Clipped waves and distortion.

[montalbano]

We have recently done a cut+galv+pressing job for an emerging band, signed to a major.
They supplied a 96 kHz master in files (double LP, so it was HUGE) due to a matter of "extra quality" the vinyl might have given.
The guys are fresh young people, musicians, they had been told about this by the studio "engineer" who clearly had got extra cash for this.
The first thing we did was to take their 96 kHz master, convert the file to 44.1 kHz, then reconvert it to 96 kHz again, and play the two files (original + converted) simultaneously but with one or another fully counterphased to let them see the difference: NOTHING! The only difference was a little bit of quantizing noise with an insignificant -50/-60dB level.
The master was anyway so brickwalled that the piano was slightly distorted, so before doing the cut we called them and asked "you are aware of this fact?" "yes, we like this way" "OK".
And we did the job. TPs etc. and they were happy!
Sometimes I had the temptation to set the level to -2/-3 dB and use a little bit of stereo expander just to "trick" the dynamic effect, but that's too fake, so what Dietrich says is correct in my view, but the fact is that with these masters you get 1/10th of the advantages that vinyl can bring.
Not to talk about people doing noise-core productions ...

[concretecowboy71]

Just goes to show that every job is different and communication with the client is important.

If you dug deep into every master, I am sure you could find something problematic.

Sometimes it is hard to draw that line between getting your job done and kicking a master back to the client. Sometimes it turns into a bunch of finger pointing with nobody taking the responsibility for the final product.

The funniest one I had recently was a band whose mixes were really bad (out of phase, no low end management...and so on). I suggested a remix and was told the band had deleted all their files so we had to work with what we had.

Just makes you shake your head sometimes.