It's such a shame that the microphones Carole King used on "Tapestry" were so awful. It was the first pre-recorded MiniDisc I ever bought back in 1993 and I actually thought that all the distortion I was hearing was due to the ATRAC compression MD used! Then I got other pre-recorded MD's and discovered that the ATRAC-PRO encoder used to make the pre-recorded discs (as well as encode Sony's SDDS films) was audibly transparent to 20-bits. Then I thought that maybe the MD of "Tapestry" must just have been a defective transfer, so idiot that I am, I bought the CD to make my own MD copy; well, I was shocked again to find that that the Super Bit-Mapped Sony "Mastersound" CD release was just as awful sounding as the MD. A used record store in Albuquerque (Krazy Kat Records) had a pristine copy of the original stereo LP pressing for only $4 so I bought it to compare - and surprise, surprise, there it was, all that awful distortion on her vocals.
Why, oh why did she use such awful microphones or defective equipment to record her beautiful vocals on that album? Do any of her other albums sound like that?
The SACD of Tapestry is kinda depressing too because it lets you hear the distortion even more than the CD. I don't know what it is exactly, and I'm probably totally wrong as to my 'guess', but it 'sounds' like the distortion is beating against the huge amounts of ultrasonic noise present with SACD's 1-bit delta-sigma coding, causing the beats to hetrodyne down into the audible spectrum and causing the existing distortion sound even worse - plus, its such a lackluster multi-channel mix to boot. For surround sound listening, I now just play the stereo version of "Tapestry" through the Fosgate Tate II 101A's "Surround" mode - it sounds like 'real' quad that way - and with a more interesting surround "mix".
