[terriblepaulz]

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.

 

[golgi]

I've also noticed this on Kind of Blue. Live evil seems to have less hiss I think.

 

[goldenratiophi]

Yep, all the editions I've heard are pretty hissy.

 

[Thermionic]

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).

 

[sno1man]

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