The Most Digital Recording You Ever Heard

In the early 80s, I bought a top of the line Denon CD player, and got a cd copy of Led Zeppelin 4.  I listened to it, then compared it to my vinyl copy (Logic DM101 tt, Signet tonearm, Monster Alpha cartridge).  I don't think I bought another CD until 1989 when I got a Mazda RX7 that had a CD player.

Unfortunately threw aware my Garrard 401 / SME, in some strange fit, not unhappy re giving up vinyl but very unhappy about what it could be sold for. I had replaced all my favourite records with CD's because the vinyl sound with clicks and pops drove me crazy. I have good CD's and poor CD's but no pops and crackles. Recently went to favourite HiFi store and listened to $100,000 vinyl set up, you guessed it, it still had pops and crackles, sorry but I cannot compare even the worst CD with vinyl.

unison77
Yello ’Touch’ sounds nauseatingly ’digital’ in my gear - the recording is harsh with exaggerated sibilance in female voice...

Zero harshness or sibilance or digitus in Yello’s ’Touch’ when played in my rig. Smooth as silk.  Female vocals sound pristine.  Clean power is the key!

Even the recordings from the early 80s that I didn’t take to back in the day sound very listenable on good modern playback equipment.  We are truly living in a Golden Age of Digital Sound 

OP ...an old 'dial-up' modem...Next...*L*

Rush: Hold Your FireIt was mastered DDD...all digitalAnd it is their suckiest recording.

I remember when I bought it thinking, 'This is going to be amazing!' What a disappointment.

Just not dynamic at all...super compressed and dead. Clean but lifeless.

I have a decent CD rig with an excellent DAC and I enjoy digital 30% of the time. A good recording is a good recording. But all things being equal, LPs have a slight edge over the best digital.

I'm sure digital will eventually win. It's getting there. But not yet.

@anotherbob 
It's best to not feed the beta troll, and rest easy knowing you're living a better life. Imagine this forum being so critical to your existence you spend the equivalent of 11 weeks worth of time (24/7) posting nonsense.

I used to love Nightfly as a recording more than I do now. Now, it does sound too digital, in the ugly ways with which people may be familiar.

This article has a great history of how and why The Nightfly was recorded in digital and why Fagen retreated from it.

Key passage:
"[Engineer] Scheiner says he wasn’t at Nichols’s A-B-C shootout, and if it were up to him The Nightfly would’ve been recorded on the 24-track Studer. In fact, when Scheiner recorded Steely Dan’s final album, Everything Must Go, in 2003, he dissuaded Becker and Fagen from using Pro Tools by setting up his own shootout between a PT-based digital system and a Studer A827 24-track. This time, Becker and Fagen picked the Studer. Explaining the retreat from digital to Sound on Sound in 2003, Fagen quipped, “Digital sound loosens the fillings in your teeth. I had a lot of work done on my teeth since I started working with digital.”

Whatever Scheiner and Fagen’s later misgivings about digital recording — or its consequences for Fagen’s dental health — both the The Nightfly’s sound and its place in audio history would be shaped by use of the 3M Digital Audio Mastering System."

https://audiophilestyle.com/ca/the-best-version-of/the-best-version-of-donald-fagen%E2%80%99s-the-ni...

P.S. Fagen's Sunken Condos album is recorded in digital again -- Avid's Pro Tools  -- but it does not have the same glare as Nightfly. Things evolve.

Ry Cooder - Bop Till You Drop - well never mind !!

Pretty much anything released by Iron Maiden is digital rough. 

The first song I heard that was "the most digital recording" was the first song I played on an iPod.  The second most digital was the second song I heard on an iPod.  The 3rd?  You guessed it, the 3rd song I listened to on an iPod.  By the 4th song I was maybe getting used to that weird chopped up packetized sound but the next day there was that glaring obvious digital sound.  Yes, you could but your entire music collection onto an iPod, but the fatiguing harsh sound pushed me back to listening to that outdated technology of scratches on a vinyl disc played by a needle that scrapes more of the glorious peaks off the vinyl with each play.  I thought I would never go back to that self destructive musical medium but digital music played on the height of musical technology, the iPod, drove me back to vinyl.

Yello 'Touch' sounds nauseatingly 'digital' in my gear - the recording is harsh with exaggerated sibilance in female voice...

Brother's In Arms is the first one that comes to mind as having that distinct digital feel.  Donald Fagen's Nightfly is another.  I think they both came out about the same time.  I would not describe it as bad since it is still better than vinyl but it does have a certain feel.

For me, I think Frank Zappa's "Thing Fish" is one of the most digital sounding titles I own whether vinyl or disc. And I'm a huge Zappa fan. 

I have many more awful sounding records than I do CDs.

You guys and your pissing matches of digital verses vinyl. I listen to mostly vinyl but I have heard good digital also.

If what you have is pleasing to you then why do you get in pissing matches about this. The bottom line is that you like what you have and the rest doesn't matter.

Good god people get a life and enjoy your music in whatever format you enjoy.

millercarbon:  First off, don't surmise that "everyone on here" feels that digital is worse than analog, that's not the case, not by a longshot.  Speaking just for me, I've heard the good of both, and I own the good of digital and I'm totally happy with it.  You're so invested in analog/vinyl that I'm sure it would kill you (not literally) to admit that digital is just as good, if not better, than vinyl.  Above and beyond the SQ, of which modern digital is superior, there's the choice !  $14.99 a month for thousands upon thousands of choices of varying genres, you'd have to be a blithering idiot not to recognize that.  Maybe every dinosaur on here likes analog versus digital, but certainly you're wrong when it comes to "everyone" thinking analog is superior.  Pop, hiss, scratch.....

You mistake me - I'm a digital guy, and remain won over to the CD, but no one can deny that back in the earlies there were some really dodgy digital recordings coming out, and I was asking if any particular ones stuck out.

I love a lot of digital and to my ears it sounds just as good as much vinyl. A lot comes back to the recording. 

@teo I agree about BIA. I like the sound of Communiqué much better.

So everyone accepts the premise that "digital" is derogatory. Digital does have a sound, and it ain't good. The sound it has is in fact so well known to be bad that even here in a digital forum everyone takes it for granted, and no one argues about the word "digital" being used in lieu of "bad".    

Fascinating.

In a general sense, most cd's  from 80's- early 2000's. Analog to digital converters in studios pretty bad in this era. And this with both remasters from analog tape and pure digital recordings. I have any number of cd rips from this era, streams from newer iterations of same recordings nearly always sound better, sometimes dramatically so.

"I put before the house is, what was the digital recording that your view epitomized everything that was wrong with digital"

That's a fairly leading question, innit?

+1 on DG.  Always liked their vinyl in the past, but their digital is never very good. 

Beginning of digital era with a good exmple. But it is not the worse. DG has plenty.

Brothers In Arms
(I say this while wearing my 'No Fear' t-shirt, the t-shirt that is bullet proof in deflecting the attacks of people who are.. possibly...just a tad too fond of that recording).