Digitally remastered vinyl?

Many of the early digitally mastered vinyl recordings sound harsh and thin. There are some gems from this era also. Like I've said so many times before, everybody along the chain must care a great deal to arrive at a great finished product. The concept of real professionals with excellent hearing and the experience required to get the desired end product is the biggest issue we consumers must contend with. Unfortunately, the great recording engineers during the pre-digital days were highly paid and intuitive (through experience) in their approach. The young technical types that replaced them lacked experience. It doesn't matter whether we are talking about an audio compact disc or a analog vinyl record, pick "one" best example and "one" worst example and play them. The best example is worth several thousand dollars in equipment upgrades. The worst example can't be made right regardless of the dollar investment in equipment. The upgrade heirarchy should start with the source and the real source is the studio work, artists included. Vinyl at it's best and digital at it's best are both great mediums with individual strengths and weaknesses.

Viridian, it is inherent in the playback of vinyl through the recovery of the signal from the grove, because of the 90 degree difference where the L and R signals are picked up. In a recording, some of the left signal is captured in the right channel and vice versa. That "bleed" is slightly out of phase with the opposite channels. If this is not permitted (highly isolated L & R channels), then reproduction of this by CD will not add this effect. If this same "poor" recording is, however, retrieved through vinyl, the inherent phasing effect of the cartridge puts some phase difference in the L & R signals, giving a more "real" sound.
Remember that one of the reasons that we can locate sounds in space is due to phase clues due to the slight arrival time differences in the left and right ears.
It is this phase difference and reverberation clues that enable us to get a feel for the size of the room in which a recording is made.

Vinyl playback of digital recordings in the late 70s, for the most part sounded very poor (DG's especially), but some were quite good after a while of learning how to do them properly. A well recorded CD (with the appropriate microphone set-up which allows some phase difference information in each channel) sound just as good as vinyl.

I am not surprised that you haven't heard of this explanation, since we just don't pay enough attention to recording process as a way of understanding the listening process.

BTW, it is exactly this hidden information in the L & R channels that is retrieved by the Hafler circuits for rear channels. On poor sounding CD's one does not retrieve as much signal for the rear channels as the same recording played back through vinyl, even though the source signals are the same - vinyl creates some of it to be retrieved. Trust me I have done the experiment to confirm this.

Inpeppinnovations, thanks for an engaging and reasoned explanation of your theory. I am not ready to sign up as I believe that there are many distortion mechanisms at play in both media, however your theory is most interesting.

I've thought of this a lot. Especially all the studio-grade cabling and connectors the signal goes through, in addition to all the circuitry. The ABKO releases of the early Stones proved this.

It all adds up to vinyl for vinyls sake, and it isn't worth it. I'd *much rather search out a used original, for the most part.

One of the reasons they dropped the "DDD" "AAD" and "ADD" labels is that modern record production is rarely so simple in its use of technology. In a modern pop/rock recording the original base tracks of a song may start out as a digital recording within a computer running Cubase or some other sequencer/recording program. These tracks may later become synched to a 24 channel, 2" analog tape recorder and additional music tracks added. Everything could then be ported over to ProTools, a digital workstation, for editing and mixing. Rather than keeping it digital through the final mastering stage, alot of producers/musicians like the sound of their final mixes when they are transfered to 1/2" analog tape. Whether or not the submitted music is in a digital or analog format, most of the better mastering houses still use analog signal processors before downloading the material into a digital workstation (SADiE or Sonic Solutions) for final prep to redbook CD format. What's interesting is that great sounding records can actually result from such a serpentine recording process, but to Lugnut's earlier point, it's all about the skill of the engineers and the level of care they take.