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Topic: uk vs japanese vs us vs etc pressings (Read 11184 times) previous topic - next topic
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uk vs japanese vs us vs etc pressings

hey all. i've become more and more of an audiophile over the past year... mostly to other genres because rap is just so terribly mastered. anyway, i was wondering if anyone has any knowledge on whether or not waveforms are the same on different pressings of the same cd releases. genesis's we can't dance from 91 for example has a us, us+canada, uk, japanese and european pressing. with the us pressing being harder to find than the others (and sometimes more expensive), if i were to buy say the japanese release, would i be getting the same waveform as the us cd? so basically... are these cd's only mixed and mastered once and distributed to diff countries/companies or do these companies do their own separate mastering?

uk vs japanese vs us vs etc pressings

Reply #1 –
Here's an example of 2 from wiki:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fresh_(Sly_an...ly_Stone_album)

Quote
As with There's a Riot Goin' On, Stone held on to the Fresh masters well beyond the record's official release, constantly remixing and re-recording the tracks.[1] As a result, alternate and significantly different versions of at least ten songs from the album are known to exist. In 1991, Sony Music, by then owner of the Epic catalog, accidentally issued a sequencing of Fresh on CD featuring alternate takes of every song except "In Time", which remained unchanged. Sony allowed the alternate version to remain in stores to be bought up by fans and then later issued the standard 1973 version of the album. However, the mix-up sparked debate among fans over which release was superior. When Sony BMG reissued Fresh in CD and digital download formats for Sly & the Family Stone's 40th anniversary, five alternate mixes were included as bonus tracks. These tracks are extremely similar, if not identical, to the alternate, accidental 1991 release. The alternate version is known to be very accessible in Japan, while it is very scarce in the U.S..


As a result if you want the finished version versus the demo version you'd better avoid the UK release.
As the article stated same goes for There's a Riot Goin' On. I can think of a number of others, Big Star's Sister Lovers - the US version being significantly different and superior (IMO) to the UK version.

What's really bad is that none of this is acknowledged on the release itself.
So to answer your question, you might and you might not; furthermore, you might not only get a different waveform (let's say mastering) you might get a completely different mix as well.

C.

[EDIT - added bit about mastering versus mixing]
PC = TAK + LossyWAV  ::  Portable = Opus (130)

uk vs japanese vs us vs etc pressings

Reply #2 –
I don't think any definite rules exists. While the above may be an extreme example, it might occur, but honestly I think most of the time you will get the same mastering (at least nowadays).

I have a few albums with both UK and Japan releases - I can check them this weekend

I remember there has been a debate where Japan-releases are said to have more dynamic range, but I have yet to see such an example for myself (SHM-releases?). Most of the time, you'll get a bonus-track (usually a B-side off a single) in contrary to international releases.
Can't wait for a HD-AAC encoder :P

uk vs japanese vs us vs etc pressings

Reply #3 –
Whilst I'm sure you're aware of this, a common fallacy perpetuated by some is that bit-identical releases (say, from the UK and Japan) still sound different. They often attribute this to material (i.e. SHM, or just an inherently better quality, courtesy of Japanese manufacturing standards). Whilst it is true that scratched CDs may require interpolation/'error correction' from the decoder, this is where there is a specific inability to read data. It is not a characteristic of the entire CD.

For instance, let's say we have a gold CD and a standard one, with the exact (i.e. bit-perfect copies) of the same music on both, they will sound the same, as they are the same. If one has a scratch in one area, it may require error-correction, but only in that one area. The 'tonality'/'warmth'/etc of the entire CD and its music will not be affected.

Be aware that many in the so-called 'audiophile community' believe that, despite this, the gold/Japanese/West-German copy will always sound better, which in fact, may only be the case if they contain a different transfer/mastering of that music.

I suppose the moral, then, is to only bother with a foreign/rare release of a CD if it actually different - something that is quite hard to determine without EAC or your personal testing. This differences between international releases have faded in more recent years, as pressing-plants tend to use the exact same digital masters, as opposed to their own transfers.

Contemporarily, if the CDs are not completely identical, any difference can often be attributed to:

1) Normalisation of volume in one country's release, but not in another (i.e. peak volume is 95% in UK, but upped to 100% in Japan). This is not the same as the 'compression' you mention, and they will sound the same to you if you adjust the volume.

