what I mean. It's actually far worse than bootleg quality.

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Is the poor quality of the black album the result of the original recording, or of its mastering? In other words, if the original tapes are still in the vault could someone remaster them and get a better sound, or is it likely that the sound simply wasn't captured properly when it was recorded?

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1979 Prince - best. Sounds great still.

1980 Dirty Mind + 1987 SOTT worst.

Dirty Mind is understandable though as these songs were actually demos that WB decided to release rather than get P to rerecord and I think their rawness and slapdash nature was seen as part of the appeal.

[Edited 5/25/19 2:50am]

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I don't understand people saying Dirty Mind has bad sound quality. It sounds very crisp to me.

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I understand they songs were recorded as demos and Prince didn't re-do or finish many of them. But that's not the same thing as saying the quality of the recording/sound is off.

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In other words, "polishing the performance" and "capturing the audito of the performance" are two entirely different things.

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I can't imagine Dirty Mind sounding any better with remastering.

lurker316 said:

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I'm no aduophile and most of his albums through 1988 sound fine to me. The one exception is The Black Album (yes, I realize it was officially released in the '90s, but it was produced in 87/88).

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To me, the Black Album sounds very muddy or muffled. The instruments are not sharpe or distinct. I first heard it on bootleg and assumed that (it being a bootleg) was the issue. When it was officially released I was excited because I figured I'd finally get a good quaity version, but to me the official release was only slightly better than my bootleg copy.

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+1

lurker316 said:

lurker316 said:

lurker316 said:

.

I said the same thing earlier in this thread. I'm no audiophile and have a very unsophisticated ear, but even I can tell the sound quality of the Black Album is horrible.

.

EXAMPLE:

.

At the 6:18 mark in the song Le Grind all of the instruments cut out for a couple seconds to highlight a quick bass riff. It should be awesome, but you can barely hear the bass it's so quiet; and it's so muddled the individual notes blurr together.

.

Seriously, everyone should queue it up to about 6:15 mark and listen to the next 10 seconds. You'll hear exactly what I mean. It's actually far worse than bootleg quality.

.

.

Is the poor quality of the black album the result of the original recording, or of its mastering? In other words, if the original tapes are still in the vault could someone remaster them and get a better sound, or is it likely that the sound simply wasn't captured properly when it was recorded?

.

I have a feeling that the midrange tone was somewhat mastered that way to sound kind of solid and strong. Then the CD transfer made it worse. I do need to test my vinyl copy to see if it sounds more rich. I remember one bootleg that had Prince from the Nude Tour era with a scarf covering part of his face sounding very nice and clear and rich. I had always wondered if that was off a vinyl transfer.

AvocadosMax said:

Dandroppedadime said:

Lovesexy is pretty good, and yes SOTT is quite muddy and quiet.innteresting to see if remastering would fix these problems or is it the recording process that Prince used (a la Sly’s Riot Goin On)

I’m sure remastering could work wonders versus me sitting at the desk, messing with Audacity and adding bass and treble and EQing it all to hell

I totally agree. Real Remastering is a track by track process .

jaawwnn said:

I can't imagine Dirty Mind sounding any better with remastering.

If you have the chance, make an A/B test with the DM WB official CD,
and the FLACs from the "Homemade Deluxe Edition" (vinyl rips).

Night and day. It's blatant.


To the ignoramus above who quotes Susan Rogers in one of her most stupid declarations ever ("Prince didn't care for sound"): you probably never listened to the Maxi 45 rpm of "Erotic City" on a high-end system, with your twenties ears (back when you could still hear high frequencies without the need of over-EQing). Or "La La La, He He Hee" from the German WEA pressings.

Susan Rogers is just pissed to have such little contribution in Prince's recordings. She seems like a very nice person, but she's totally full of shit on the sound quality topic and thinks she could have done better with more time (and more sleep, probably).

Truth is, most of the time her only job was to position microphones and pressing the Record button.
Prince knew the quality of working fast: you don't overthink. And your first instincts are kept intact.
That is why his eighties productions still sounds so fresh and enjoyable (that is, under proper listening conditions).

Go listen to some early punk records to get a taste of what a truly bad recording sounds like (and keep in mind in this case, it sounds bad intentionally). Bitchin' audio quality has been widely available since the sixties. But who cares outside of classical music, where the goal is to stay as truthful to the source as possible?

Good producers go beyond "pleasing" sounds. A pop record is not supposed to be a fucking frequency hearing test. Head over to Deutsche Gramophon if high fidelity is what you're after. People who only expect a crisp definition in everything they hear are not music lovers, they're audio wankers. Go back to Sowing The Seeds Of Love and all that sonic bourgeois bullshit.

Stop spreading this stupid idea that Prince didn't care about sound quality. He was perfectly happy with the organic sounds he got out from his seventies-eighties gear, period.
Greasy synths. Sticky Linn. All melted in one tasty soup. It sounds alive, and not just because of the performances. Who would question the fantastic sound of "Shockadelica"? Clean it ain't.

The hell with these fucking eighties recipes where you can distinguish every single instrument from a mile away. These productions scream the musical incompetence of the A&R men of the times, and the gullibility of the uneducated teen-ager for everything shiny and pumping.
The result forty years later: everything sounds atrocious. Even acoustic instruments.
Thank you very much, assholes.

Prince showed the finger to the bling-bling sound that everyone was going after in the eighties (hello Bruce Swedien, hello Bob Clearmountain), that shitty, crystalline sound that ages so bad, alas, until Susan Rogers put a SSL console (yuck!) in Paisley Park Studio A.

This is why sound-wise, Lovesexy (and subsequent records) is the production that has aged the most, despite the arrangements being very decipherable (and enjoyable) because of the clinical timbres and the über-precise separation of frequencies.
The atrocious Roland D-50 is also a culprit, and it was the beginning of the "press-a-single-key-and-lots-of-shit-happens" synths, which caused horrible records at a mass scale until the mid-nineties, before Aphex Twin, Prodigy, Massive Attack and less household names brought synthesizers and samplers back into original and creative territories.


Prince's records all sound terrific, deep, contrasted and dynamic, as long as you stay in the AAA (Analog recording-Analog mixing-Analog mastering) realm.

If you've never experienced Prince's AAA recordings with your fully functioning ears (roughly before you hit your thirties) on relatively "high-end" audio systems (which were your standard living-room norm, until the nineties: then came the Loudness Wars), you don't know what you're talking about and have little say in this thread.


Even sadder, you don't (and maybe never will) know how Prince truly sounds.

[Edited 5/31/19 10:52am]

bonatoc said:

bonatoc said:

jaawwnn said:

bonatoc said:

If you have the chance, make an A/B test with the DM WB official CD,
and the FLACs from the "Homemade Deluxe Edition" (vinyl rips).

Night and day. It's blatant.

Did they do much with the vinyl for that release? I could just throw on the original vinyl? As for the rest, yeah maybe, but considering some of the atrocious edits on Time records I'm not convinced P was that worried about quality in that audiophile way. Certainly Purple Rain deluxe is an abomination but his stuff (thank god) will never have that Steely Dan or 10CC yacht rock faceless perfection quality no matter what people do with it. I think its quite possible that both you and Susan Rogers are equally correct, you're just coming at it from different angles.

the purple rain master didn't make a difference to me, i bought the album for the dvd of syracuse (now, that actually did sound better to me) and the extras from the time.