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Topic: Ommadawn audio balance< Next Oldest | Next Newest >
Gladstoner Offline




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Posted: July 17 2009, 14:19

When I played 'Boxed' Ommadawn through the car stereo, the audio was way out of balance. The female vocals and the "wood xylophone" instrument (toward the end of part one) were barely audible. Has anyone else had a similar problem? (I happen to play the CD with a portable Sony player through a cassette adapter). I wanted to hear from others here before messing with the stereo settings.

(My apologies if this was addressed in another thread)


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larstangmark Offline




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Posted: July 18 2009, 04:09

Quote (Gladstoner @ July 17 2009, 14:19)
When I played 'Boxed' Ommadawn through the car stereo, the audio was way out of balance. The female vocals and the "wood xylophone" instrument (toward the end of part one) were barely audible. Has anyone else had a similar problem? (I happen to play the CD with a portable Sony player through a cassette adapter). I wanted to hear from others here before messing with the stereo settings.

(My apologies if this was addressed in another thread)

A Wood xylophone? Wouldn't that be a marimba?  :/

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Scatterplot Offline




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Posted: July 18 2009, 05:14

You need an updated car stereo dewd. Your Ommadawn will be fine played on a CD on a decent JVC/Sony/Kenwood CD player. Time for an upgrade! Advice: Buy a FM/CD player with an aux in jack. You can hook an MP3 player to it, and with 1 or more Gigs of memory your MP3 player can hold plenty of music! Put a piece of Velcro on your dashboard(and MP3 player) and your MP3 player can hang there. Now you can have the whole MO discography as well as Tangerine Dream discography in your car.
Jim


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Gladstoner Offline




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Posted: July 18 2009, 13:44

Quote (Scatterplot @ July 18 2009, 04:14)
You need an updated car stereo dewd. Your Ommadawn will be fine played on a CD on a decent JVC/Sony/Kenwood CD player. Time for an upgrade! Advice: Buy a FM/CD player with an aux in jack. You can hook an MP3 player to it, and with 1 or more Gigs of memory your MP3 player can hold plenty of music! Put a piece of Velcro on your dashboard(and MP3 player) and your MP3 player can hang there. Now you can have the whole MO discography as well as Tangerine Dream discography in your car.
Jim

Thanks. I figured as much. I just wanted to try the easy stuff (asking questions) first before taking a screwdriver to the dashboard.  :)

Oh, and the MP3 player will also need to hold the ELO discography and the full repertoire of classical music....


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Bassman Offline




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Posted: July 18 2009, 15:55

Glad, assuming you're not going to run out and get a whole new hi-fi system for your car, I suspect the car adapter simply works that way.  I say this because I had the identical problem a few years ago, before buying the car I have now.  Some stuff sounded fine, other stuff... not so.

(And no, I didn't buy a new car just for the benefit of a proper CD player...   :) .  One day a horrible person ran a red light and totalled my Lumina... :( .)

Just trying a new adapter cord may help, if possible.  At the time I thought those cassette adapters were pretty handy little gadgets.


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Ugo Offline




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Posted: July 19 2009, 18:58

Before doing anything with a new adapter or a new cord, I'd check the ordinary CD of Ommadawn, if you have it - i.e. the non-Boxed mix - and see if everything sounds right on that one. I'm telling you this because I know that the Boxed version of Ommadawn, like all of Boxed, was mixed in quad, and the quad mix are intact on the CDs, in spite of what the booklet says. :D So it may be that some sections of Ommadawn aren't really clear because they've been mixed to go on the rear speakers in the quad mix, so maybe a slight phasing problem (out-of-phase stereo or something), maybe caused by your adapter, is cancelling out one of the two "pseudo-stereo" channels on the mix, i.e. either the 'front speakers' or the 'rear speakers' channel is cancelled out (I don't remember where the marimba and the female vocals are, whether in the front or in the rear). This channel is an actual one in the quad mix, but it's just reduced to a "pseudo" channel when the mix is played through ordinary stereo speakers. I'm not sure whether I'm being clear enough on this, but it's what happens to me when I've got a DVD that's mixed in 5.1 and I play it through two loudspeakers (such as the ones on my TV)... some things are often cancelled out, or muted. To give you an example,  I've got a DVD of Freddie Mercury's videos, which features just a Dolby Digital 5.1 mix and not a stereo mix, for all songs; on "I Was Born to Love You", all of Freddie's crashing piano chords throughout the choruses are completely absent when I play the DVD through stereo speakers and not through my 5.1 system setup, because those chords were mixed to go only on the rear speakers, which is kind of weird for a music video's sound mix... but I guess that whoever mixed it was playing a bit with the pan control, just like Mike did on the 5.1 mix of TB 2003... :D

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Gladstoner Offline




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Posted: July 19 2009, 19:19

Thanks all for the ideas and suggestions.

I listened to Ommadawn in a proper CD player in another car, and it was also out of balance, though not as bad. The level of car noise seems to be the inhibiting factor. It still sound fine at home.

I also suspected the quadraphonic "enhancement" (or its derivative) may have played a role as the gimpy little cassette adapter likely could only deal with a simple stereo setup.

Hergest Ridge, on the other hand, sounds just fine in the car....


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Bassman Offline




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Posted: July 19 2009, 20:32

Ugo, the quad mixes on Boxed are stereo "fold-down" versions of the original 4-channel.  The fact that a surround decoder can give a pseudo quad effect is just a nice happenstance, but it's a simulation nevertheless.  All of which has nothing to do with a car stereo system, where it's a simple L-R setup.  This has all been discussed to death on other threads, so I don't want to digress too much.  The info on the "Boxed" set is not in error.  It is stereo.  Multi-channel CD's didn't exist in 1989.

Sorry for the thread-jack, Glad.   ;)


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Ugo Offline




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Posted: July 21 2009, 17:39

@ Bassman: sorry for going off-topic... I too thought that the Boxed CDs were stereo, until Korgscrew explained me that they aren't. :D And I'm not talking about the CD themselves being multi-channel, of course they didn't exist back then. I'm talking about the mixes: Korgscrew told me that the original quad mixes were preserved intact on the CDs, and they work best when played through a quad decoder (or an approximation of it, such as my Dolby Digital ProLogic II decoder). I've got other CDs (for example, a couple of Deep Purple ones) which are not multi-channel CDs at all, yet they contain quad mixes. And believe me, the quad mixes sound very different from the ordinary stereo mixes, when played through the ProLogicII decoder. :)

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Bassman Offline




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Posted: July 23 2009, 19:10

Yes, that's what a fold-down stereo version of a quad mix is supposed to do.  The decoders are merely doing their job.

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Ugo Offline




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Posted: July 23 2009, 19:30

Quote (Bassman @ July 24 2009, 01:10)
The decoders are merely doing their job.

OK, so how come my old Virgin CD copy of Ommadawn, when played through the same decoders, sounds so markedly different from the Boxed Ommadawn? Even in my car stereo (to get back on topic) ? :D I admit I'm not too good at the technological aspects of these things, so please explain... :)

EDIT: Forget what I wrote above. I think I found the answer by myself... :p


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Incantations Offline




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Posted: July 09 2010, 20:45

Quote (Scatterplot @ July 17 2009, 21:14)
...as well as Tangerine Dream discography in your car.
Jim

That brings me back to listening all the way through Zeif. I think its called zeif... Oh! no, its Zeit, wow that was way back :D

oooh Tangerine Dream  :p


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