2) Different stop/start times. Early digital transfers were put on DATs or equivalent digital tape, as nothing else was sufficiently capable of holding a digital copy of the music, bar the CD. This meant that the songs were not discrete before the CD mastering. Therefore, the point where the CD's engineer decides to stop one song and start another, may result in irregular EAC peaks/results when comparing similarly sourced CDs. However, if you could line the tracks up, you'll find they are in fact identical. For these cases, wave-form matching is your best bet for confirmation.

I hope this helps.

uk vs japanese vs us vs etc pressings

Reply #4 –
thanks for the knowledgeable replies guys.  that's quite something that happened with that sly and the family stone album, carpman.  for the most part i do believe that the vast majority of cd pressings are identical.  it only makes sense that the album is mastered once and distributed to different countries/companies for manufacturing and sales.  it's a least the simplest way to do it.  though i've read that that is not the case with vinyls from back when, where some people claim that different pressings actually are mastered differently.  as far as people claiming some cd pressings (like japanese) are more dynamic, they may just be thinking so because they may be able to turn up the us release to 65% on their audio player, and only 45% with a different pressing.  i'm guessing maybe that the us waveform isn't amplified fully (a lot of older less compressed releases can be amplified a decibel or two as ya'll probably know) and they're left with that impression.

it would be interesting to hear what differences those uk and japan releases have, odyssey... if you have the time.

and yeah, you're right jacksongrey, the only way to know for sure is to buy a copy of each, rip em and look at the waveform yourself.  i swear becoming an audiophile is driving me nuts.

uk vs japanese vs us vs etc pressings

Reply #5 –
Quote from: diamenz on
and yeah, you're right jacksongrey, the only way to know for sure is to buy a copy of each, rip em and look at the waveform yourself.  i swear becoming an audiophile is driving me nuts.


I wouldn't get too hung up on it. At the end of the day, the difference between many releases is marginal at best. If 'audiophile' means making life difficult and expensive, for a 1% improvement, so be it, but I think I can speak for most people on this forum in saying we find it a fruitless pursuit.

You'd do better to check what the best pressing is that is available for a reasonable price, and just stick with it. Then you can use the money you save on things that do make a difference, like a nice set of speakers.

uk vs japanese vs us vs etc pressings

Reply #6 –
Quote from: JacksonGrey on
I wouldn't get too hung up on it. At the end of the day, the difference between many releases is marginal at best.

That may be true for modern albums that were probably recorded digitally. But for older releases from analogue recordings, different marketplaces would often use whatever tapes they had locally.

Here's an example. Way back in the 80's a friend and I decided to compare our CD players, so he brought his round to my house and we hooked them up through my system. The only CD we both owned was Dark Side of the Moon, so we put one in each player and noticed a huge difference. Then we swapped the discs around and the difference followed them. The players themselves sounded pretty much alike, but the two versions of DSOTM (mine was UK, his was Japanese) were worlds apart.

uk vs japanese vs us vs etc pressings

Reply #7 –
Quote from: diamenz on
for the most part i do believe that the vast majority of cd pressings are identical.  it only makes sense that the album is mastered once and distributed to different countries/companies for manufacturing and sales.  it's a least the simplest way to do it.  though i've read that that is not the case with vinyls from back when, where some people claim that different pressings actually are mastered differently.

This is because while today that is the simplest way of doing it, thirty years ago pressing vinyl took rather longer than pressing CDs does today, you couldn't send masters over the internet, you couldn't release over the internet, and bulk transportation was slower and more expensive.  That's why different regions sometimes had different-sounding pressings of records—the pressing could be done independently in the US, the UK, Europe, and Japan, for example to avoid shipping too much stuff around.

uk vs japanese vs us vs etc pressings

Reply #8 –
Quote from: JacksonGrey on
Quote from: diamenz on
and yeah, you're right jacksongrey, the only way to know for sure is to buy a copy of each, rip em and look at the waveform yourself.  i swear becoming an audiophile is driving me nuts.


I wouldn't get too hung up on it. At the end of the day, the difference between many releases is marginal at best. If 'audiophile' means making life difficult and expensive, for a 1% improvement, so be it, but I think I can speak for most people on this forum in saying we find it a fruitless pursuit.

You'd do better to check what the best pressing is that is available for a reasonable price, and just stick with it. Then you can use the money you save on things that do make a difference, like a nice set of speakers.


