"Noise" in Whole Lotta Love?

[gibsonfan159]

2 hours ago, Archetype said:

I thought the slider was up for the microphone on John Paul Jones’ bass amp and it was picking up Jimmy’s guitar from somewhere across a large recording studio

Exactly what I thought.

[woz70]

On 10/13/2022 at 8:33 PM, Archetype said:

I thought the slider was up for the microphone on John Paul Jones’ bass amp and it was picking up Jimmy’s guitar from somewhere across a large recording studio

That's an understandable reaction.
Let's figure out how big that recording studio would have to be for this to be true.

The delay from guitar sound to echo is somewhere between a quarter and a third of a second - let's call it 0.3 seconds, which is nicely between those two numbers.
The speed of sound in air is about 343 metres per second.
You can calculate distance travelled by multiplying speed by time.

So:

Distance = Velocity x Time
343 metres per second x 0.3 seconds = 102.9 metres

That's over 112 yards, if you like feet and inches.

That is one hell of a studio.

 

[Archetype]

16 hours ago, woz70 said:

That's an understandable reaction.
Let's figure out how big that recording studio would have to be for this to be true.

The delay from guitar sound to echo is somewhere between a quarter and a third of a second - let's call it 0.3 seconds, which is nicely between those two numbers.
The speed of sound in air is about 343 metres per second.
You can calculate distance travelled by multiplying speed by time.

So:

Distance = Velocity x Time
343 metres per second x 0.3 seconds = 102.9 metres

That's over 112 yards, if you like feet and inches.

That is one hell of a studio.

 

Well, fair enough -- but it can be fun to not let (Newtonian) physics get in the way of active imagination. 🙂    

[gibsonfan159]

Maybe we can determine how far away that plane was on Black Country Woman.

[woz70]

5 hours ago, gibsonfan159 said:

Maybe we can determine how far away that plane was on Black Country Woman.

You could make yourself some serious money if you came up with a way to do that. 

[gibsonfan159]

On the topic of little details, it's funny how the track cuts were botched on the 1994 remaster of the second album. You can hear about half a second of the last track at each beginning.

[Brigante]

On 10/13/2022 at 12:29 AM, Strider said:

 It's funny...I do not think I heard the squeak until I bought the 1990 remasters.

I never want to hear it, man - because I know I'll never UNhear it afterwards! 😄

Edited October 20, 2022 by Brigante

[Strider]

Since no one else has brought this up, what is that noise at the 3:40 mark of "Heartbreaker"? Right between the end of the solo and the start of the last verse. Is it Jonesey's bass or Jimmy's guitar that is so hot that it is picking up their fingers sliding over the frets? It's on the original and the remaster.

 

[woz70]

19 hours ago, Strider said:

Since no one else has brought this up, what is that noise at the 3:40 mark of "Heartbreaker"? Right between the end of the solo and the start of the last verse. Is it Jonesey's bass or Jimmy's guitar that is so hot that it is picking up their fingers sliding over the frets? It's on the original and the remaster.

It's on the bass track, and only on the bass track..... but it's not from the bass that appears in the final song...

Of the available multitracks (four songs from LZII) Heartbreaker is a bit of a weird one, and not set out as you'd normally expect.
The track listing is:
1: a 'room' recording of the entire band playing the backing track.  The Bass & Guitar sound a bit distant (more 'roomy') and the kit sounds more up-front and bright , so it might be a room mic for cymbals etc., or it could be a blend of mics sent to one track.  Hard to tell really
2: Bass guitar - a really overdriven sound with either a light tremolo or being sent through a leslie cabinet, and compressed within an inch of its life.
3: 1st electric guitar
4+5: Drums
6: 2nd electric guitar
7: Vocal and 2nd guitar solo
8: Main Vocal

The bass in the 'room' track (1) isn't quite the same as the actual bass track (2), so the bass has obviously been overdubbed/re-recorded after the backing track was recorded live.
'The sound' is almost definitely the original bass line, being played back through the studio monitors and being picked up by the bass amp microphone while Jones records his slightly different overdubbed line.


The iconic guitar solo is a completely separate recording, and was obviously edited in after the song was complete.

Edited October 25, 2022 by woz70

[jsj]

Has there ever been a version of how the song originally was before  the middle guitar solo was inserted? That’s what I’d like to hear

[woz70]

2 hours ago, jsj said:

Has there ever been a version of how the song originally was before  the middle guitar solo was inserted? That’s what I’d like to hear

There was a solo recorded at the original tracking session. It's very rough,  and obviously meant as just a placeholder.  The solo that we hear today was very much the best take. 

 

[jsj]

I misunderstood the concept of the solo in the middle of heartbreaker. When i read about the insertion of the separately recorded solo, I thought it meant it was added as an afterthought. I’ve had it wrong all these years! 

