Ah, now I see the complication of this VW Sym 8 issue. While the symphony is
the work of Mercury 6/19/56, the flip side is Auger's from 12/1957. But, on
the LP, the symphony doesn't sound like a Mercury production. A few things
speak from the center of the stage, but it's mostly got a L/R bias and poor
focus. The LP also has a strong high-frequency hiss that is louder and
higher-pitched than other SRs I have. Not on the lead-in, the noise starts
with the music, and is steady between movements. Not from the pressing
itself. Side 2 is similarly afflicted. The music is lower in level and not
as dynamic as, say, Capricorn Concerto. There are no production credits on
the sleeve.
Tom, maybe these sessions had to be edited in Manchester in order to get the
mono version out quickly, given the premiere of the symphony a few days
before recording? Possibly a 2-track master like you heard about was edited
alongside the mono, and shared with NY later for the stereo Mercury issue.
Depending on how they handled approvals, that might be true for the whole
history of the Pye collaboration. Maybe the 3-tracks were never touched.
Possible?
The Dutton/Barbirolli Society CD, a mastering from EMI 1992, is missing the
top-end noise, but is rather generic in its sense of place and occasion. Its
imaging also sounds nothing like Mercury, but what I suspect to be some
reverb applied to hide the aggressive CEDAR filtering does fill in the
center a bit. The soundstage is different than the LP, but neither are
correct.
I know a lot of Auger's work, so let's blame somebody else for whatever
happened.
-----Original Message-----
From: Association for Recorded Sound Discussion List
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Tom Fine
Sent: Wednesday, August 08, 2012 9:26 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] New-ish EMI set
Hi Carl:
Bob Auger was a great engineer, a real giant in British audio production. Do
some googling on him,
he was a major force over there. He was a staff engineer for Pye Records
when Mercury and Pye worked
together, and he and my father became good friends. Auger engineered many
Kinks recordings for Pye,
among many other things. He also taught Eddie Kramer engineering, and Kramer
said in at least one
interview that his drum mic technique was a varient on the 3-spaced-omni
approach, taught to him by
Bob Auger who learned it working with the Mercury crew. If I'm recalling Bob
Auger's obit correctly,
he also went on to be a major force in sound-for-TV engineering in the UK.
I would say, if a Barbirolli recording was made for Pye Records after 1957,
it was an
Auger-originated recording. If it was made for EMI originally, it was
probably not engineered by
Auger. EMI's approach to classical recording in the stereo era varied from
relatively few mics to
many mics, at least that's how I interpret what I've read and seen in
photos. And there was a whole
different approach taken by Carson Taylor for U.S. sessions, but that's
another discussion for
another time. I've seen photos are Abbey Road where you can count 40+ mics,
but I've also seen
photos from Kingsway where there seem to be a dozen or fewer mics.
If/when UMG acquires EMI, it's possible that the combined vaults will
straighten out the Barbirolli
master tapes and we may one day get a complete box set, using both Pye
first-generation tapes and
Mercury 3-track masters, plus later EMI masters. I suspect one issue with
the Mercury/Pye stuff is
that all the documentation may not be together in one place, which would be
solved by a consolidated
UMG/EMI vault.
-- Tom Fine
PS -- I agree abouit the V-W 8th, which was dedicated to Barbirolli and
premiered just before the
recording took place. There was all kinds of excitement surrounding that
session and the performance
was electric.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Carl Pultz" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, August 08, 2012 8:38 PM
Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] New-ish EMI set
> Tom, I've been curious about that situation, too, as another of my
treasured
> discs is the Pye/Mercury V-W Sym #8. I have both the Mercury LP and the
> Testament/Barbirolli Society CD reissue. The neighborhood is too quiet now
> to put either on (at the right volume!) to refresh my memory, but I'll do
> that tomorrow.
>
> Did Auger work for Pye? He engineered the Halle 'A London Symphony"
session
> the next year, 12/1957. It appears on the same CD.
