Alec R Costandinos CD's, We Must Get These To Happen

[Jimmy-Michaels]

Ok,
Well i've talked about those horrable russian bootlegg Alec CD's made from not the best condition vinyl and the bad editing and attempted mastering (beware, they are all on Ebay again), I myself have been working on a project this past week putting Alec's LP's to CD and i found that using an EQ and pure mint vinyl, it sounds very very close to being a real CD. Now, why Alec will not have his stuff on CD, still beats me. However, i heard that Romeo And Juliet was avalible on CD out of Japan at one time and some places still have some copys hanging around. Does anyone know if this was i decent remaster? Like actually sounding pure CD? I know that very rare loooooong gone Unidisc release of Alec had very poorly mastered stuff. Romeo And Juliet has alot of tape hiss and is also pitched waaaaay too fast, about maybe +1 up from as fast as they pitched the 4 min edit. So, does anyone know if this Japan release was good or not? The only Alec for sure that i know was avalible was at one time the Alec/Tina Turner "Love Explosion" LP and still avalible is "Love In C Minor".

DJ Jimmy M

[rhessel]

Hello DJ Jimmy M:

I purchased these japanese CD from Alec Costandinos and it sounds fantastic to me. I think it was remastered from the original tapes. I do not hear any hiss... It is released throught Philips in Japan.

Cheers.

[Jimmy-Michaels]

Was it pitched fast on this CD? Like the 4 min edit? or is it good normal pitch?

Jimmy M

[rhessel]

Hello

Sorry that my reply took so long.

I am not shure if the pitch was changed. The recording company is the japanese Philips,distributed by Mercury/Polygram KK (another japanese enterprise) with the Ibis Records Inc copyrights (which was the original Alec's company)

The track time are:

Acts I & II -> 15:32
Acts III, IV & V -> 16:57,

which may give you an idea about the pitch.
I do not have any complain about the sound quality.

Hope this helped.

Cheers,

[Jimmy-Michaels]

Ok,
Did you read the time off the CD cover? Or is that how it regesters on the CD Player itself? If you got that time off the CD Player itself by putting the CD in then...it's pitched too fast. At normal pitch it should be:
Act 1&2 (15:37)
Act 3,4,5 (17:14)

Thats how it reads on my CD Player having it played at the right normal pitch from my LP that i put onto a CD. Check the CD Player reading if you got this off of the cover and please let me know. If you listen to the 6:?? edit of Romeo And Juliet on the Disco Nights vol 3: The Best Of Eurodisco CD, that is the proper pitch.

DJ Jimmy M

[rhessel]

Hello DJ Jimmy M:

The track time was read at display of the CD player, not at the CD cover.

Yes, it seems a little bit over pitched (a hope that this exists), but see:

From 15:32 to 15:37 it's only +0.54%
From 16:57 to 17:14 it's only +1.67%

Hope this helped.

Cheers,

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: rhessel on 2002-07-06 20:33 ]</font>

[Jimmy-Michaels]

Well,
Thats a bit better than the unidisc one which is pitched at about +2 1/2. I wonder why they play it faster? It kinda ruins the aspect Alec set for the track, hmmmmm, anyway, yes that answered all my questions and I might pick it up if i can find a copy and see if maybe i could slow the disc down somehow and transfer it to a blank disc. Dunno anything about CD pitching, im a turntablist. Anyway, thanx.

DJ Jimmy M

[BrunoRepublic]

On 2002-07-06 22:50, DJ Jimmy M wrote:
Well,
Thats a bit better than the unidisc one which is pitched at about +2 1/2. I wonder why they play it faster?

Because Unidisc has piss-poor quality standards.

[Jimmy-Michaels]

Well unidisc has improved since that early CD. The 3 other discs i have of theirs are fine which are:
Patrick Cowley - Megatron Man
France Joli - Come To Me
Saint Tropez - Je T'aime

What i was wondering is why "Romeo And Juliet" always gets pitched fast? The only re release that isnt is the 6:?? edit on the Disco Nights Vol. 3 CD.

DJ Jimmy M

[BrunoRepublic]

On 2002-07-06 16:39, DJ Jimmy M wrote:
Ok,
Did you read the time off the CD cover? Or is that how it regesters on the CD Player itself? If you got that time off the CD Player itself by putting the CD in then...it's pitched too fast. At normal pitch it should be:
Act 1&2 (15:37)
Act 3,4,5 (17:14)

Thats how it reads on my CD Player having it played at the right normal pitch from my LP that i put onto a CD.

