About Us

Founded in 2008, sonic-recreation was started as somewhat of a quest. After over 20 years of life in the purely digital music domain, pursuing audiophile nirvana, we were reminded of how amazing vinyl can sound when we heard some vinyl transfers of Beatles' music by someone known as Doctor Ebbetts. They sounded incredibly good. So good, in fact, that they became our ''go to'' versions for every CD in the Beatles catalog. Immediately, the desire to make music by other artists sound so good became our quest. After an initial investment in some high quality, vintage equipment, we started off. At first the results, though amazing, were not up to par with what we'd heard from the Doctor Ebbetts transfers. By 2010 we had upgraded nearly all of the components in our mastering studio. We invested in some superior editing software and some higher quality record cleaning tools. We are now very pleased with the results, and we think you will be also. We thought at first that poor sound quality was inherent to the CD medium, but we found that a properly mastered CD can and does sound simply amazing. Please check out our catalog or read our services page to find out how to get your vinyl records transferred to digital.

A few words about vinyl to digital transfers:
The music industry has decided that louder is better, utilizing several different digital and analog techniques to create the illusion of louder and louder recordings. We, the listeners, have been hearing these recordings for long enough now that our ears have started to adjust to them and some of us find that they sound really good - brighter, more detailed, more energetic. In order to accomplish loudness in a recording, mastering engineers introduce several kinds of distortion, including compression and clipping - sometimes called "brickwalling", effectively reducing the dynamic range and entirely losing any audio depth that might have been present in the original mix version. Some of these techniques were even in place before the advent of the CD or digital recording.

At sonic-recreation we are committed to preserving the audio quality of recordings, and strive to present them to our listeners in the way the original artists and engineers intended.

WARNING: Proper Vinyl to digital transfers have much greater dynamic range than most modern recordings, and can sound odd at first - and though they have [in most cases] the same absolute volume output as modern recordings, they may sound ''quieter'' -- solution: Turn up the volume!! Here is a way to get the most out of your sonic-recreation recordings: Set your graphic equalizer or tone controls to the ''flat'' position, and then adjust them slowly while listening carefully to match what your ears want to hear. In most cases the closer to flat the better, but due to limitations in some home stereo systems, some equalization may be required to get the best sounding playback.
And most of all: Sit back and enjoy listening. You'll be glad you did.

Here are some interesting and informative articles and sites for audiophile enthusiasts. Happy reading.

(Unofficial) Dynamic Range Database
Wikipedia article on "The Loudness War" -- what's wrong with my CDs??!!!