>
> I was actually referring to the V-W sym 5, made in Kingsway in 1962. I've
> only heard the Angel LP and the ca. 1994 CD versions. Sonically, they're
> quite a disappointment, sounding rather muted and cloudy. Surprising for
> both the team and location, and the fact that the session was the return
to
> EMI for Sir John, after a long absence from the label. You'd think they'd
> have pulled all the stops. Is there a Barbirolli maven out there who has
an
> EMI LP pressing of this session? Does it sound woolly to you?
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Association for Recorded Sound Discussion List
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Tom Fine
> Sent: Wednesday, August 08, 2012 7:45 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] New-ish EMI set
>
> Regarding the Barbirolli material that was recorded by Mercury and Pye, I
am
> pretty sure that EMI
> used the Pye 2-track masters for their early-era CD reissues. I think
those
> digital masters were
> later leased to the Barbirolli Society, which put out some of the same
> material. According to the
> Mercury tape logs I've seen, all of the Halle/Barbirolli 3-track and mono
> masters were sent to EMI,
> many of them in the early 60's and the rest by 1971. I am not clear
exactly
> what the Pye 2-track
> master were. I was told by one first-person participant that they were
made
> by Pye from the feeds
> of the left and right mics, which would explain what I perceive as a
> non-Mercury-like weak center in
> the EMI CD reissues. Another first-person participant told me that Bob
Auger
> did his own on-location
> 3-2 mix and recorded to a 2-track master. A more logical explaination,
based
> on other Mercury
> operating procedures, is that Pye would have gotten a 2-track made during
> the first American LP
> cutting, so it is a "first generation 3-2 mix" tape. However, as I said,
the
> EMI CD reissues do not
> sound the same as the original Mercury LPs or mass-duped 2-track tapes.
>
> -- Tom Fine
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Carl Pultz" <[log in to unmask]>
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Wednesday, August 08, 2012 7:23 PM
> Subject: [ARSCLIST] New-ish EMI set
>
>
>>I was happy to find that the 'Sir John Barbirolli: The Great EMI
> Recordings'
>> box set contained a mix of transfers from across the digital era, the
> newer
>> ones excellent. A few tunes that had been the subject of earlier issues
> are
>> updated. One example is the famous Tallis Fantasia session, which Bernard
>> Herrmann had a hand in. The 2000 remastering in the box is dramatically
>> different than the 1980s reissue and just clobbers the Angel LP.
>> Unfortunately, the V-W 5 is not updated, but the glory shines through
>> anyway.
>>
>> As someone here recently said, much of the EMI catalog has lagged
somewhat
>> behind the state of the art. With such a huge catalog, that might be
>> understandable, even without all the corporate drama.
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Association for Recorded Sound Discussion List
>> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Tom Fine
>> Sent: Wednesday, August 08, 2012 3:06 PM
>> To: [log in to unmask]
>> Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] New SONY sets
>>
>> Mike, do you know if there's a policy as to WHICH digital transfer to
use?
>> In the case of both
>> Columbia (Sony) and RCA (BMG), there were many not-so-good attempts
before
>> good remasters were
>> obtained. For Sony, I'd put the ones that Dennis Rooney oversaw in the
> late
>> 90's as their best. For
>> RCA, the CD layer of the SACDs done by Soundmirror are vastly superior to
>> earlier attempts.
>>
>> For their box set, Decca went back and re-did some material that had been
>> previously remastered,
>> with good results. I think DGG did new transfers for some of the material
> in
>> their budget-priced
>> boxes, for instance the Kubelik Mahler cycle seemed to have all been
>> remastered in the late 90s as
>> opposed to some of the earlier remasters of some of the symphonies (I
> don't
>> think all were
>> previously released prior to the box set). I believe everything was
> brought
>> up to the era and
>> quality of the "DGG Originals" series, so circa late 90's.
>>
>> -- Tom Fine
>>
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Gray, Mike" <[log in to unmask]>
>> To: <[log in to unmask]>
>> Sent: Wednesday, August 08, 2012 2:47 PM
>> Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] New SONY sets
>>
>>
>>> As a rule, no new transfers are made from analog originals save where no
>> prior digital transfer
>>> has already been
>>> made.
>>>
>>>
>>> Mike Gray
>>>
>>
>
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