I stream Quboz Connect via AL to MKll. Some recordings from the 50-60’s sound wonderful @192hz and some don’t. Check out Ella Fitzgerald’’s Ella Swings Lightly. It sounds wonderful if you haven’t heard it. Then I listen to Elton John’s Captain Fantastic @96hz sounds flat, no dimension. Even the difference in hz doesn’t explain it. Recordings in more recent times many times don’t sound as good as the older recordings.
My question is how do they make the older recordings sound so good?
There are probably many reasons/explanations. One that I will put forth has to do with recording techniques and philosophies. Prior to modern studios there were different sized rooms, and most musicians were playing together in one space with fewer partitions and screens than are common now. This required different microphone placements etc.
Then . .. imo one important factor was. . . the use of vacuum tubes.
My theory is that you can’t “make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear”. That is, if the original production team weren’t skillful enough to capture sufficient detail in the performance then it won’t make much difference to what resolution you transfer the recording. Call it good luck, foresight or whatever, if the original recording of the performance resulted in producing some great masters then it’s possible that re-mixing into a higher resolution medium will give you a better consumer recording than what was originally available.
@JLawry may be able to contribute here. I believe he’s had some professional experience. 
Further musings. I think this is where Paul McG has got the right idea. The Octave Records studio equipment can simultaneously record up to 32 channels of DSD256 bitstreams. So you can have all sorts of microphones picking up the performance from different angles. I suspect that at that resolution you can easily pick up everything that any microphone can pick up. Even if Paul doesn’t use all the channels used in a session for the final two-channel consumer product, some future engineer may put together a better sounding recording based on possibly better production tools available then.
One must start with a good master. The era is necessarily the driver for sonic quality. Lonsonn has a good point as in the 50’s and 60’s tube technology had hit its stride and those years were its golden era. Thus tube recordings had the potential to sound good, but no guarantee. In comparison in the 60’s and 70’s solid state was coming into its own, and those solid state recordings could sound flat and harsh. Again keep in mind these are generalizations. The recording and mastering engineers had a significant role regardless. Many variables, Kinks, Bruce Springsteen, and Elton Kohn records all sound flat and thin to these ears.
Good points. The rooms were large with mics placed through out the room. And then the vacuum tubes. Everything was whole spectrum. It sounded like it sounded.
Agree. We can now extract and hear stuff they recorded but never heard. And we are fortunate for that.
Since I got an email that somebody said my name, and the fact that it seems unusually complimentary, I’ll try to add in.
This is obviously a subject with so many variables, it’s almost impossible to figure out where to start. Unfortunately, my professional experience never got into remastering or remixing, but I do have a fair amount of knowledge of earlier recording techniques. If I were to hazard a guess as to why some re-issues of earlier stuff would sound bad, I would suggest that they are trying to do something with a recording that was never in their ears. The best reissues I’ve heard are ones where the people doing the reissuing have a solid knowledge of what was available, the target audience of the music, and to calm down the idea that just because it’s new technology doesn’t necessarily make it better. Maybe it all falls under the category of History. For instance, I’m (like a lot of people) a great admirer of Rudy Van Gelder’s jazz recordings. But there are things about his recordings I don’t really care for. In the 1990s, he was hired by Blue Note to see if he could come up with what he thought was a better sound from his original masters, and he felt he did, and I feel he did. But it was all still engineered from the same brain that understood what he was trying to reproduce. I don’t like the way he recorded piano, but I understand there were reasons, one of which was how the piano was treated by jazz musicians in the 50s and into the 60s - as a rhythm section instrument that was situated back from the audience. I’ve heard attempts to do a better job of bringing out the piano in some RVG re-issues (not his own) and it just doesn’t work.
One other re-issue issue I’m fascinated with is how there was more data going onto tape or record than could be reproduced by the playback gear around at that time. So there has literally been sound hiding in the grooves or magnetic flux that was not even heard during the original mastering. It seems most people would just say, “Duh, use it,” but not so fast. With that info missing, the overall sound of a master might be affected, if not ruined, by revealing what’s there. Again, I think a full understanding of the technology and style of the time comes first.
One of the drawbacks IMHO of streaming is for the most part your streaming the latest remaster which is most likely brickwalled. I have an original UK and US LP as well as the original 1984 DJM CD of Elton John’s Captain Fantastic and it is not flat at all. All 3 sound wonderful.
I have oft stated here our ability to capture sound far exceeds our ability to play it back. This has aways been true.
Now take what’s recorded here, digitalize it and play around with the resolution.
@scb I feel you on this. Sometimes the Qobuz hi-res version of an album sounds weird to me. Talking Heads “Speaking in Tongues” is a recent one. The CD quality one sounds better to me. I’m not crazy about the hi-res Miles Davis Kind of Blue either…. My redbook CD version sounds better.