I am hard pressed to think of a more *fruitful* thing for an audiophile/music lover to do than to seek out prefered masterings of one's favorite titles. "Save on things that do make a difference"??? Really? I hate to call you out but this is really terrible misinformation. Mastering makes a difference, big time. Ignore the mastering and buy better speakers? Why? So you can better hear how bad the mastering is? Upgrades in playback hardware and software really go hand in hand. What is the point of better hardware if you are going to neglect the source material?

uk vs japanese vs us vs etc pressings

Reply #9 –
Maybe there are two things.

1. Different masterings or even mixes for different regions.

2. Back in the Olden Days of Vinyl, even with the same master you could get different quality, depending on the standards of individual pressing plants. When I bought vinyl, I lived in Australia, and we had a bit of a suspicion that local pressings might not be as good as US/UK ones (probably cultural cringe/paranoia, but not impossible).

As with so many things, I suspect there's an irrelevant carry over of concerns that were legitimate once upon a time.

uk vs japanese vs us vs etc pressings

Reply #10 –
Time seems to me to be the main factor in whether an album is available remastered. However I find different pressings also occasionally feature completely different recordings and even tracks. I often come across European and Japanese releases that contain material not found on any of the North American pressings or releases. Indeed, I find Discogs to be very useful in this regard because it discriminates between each and every reissue of an album.

Edit: add link
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?  ;~)

uk vs japanese vs us vs etc pressings

Reply #11 –
There are a few useful tools available that can help you inspect different pressing or releases: AccurateRip, ReplayGain, Discogs, sound editing software, music forums and (un)official discographies.

AccurateRip is intended to be for comparing the checksums of your ripped CD against a set of checksums made available online by the AccurateRip database. The albums are ID'ed by the TOC (Table of Contents) of the Audio CD, but different pressings with different audio may have the same TOC, so AccurateRip will also store these different pressings. There's a tool called CUE Tools which will show you all relevant pressings for the CD's album ID, and whether your extracted audio matches any of these pressings' CRCs, it even does offset shifts, since many pressings only differs by a shifted offset.

While a new issue of an album will probably also have a different TOC, some issues do have the same TOC. Also AR will not tell you if you have the Japanese pressing or the West German pressing, that information is simply not submitted to the database. Anyway it can give you some hints. For example you have puchased two issues of the same album, and you compare both rips with CUE Tools, you might find out that the audio is 100% identical except for an offset shift.

ReplayGain is an easy tool to get a rough estimation of the loudness of a release. So again, if you have two issues of the same album, and you let a RG capable player calculate the RG values you can roughly estimate which one has been mastered to be "louder".

If you really want to see whether a release was brickwalled, a common soundwave editor with waveform display (all of them support that) is your tool of choice. Use one that can zoom down to the level where individual samples can be seen. If there are consecutive samples with -32768 or 32768 values, then it is digital clipping.

Discogs is intended to be an online database that lists every single issue of albums, singles, eps and so on of every artist. Of course it will never be complete, but it's currently the best online database for looking up this information, that I know. Searching for catalog numbers works ok as does searching for barcodes, but be aware that most users just add white spaces to the barcodes, which is not the best practice, and that the catalog number may have also been submitted with or without whitespace between the letters and the number. And of course, not every release has the catalog number and even fewer have the barcode.

Then there are music forums where people discuss the different issues of albums of their beloved musicians and bands. Good luck with finding what you are looking for there.

Last but not least there are almost complete discographies for some artists. This is very rare and I'm not talking about the discographies you will find on most label or artists websites, but stand alone documents such as the The Complete Steven Wilson Discography

By now you have probably realized that there is no perfect way to get the info you want. Instead of acquiring the data from different sources like the ones above, the better way might be to just ask about the different releases of an album. For example in the music discussion sub-forum here at HA.org... 

uk vs japanese vs us vs etc pressings

Reply #12 –
Quote from: diamenz on
if i were to buy say the japanese release, would i be getting the same waveform as the us cd? so basically... are these cd's only mixed and mastered once and distributed to diff countries/companies or do these companies do their own separate mastering?


There are no rules or conventions. The cheapest thing to do is to *not* change anything when you release a recording in different countries. I suspect that this is the most common procedure.

uk vs japanese vs us vs etc pressings

Reply #13 –
I don't know much about how modern digital recordings are distributed worldwide or how old analogue masters from the vinyl era have been recaptured on digital media.

Old vinyl pressings do sound different from one another though. For sure. Before we had Japanese represses on heavy vinyl the old E.M.I. plant in Hayes was the gold standard. Continental re issues in particular were often inferior. Particularly Spanish and, oddly, some German issues could be thin. Not simply quieter either???

