Are you asking for the best drum playing or drum parts on an album? Or the best SQ of recorded drums? That would be Billy Cobham for starters.
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@lowrider57 - Definitely about the best sound quality. A lot of good music didn't translate well to CDs and others were starting to use whompy/whimpy digital drums during the same period of time. Wondering when drums on CD's started to sound good. |
First I heard was "Weather Report", but I don't recall which album. I didn't own a CD deck until the beginning of this century, but a friend who worked for The Hollywood Bowl received one of the first consumer models as a business gift. When she installed it in her system, thinking that it was NOT working, she blew the tweeters in her Avid speakers by pressing play with the volume level set very high. I loaned her a pair of Braun L300's to use until I could replace the blown tweeters.
DeKay |
@bigtwin - I've tried to clarify this in further posts. I don't mean musicianship but the quality of the recording of the drums. What are the earliest drum recordings on CD which seemed to get out of both hyper-compression and digital boredom? |
The early Sheffield Labs direct-2-disk albums. The CD versions of those albums are of course not direct-2-disk (LP's, vinyl for you youngins' ;-), but recording engineer Doug Sax also captured those in-studio performances on the reel-to-reel machine Sheffield had in their studio. Those recordings were eventually issued on CD. |
You might have to go a bit further with what defines good sounding recorded drums to you, though. Do you mean, the sound of drums the way they tend to be recorded on the vast majority of studio rock, pop, etc., recordings? I.e., every drum with its own separate mic, multiple mics on cymbals, multi tracked. Where the end result is, kick drum that you feel in your chest, but the image of drum kit seems to be way to large, ss if drums are spread across the entire width of the soundstage. Or, do you mean more natural sounding drums, where they are more localized in the soundstage among the other musicians? Where it seems an actual normal sized human could be playing them. If you mean the former, the drums on the Return to Forever album, "Romanti Warrior" as played by Billy Cobham fit the bill. They translated very well from the original analog, to CD. If you mean the latter, drums on the vast majority of acoustic jazz recordings will do. I especially like the way drums are tecorded on most recordings on the ECM label. Very natural, very detailed, well defined within the soundstage, attack and decay is better tecorded. |
First thing that popped into my mind was Keith Moon, Won’t Get Fooled Again @blackbag20 the Professor - genius, master of his craft, and gone too soon. Along with Gordon from The Hip, two great Canadian artists that I really wish were alive today doing what they do so incredibly well. |