Edited October 27, 2022 by jsj
Sausage fingers

[paul carruthers]

Maybe I'm trying to listen too hard, but do any of the recent remasters of HOTH try to muffle the telephone in the background? I only ask because the remaster on Youtube, with the blue album cover, the phone doesn't seem to be as loud as some of the 1990s remasters.... 😆

[woz70]

20 hours ago, paul carruthers said:

Maybe I'm trying to listen too hard, but do any of the recent remasters of HOTH try to muffle the telephone in the background? I only ask because the remaster on Youtube, with the blue album cover, the phone doesn't seem to be as loud as some of the 1990s remasters.... 😆

I've had a good A/B listen to the 1990 remaster and the 2014 remaster of The Ocean (only via spotify, as I don't own it - so a slight disclaimer there....) and I honestly don't hear a vast difference. 
There are some quite subtle tonal differences between the two.  It sounds like the 2014 master has a lower noise floor (less hiss) than the 1990 master. and there's been some reduction in both mains-hum and print-through, but once you tune into that telephone ringing it's pretty much the same on both to my ears.
Also, after listening to both back-to-back I think I prefer the 1990 mastering, in spite of the hiss, hum and print-through.... controversial?  Anyone else agree?  It might be 'stranger to change' syndrome, or just overfamiliarity with the 1990, but it just sounds a little more 'rounded' to me 😕 .
Worth mentioning that standard cover and the blue cover deluxe edition use the same mastering for the original album content - the deluxe edition is not a separate beast.

[gibsonfan159]

2 hours ago, woz70 said:

Worth mentioning that standard cover and the blue cover deluxe edition use the same mastering for the original album content - the deluxe edition is not a separate beast.

Can you explain what you mean by this? Is the Davis not a true remaster or is it only an EQ job?

[woz70]

18 hours ago, gibsonfan159 said:

Can you explain what you mean by this? Is the Davis not a true remaster or is it only an EQ job?

The 2014 mastering job remastered the original stereo mix tape of the album. If you bought the standard remastered album and the deluxe edition too, you've bought exactly the same content twice. The only difference is the extra content on the deluxe version. 

All of the 2014 remasters are the same - the original album content (which is remastered) on the standard edition and the deluxe edition are identical. 

Yes, John Davis did a 'true' remaster.... and eq is one of the (few) tools that mastering engineers use. As none of us have heard (or are likely to hear) the raw stereo mix of the album - pre mastering - it's impossible to say which other tools he has used as well.

The fact that the 1990 remaster and the 2014 remaster sound so similar is down to two very good engineers using similar tools, making similar choices and ending up with very similar results.

The very nature of mastering a recording is subtlety... Enhancing what is already there, and making translatable to as many playback systems as possible.  In some instances a slight eq tweak is all that's necessary.
if you want to hear huge differences or broad stroke changes then you need a re-mix. For some of Led Zeppelin's songs a remix is simply not practical, and the results would be wildly different from the recordings that we all love.
(Whole Lotta Love is a really good example of this - the final mix we hear cannot be achieved simply by bringing up the faders and adding a bit of reverb/compression/eq here and there.  A lot of the sounds going on in the sonic-wave section were created by realtime manipulation of an echoerec (or similar) during the mix down process - those sounds aren't there on the multitrack tape! - and that sort of thing, literally mix down as performance, is just unrepeatable.  I suspect it's one of the reasons why we'll never see a 5.1 mix of the original albums, and especially not LZII).

To be absolutely clear: the tools available to a mastering engineer are eq, compression (single-band and multi-band), limiting,  and 'stereo enhancement'. That's it. 
It's not within the remit of a mastering engineer to change the levels of any element of a finished mix - which is all they deal with - that's up to the mix engineer.  They can alter our perception of the loudness of certain elements using compression and equalisation - for instance: subtle compression can increase our perception of 'detail' in a recording... it can make quieter sounds in a quiet section of music more apparent (simply by increasing the volume of a quiet section in relation to the surrounding louder sections) but it cannot change the balance of any of those sounds; eq can enhance certain frequencies that our ears are more attuned to to make guitar, for instance, sound more 'forward' in a song - but, again, the guitar hasn't been 'turned up' in relation to the sounds around it.  Certain frequencies within the guitar sound have been manipulated to make it appear louder.

Learning a bit about how our ears work, how our brains interpret the sounds we hear and accentuate certain frequency ranges (mainly the ranges where the understandability of the human voice lies), and a bit about psycho-acoustics is not only really fascinating, but really helpful in beginning to appreciate some of the concepts of perceived loudness.

Edited October 29, 2022 by woz70
clarity

[gibsonfan159]

Ah, by "standard cover" I mistakenly thought you were referring to the original masters. I totally forgot about the non-deluxe versions of the 2014 releases. 

17 hours ago, woz70 said:

The fact that the 1990 remaster and the 2014 remaster sound so similar is down to two very good engineers using similar tools, making similar choices and ending up with very similar results

Maybe personal listening experience but these two masterings sound very different to me, as do all the individual remasters.

17 hours ago, woz70 said:

and 'stereo enhancement'.

That's something Davis definitely improved upon. The soundscape on his versions sound vastly broader. How do you think that was achieved? Simply adjusting the channel balances for each track?

[woz70]

2 hours ago, gibsonfan159 said:

Maybe personal listening experience but these two masterings sound very different to me, as do all the individual remasters.

I've only listened in detail to The Ocean, so can't really comment on the rest of the album. 

Reading more widely on other forums, there seems to be a bit of a consensus that the Barry Diament mastering of HOTH is the most pleasing to listen to, which is interesting.  

I've listened quite a lot to the updated PG and I'm not a great fan of the John Davis version. It's lacking in bottom end compared to the '90 (especially Kashmir), which is my preferred listen. 

On cursory listening to the rest of the remasters the only real revelation is ITTOD, which to my ears is a vast improvement.  I still think that album could do with an actual remix though. 

2 hours ago, gibsonfan159 said:

That's something Davis definitely improved upon. The soundscape on his versions sound vastly broader.

Not my experience (definitely not enough to say 'vastly'), but like I've said I've not listened in detail. 

The whole subject of 'stereo enhancement' is a bit arcane, and not something I have a great deal of knowledge about.