Now I think about this I don't know for sure why. Anyone know please?

I'm assuming the record companies didn't send the master stampers overseas so maybe they copied the analogue tape and it was recut or even remastered? Also how does the hardness and thickness of the vinyl affect the sound?

uk vs japanese vs us vs etc pressings

Reply #14 –
I remember 2bdecided buying the Australian version of Dido's - Life For Rent CD and comparing it with his UK one. They were technically quite different.

Quote
What is more, this is a different mastering from the UK version. It's fractionally quieter, fractionally quicker, and has been re-dithered (or just truncated). Indeed, the noise-shaped dither of the UK version is still visible on a spectrogram of the Aus version, but there's also standard (not noise shaped) dither or truncation of the last bit. So you've got extra high frequency noise from the initial noise shaping, and then noise/distortion added back into the audible spectral region at the normal -90B noise floor. Worst of both worlds!


Dido Destroyed
daefeatures.co.uk

uk vs japanese vs us vs etc pressings

Reply #15 –
There is no hard and fast rule.  There are some rules of thumb.

In the last 20 years, concurrent issues of new releases (including remasters) are generally identical in mastering, though sometimes one may have bonus tracks.

In the 1980s, it was a jungle.  Concurrent issues from in different countries from the same corporation were generally the same (and often a WG for US or Japan for US has the same digits as the subsequent US made disc).  But sometimes, even brand new releases sometimes seemed to follow the old vinyl protocol where a dub of the master, either analog or digital, was sent to foreign countries and the local label did its own master. 

And with back catalog, sometimes masterings were redone when errors were discovered (swapped channels, sound effects left off b/c the new engineer thought they were before or after the beginning of a song, clicks, wrong versions used, and so forth).  And sometimes, as in the very expensive first Japanese pressings of Abbey Road and Dark Side of the Moon, the subsidiary used the dub of the master sitting in their vault from when they originally mastered the vinyl (and sometimes that tape was in better shape, or transferred better, than the version in the mother country).  Sometimes, cds from different countries will be almost identical, but one will have had levels boosted uniformly, or digital silence edited in where the other version had analog hiss, etc.

But the main thing to look out for is when entirely different labels did the mastering.  For instance the Kinks catalog on PRT sounds vastly different (and most think better) than the subsequent versions on Castle.  Sometimes one company had access to masters and another didn't.  And so forth.

uk vs japanese vs us vs etc pressings

Reply #16 –
Quote from: RonaldDumsfeld on
the old E.M.I. plant in Hayes was the gold standard. ..............................

Well, it's not quite that straight-forward. The "best" plant changed over time as cutting lathes and/or presses were replaced. Also if a record company was faced with an album that suddenly took off they would often stretch their production standards. EG producing an extra negative from the master or an extra set of stampers etc. As long as QA didn't find too many failures everyone was happy. But it did mean that quality could vary even from the same plant. And then there was the amount of re-ground vinyl allowed in the mix, the weight of the "doughnut" fed to the stamper etc.

And anyway an EMI or CBS album wasn't necessarily pressed by EMI or CBS. If a company was having a good spell chart-wise their factory would often have problems keeping up with demand. So, they'd outsource some of the production. Sometimes things could get very silly where Polygram, for instance, was pressing for CBS and suddenly one of their albums would take off. They didn't have capacity due to their committment to CBS so they'd get EMI to press it and so on.

All in all it's very dificult to generalise

uk vs japanese vs us vs etc pressings

Reply #17 –
Thanks for that.

Anyone have any opinion as to what effect the volume and quality of the actual vinyl used has on the sound of records?

I always preferred to get a thick, stiffer 'shellac' LP rather than a thin, bendy 'rubbery' copy.

Now I think about it I cannot see why they would sound different.

Perhaps the rubbery LPs were just cheaper all the way through the process and it's not necessarily the actual vinyl that makes them sound different?
 

uk vs japanese vs us vs etc pressings

Reply #18 –
I wanted to add a question to this thread because it is very relevant to the decision that I am trying to make right now. I am looking to purchase a copy of Genesis' LP "Invisible Touch" on vinyl and I am trying to decide if I should get the U.K. pressing on Charisma Records or the U.S. pressing on Atlantic Records. I live in the U.S. so it would be a little more expensive to get the U.K. pressing.

Does anyone have a good guess as to which pressing might sound better, if there would be any difference at all? I would really appreciate some input on this.

Thanks.