HiFi & Music & Technical Wojtek on 18 Nov 2006 10:51 pm
Sound quality depending on origin of record manufacture?
I know for a fact that not many people acknowledge this fact, but for me and many others the answer is YES! Sound quality DOES in most cases also depend on the factor of where was the record manufactured. And by using the term “record” I don’t mean only LP’s and vinyl singles. It’s the same with CD’s, cassettes, LD’s (LD = LaserDisc) and probably also SACD’s and (nowadays pretty rare) pre-recorded tape reels. I don’t know if this is also a fact for video cassettes (either VHS, SVHS, Beta or other standards), DVD’s or the (supposedly deemed “dead”) DVD-A’s…
So now you ask: so where are the music medium’s made better than elsewhere ? From my experience, things look kinda like this today (order from best to worst sound quality):
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1. Japan
2. USA, Canada
3. UK, France
4. Germany, Italy, Holland ,Spain, Sweden, India
At this moment if a, similar to this one: “This guy’s a complete loon”, thought crosses your mind then I advise you to somehow obtain 2 copies of the same CD, LP or other music medium (except mp3’s and similar compressed audio files of course :) ), which differ by their manufacturing origin (according to the graded list above, like an American and a French one for instance) and decide yourself if what I say is right or wrong. Hoping that you’ll playback the medium on something better then your average Joe’s “scout-league” audio system (i.e. something for over $50), I can assure you that you’ll notice the differences right from the start.
I only listed western countries (except Japan and India), because I simply haven’t ever heard, for example: a CD from China, a LP from Cuba (although I’ve heard opinions that they were cut quite well) or a cassette from Egypt. I could guess and estimate, but then it wouldn’t justify the “from my experience” sentence.
If I wouldn’t have to compose the above list from today’s perspective, I’d also add Russia, Hungary, Poland and almost all other old “east block” countries and I’d file them under the number 5. Back in the socialistic days, the manufacturers made very cheapo-cheapo quality LP’s in comparison to other countries. Lay low the fact that it was supposedly hard even to get a hold of a Polish LP in Poland! My parents often told me that group excursions to Hungary for the sake of obtaining LPs (they didn’t have such problems as in Poland in this matter) weren’t uncommon.
I must also say that this list doesn’t concern us if we’re talking about a so called “audiophile” HiFi release, for example: albums recorded and released by specialised audiophile labels, like for example: Cambridge Acoustic Recording, Opus3 Records, John Marks Records and many others.
So now a second question comes a’ hurlin’ at us. It’s fairly easy to understand why the list’s order is like that and not the other way around if we take LP’s or cassettes. But why is it also true, for example: for digital mediums like CD’s ? That I can’t tell you in a straight answer, cause in this subject I can only speculate. The first thing that bugs our theory is the sole fact that we’re talkin’ digital here! On a German or Indian or Canadian made CD should be the same binary string of 0’s and 1’s, cause the album sources are mostly mastered in the same place right ? In theory most probably yes, but in practice it ain’t so. Maybe the quality of digital mediums simply depends very much on the quality of the equipment used in the manufacturing process ? If it were true then another sentece ended with a big question mark comes straight from the pits of manufacturing hell, for example: Why do the Italians (supposedly) make worse quality records than the French ? This whole thing is simply a big mind boggler …
And what about the differences between 1st and later editions of records ? Original master vs. remaster ? Digital vs. analog ? Those are stories for another time, but I can assure you that I’ll be posting about these topics cause they’re also quite controversial and not always so obvious.
If you have any other thoughts on this and other peculiar audio topics, then please do leave a comment.
PS: On a sidenote, I recently changed the layout of the blog to something “less default” (here I’d like to sincerely thank Sadish Bala for making this great theme, which BTW is freely available from his website, among other themes for the Wordpress blog system).
I also removed the Google AdSense ads for now, cause I still haven’t decided on where and under what disguise to put them on the blog’s pages (any help here would be much appreciated).