Miles Davis = hissy?
Jan 25, 2008 at 2:14 AM Thread Starter Post #1 of 5

terriblepaulz

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I am listening to Bitches Brew right now, and the tape hiss (or what I presume is tape hiss) is pretty loud, especially at the beginning of the track. I have noticed the same thing with Kind Of Blue.

Has anybody else heard this? Do I have bad releases? Are these notoriously hissy recordings?

Thoughts, comments, and abuse are welcome.
 
Jan 25, 2008 at 2:40 AM Post #2 of 5
I've also noticed this on Kind of Blue. Live evil seems to have less hiss I think.
 
Jan 25, 2008 at 1:50 PM Post #4 of 5
Well we know that these recordings were made a long time ago by tape machines, probably without noise reduction. Typically the signal to noise ratio for a studio recorder in those days would have been around 60 dBs which is clearly audible at a high(ish) listening level. To make matters worse the master tapes may have copied onto other machines and this would double the noise level (+3dB). Modern digital systems give 90 or more dBs and are silent. Also a classic effect from headphones with a slightly uneven high frequency response will be a tendency to accentuate tape hiss (not saying yours are though).
 
Jan 25, 2008 at 6:32 PM Post #5 of 5
I have the box sets for in a silent way, miles davis and gil evans,(which has sketches of spain) and the complete miles davis and john coltrane. and they all have noticeable hiss in them especially on phones.

2 minutes of the beauty that is miles playing makes you forget about it though.

I do have a "remastered" version of Sketches of Spain from the mid 90's. It has noise reduction reduces the hiss, but doing that also introduced a harsh edge to miles trumpet which is just awful
 

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