Dusting off this old thread...

DJ Jimmy M, if you're still around: I recently picked up a US copy of Romeo & Juliet, and I think side two is actually a bit slower than it should be. I have the original French pressing on Ibis, as well as a Canadian copy on RCA, and they both sound a bit faster than the Casablanca release.

I'll do some in-depth testing later on... a good reference point would be to compare against a digital tone and see which one(s) more closely match an actual 12-tone key. This is how I determined that the album version of "Mondo Disco" is the wrong speed, and the 12" is correct.

_________________
Or, as they say in the classics:
"I've never seen a man eat so many chicken wings!"

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Graham Start on 2002-08-21 18:18 ]</font>

[Jeff H]

Sorry to get off the subject somewhat, but I recall that the spelling of Costandinos' last name was discussed in another old post.

I was playing the Love De-Luxe "Here Comes That Sound" LP tonight, and I noticed for the first time that a dedication on the back reads: "With thanks, love and affection to Alec CoNstandinos for believing in me.--Hawk" (Alan Hawkshaw).

So I guess this incorrect spelling is fairly common.

[DanceMan]

On 2002-08-21 22:03, Jeff H wrote:
Sorry to get off the subject somewhat, but I recall that the spelling of Costandinos' last name was discussed in another old post.

I was playing the Love De-Luxe "Here Comes That Sound" LP tonight, and I noticed for the first time that a dedication on the back reads: "With thanks, love and affection to Alec CoNstandinos for believing in me.--Hawk" (Alan Hawkshaw).

So I guess this incorrect spelling is fairly common.

Yes, Jeff....This is something that happens coNstantly to many of us....I was always unsure myself and I am getting worse and worse, either sticking in an extra letter or leaving one out or putting the wrong letter in its place....even with easy names as such Patti(e) or Vicki(e) or RiTchie Family, so many more...the only name I never misspell is Gloria's...not Gainor but GAYnor.

[QUINNY]

The differences in pitch could easily be explained by the tape recorders used having slightly different speeds. Don't forget, in the analogue days, machinery could go out of alignement quite easily and +/- 0.5% was well within pro specs so far as speed was concerned. I think you're worrying too much.

[BrunoRepublic]

Exactly my point. The thing is, I'm looking into buying a lower-end "audiophile" turntable, and *none* of them have pitch control. The word that I got from a hardcore audiophile friend of mine was this:

"Pitch controls are frowned upon by the High-End audiophile crowd for two reasons:
The first is that you shouldn't have either the need or latitude to monkey with the essential nature of the recording, and one assumes that decent recordings worthy of good playback technology SHOULD NOT need to have their pitch re-adjusted by the home listener!
The second dovetails into the first reason: The pitch control adds extra complexity and cost to the turntable. It doesn't improve sound quality, it is a correction mechanism for faulty recordings, usually low-budget sonic abominations from the stone age of music reproduction (most people would think, Pitch adjustment requirement=You're taping a bunch of old 1923 mono acoustical 78's or those 160rpm Edison cylinders that are even older still???)"

Yet in my experience, records cut at a slightly off pitch aren't all that uncommon. I've got about half a dozen that I know of. And it isn't just poor production quality control that can cause this. The most infamous example of this being Miles Davis' landmark "Kind Of Blue" LP, of which all copies made before 1995 have one side playing almost a semitone off.

Of course, I can also correct pitch digitally after recording to hard disk, but this introduces all sorts of resampling artifacts.

I've heard stories of people modding Technics 1200s to get decent sound out of them... maybe I should look into that.
_________________
Or, as they say in the classics:
"I've never seen a man eat so many chicken wings!"

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Graham Start on 2002-08-22 11:01 ]</font>

[QUINNY]

Not to push the point too far, but all 12" records from the classic Disco era will be slightly too fast or too slow and therefore slightly out of pitch.
imagine this scenario:

Master 16 or 24 track is 0.5% slow
Master 2 track is 0.5% slow
Cutting Lathe is 0.5% slow
Therefore pressed discs 1.5% slow, compared to actual pitch of music as played in the studio.
The opposite would be just as possible.
Of course in the real world, even 0.5% would have been pretty accurate speed, so far as anyone was concerned and would not unduly worry an engineer's ears. The thing was that all gear was either slightly fast or slow, so with any luck the variations more or less cancelled each other out.
Add in accumulated distortion and Wow and flutter, the distortion of a stylus being dragged across the grooves in the record and it's awonder they sounded as good as they did.
I personally have never heard a CD that sounded worse than the vinyl, especially when it comes to hiss and RUMBLE. 12" records have a dynamic range of about 35dB in real life, and that ain't much.

