Electric Light Orch - Don’t Bring Me Down

crapfromthepast wrote: Dave - Pre-emphasis was used on very early CDs, and was thankfully retired after the mid- '80s.

Wasn't this due to using tapes originally mastered for the vinyl releases? I've heard that Motown was particularly
notorious for this.

Indeed, pre-emphasis is an option which can be applied during the digitization of analog tapes. It is not on the analog master tapes, and has nothing to do with the fact that some CDs were made from the wrong production masters.

That said, Dolby A or dbx noise reduction is sometimes encoded onto the analog tapes and does not always get properly decoded when playing the tapes during digitization, and they can end up having a similarly bright sound because of this. But that's less common than pre-emphasis, in my estimation.

Also, when I used the word emphasis in reference to the 1993 gold disc of Discovery, I did not mean pre-emphasis. I know what pre-emphasis sounds like and that's not what is on that particular disc. I was just using the word in the general sense.

But it is true that at least some of the 1980s pressings of Discovery were mastered with pre-emphasis. Lazlo's list of releases suspected of having it hasn't been updated in years, but it does mention those. I believe "Don't Bring Me Down" on ELO's Greatest Hits Vol. Two also has it. There's a Steve Hoffman forum thread where these suspicious CDs are discussed.

Edited by mjb50

Trivia - I knew about the "groooos" lyric. (Probably on the album sleeve's lyrics). But I didn't know the guy on the Discover cover is a young Brad Garrett. That's the brother of Raymond in "Everybody Loves Raymond", right? I sort of see the resemblance looking at the album cover now.

<that weird sound at the end is the sound of the fire door to the studio slamming shut.>

To me, that did sound simply like a slamming door. Didn't know it was the one in the studio, but that makes sense, as it was the closest door to shut during the recording :)