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ARSCLIST  June 2013

ARSCLIST June 2013

Subject:

Re: Bass less reissues from England

From:

Carl Pultz <[log in to unmask]>

Reply-To:

Association for Recorded Sound Discussion List <[log in to unmask]>

Date:

Mon, 3 Jun 2013 08:26:03 -0400

Content-Type:

text/plain

Parts/Attachments:

Parts/Attachments

text/plain (109 lines)

Um, er, - - What? I've never heard of fringing compensation. Please explain,
Sir.

db - that certainly does seem to be the norm for the first round of EMI
reissues. Fortunately, they weren't as allergic to hiss as were certain USA
firms.

Growing up here in Capitol-land, I don't have many genuine EMI LPs. One I do
have is ASD 2323, Bartok V. Con1, Menuhin/Dorati/New Phil. Marvelous in all
aspects, but if you get tired of listening to the music, you can instead
study the sound of the subway rumbling at intervals beneath the venue
(Kingsway?). Clear as day.

A month ago, downtown Rochester became a movie set for a new exercise in
cinematic techno-treacle - Batman, I'm told. On the evening of a client's
concert, a chamber chorus treatment of Handel's Te Deum and Jubilate, they
were shooting a few streets over with sound effects. Every few minutes,
they'd launch a series of Booms. "Make them to be numbered" - Boom, boom -
"with thy saints" - Boom - "in glory everlasting" - Boom, boom, boom!

Neither me nor the guys in the white lab coats had set out to make a sound
effects record, so something had to be done. They probably did what I did,
notched out the worse of the rumbles. Whether you're recording for a young
conductor's Youtube vid, or for the ages, you can encounter the same
vicissitudes.

Okay, this is an extreme example, but these are the sorts of judgments
producers make and it adds to the variability of the product we buy.
Recording DC to daylight is cool, but sometimes a total hassle. When EMI
issued that Menuhin session on CD, and they heard the noise, what did they
do about it? Lop the bottom off and otherwise pretty much accept it, as they
appear to have done for the LP? Or go farther, given a mandate that CDs were
to be perfect, meaning no traces of old-fashioned imperfections?

I dunno. It's instructive to unpack the old decisions, but an exercise in
frustration, too. Maybe seeing it from the business management angle is more
on point. Did the exec suite have any idea how enduringly important this
stuff would be? Apparently, nobody else was given the luxury of Mrs. Fine,
to devote so much individual care to a large body of work, at that time. The
demand for product, cheap, "perfect," and vast, must have made for some
degree of compromised SOP. Maybe we should feel their pain, those who knew
that they could have done better. And be happy that standards, not just
technical, have improved so that things are so much better the second,
third, fourth time around.

-----Original Message-----
From: Association for Recorded Sound Discussion List
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Jamie Howarth
Sent: Sunday, June 02, 2013 10:56 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] Bass less reissues from England

Probably in the absence of tones fringing compensation is not being applied
.

Please pardon the misspellings and occassional insane word substitution I'm
on an iPhone

On Jun 2, 2013, at 10:27 PM, DAVID BURNHAM <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> My biggest issue has always been the reissues which come from England;
from the birth of the CD almost every reissue from England sounds thin
compared to the original LP.  IMHO, the British, more than any other country
was able to record music featuring organ solos, accompaniments or as a
member of the orchestra with astonishing depth - capturing 32 foot sounds in
a room moving way.  I could site any number of such recordings but almost
without exception, these sounds have been removed from the recording when
issued on a CD.  I can think of at least two reasons for this - firstly any
situation with an organ often has the rumble from the air generator audible
in the room so if they start to play the tape and hear this deep rumble they
filter it out and bye bye pedals, (I'm assuming here that the mastering
engineer is probably very skilled but may not have a taste for this kind of
music).  The second is that I've always believed that the tape machines
> used in England in the 50s, 60s and 70s had a frequency response of around
18 to 18khz;  but these machines have probably gone into disrepair and have
been replaced by newer machines with a response of around 30 to 30khz.  I
may be totally wrong about these conclusions but I can list plenty of
records which have undergone this thinning - the Decca recordings from
Kings' College and St. John's college, Boult recordings on EMI of Elgar
Oratorios, Vaughan-Williams Symphonies, Holst's Choral Symphony, etc. etc.
On the other hand when RCA Victor "Living Stereo" issued the Virgil Fox
recording on CD, (I think they only issued one), it suddenly acquired a rich
bass which was totally absent on the original thin sounding LP.  Go firgure!
> 
> db
> 
> 
> 
>> ________________________________
>> From: John Haley <[log in to unmask]>
>> To: [log in to unmask] 
>> Sent: Sunday, June 2, 2013 8:22:05 PM
>> Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] The ghost in the machine - what happened?
>> 
>> 
>> I run into CD reissues all the time that do not sound as good as the
LP's.
>> This has nothing to with the medium; it's the taste factor of whoever is
>> doing the remastering and/or producing, and what they have done *to* the
>> sound of something.  I agree with Dennis' approach, but sometimes the
>> decisions are not being made by people with good judgment about how
>> something either did sound or ought to sound.
>> And sometimes these bad decisions are being made by people who really
ought
>> to know better.  You just can't make any assumptions.
>> 
>> Best,
>> John Haley

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