[BrunoRepublic]

On 2002-08-22 16:58, QUINNY wrote:

I personally have never heard a CD that sounded worse than the vinyl, especially when it comes to hiss and RUMBLE.

I take it you haven't heard a lot of Unidisc CD reissues then? :lol:

[QUINNY]

GrahamStart: Nope, I've never heard one of them, but I still can't believe they're as bad as you're making them out to be. Maybe they're not as good as other CDs, but are you really telling us that they're worse than vinyl? Unidisc is a proper label and you'd think they'd use pro people with pro equipment, but who knows.
It could only be that they were unable to get hold of original masters and obtained mis labelled copy masters. This is quite common when dealing with old material. The other thing is that the tapes could have become magnetized over the years or the layers of tape stuck together, thus making decent playback difficult.
Are we comparing and audiophile turntable and cartridge against a $100 CD player or what?

[BrunoRepublic]

On 2002-08-22 17:17, QUINNY wrote:
GrahamStart: Nope, I've never heard one of them, but I still can't believe they're as bad as you're making them out to be. Maybe they're not as good as other CDs, but are you really telling us that they're worse than vinyl?

In a word, yes.

Some of their CDs are obviously mastered from cassettes, with all the hiss, dropouts, and poor frequency response that you'd expect. Others are from denoised vinyl -- not so bad if it's done right, but listen to their "Bumblebee Unlimited" compilation -- I could do better than that! Their Salsoul double CD comps also came from vinyl, and are reasonably well denoised -- but they obviously played them with some crappy DJ cartridge, because there's hardly any detail.

Other releases have interesting flaws. One channel inexplicably fades out for a few seconds during Musique's "Summer Love Theme". The same disc has some sort of strange channel phase problem, and sounds very strange in headphones at times. They can't even get their own material right! The Kat Mandu compilation must have been mastered by a half-deaf burned-out clubber, as the treble is so high and harsh that it's downright painful to listen to. I have the original 12" fron Unidisc to compare, and it's nowhere near those eardrum-shredding levels. Another point is that most of their releases are absurdly compressed (Sharon Redd, most Cerrone). Sadly, this seems to be a common practice with many labels these days, so I can't single them out for that. But the one that takes the cake is their CD single of "Le Spank". It clearly came off an old cassette, and a crappy one at that. The tape didn't align with their playback deck, so the track goes from bright to dull and back throughout the entire duration -- thus turning it into filter-disco.

In all fairness, not all of their releases are bad. Most of the material from the Montréal scene sounds okay, like Bombers, Kebekelektrik, and everyone's favourite group, Lime. I'm assuming this is because they were actually able to get something better than 5th-generation copies for those releases.

But yes, given a half decent copy of a track on vinyl, I can get it to sound better than most of their releases... and I have.

I am not a big fan of vinyl, having neither the money nor the patience to build and maintain a decent playback system. But I'd rather have scratchy original copies than their cruddy, muffled, distorted, squashed, and generally shitty reissues.

[QUINNY]

GrahamStart: Hmmm....very interesting. Have you ever chastised them or asked them how come they end up with such crappy stuff? They didn't master from cassette did they? You're pulling my leg.
Changing the subject slightly. My daughter bought the Robbie Williams 'Swing when you're...' CD. I was absolutely shocked at the really awful (post) production values on that. Track starts in the wrong place, loadsa hiss, the odd dropout, pre echo etc etc, and other oddities.

[Jimmy-Michaels]

WOW, an old post gets a responce, Yes, I am still around. A little drunk right now as my boss took me out tonight for a celebration of some business related stuff...lol, anyway, the 12" edit for Romeo And Juliet is the right pitch that I am referring to. Even this version on CD is at this pitch and also, listen to the track in the film 'Thank God Its Friday", it is the correct pitch there too. And my Casablanca LP is the same pitch on both sides. So, yes if you can look into it more that would be great. Also, Costandinos' talking intro on the CD even sounds like he had a little helium..lol, I know what he sounds like. The 4 min promo edit of Romeo And Juliet is pitched fast natraly like the reissues. But not to mention, ive just heard the shitty unidisc version for CD.

DJ Jimmy M

PS I hope I win this Montana CD. This sounds great!!!!!!!