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RE: There are precious few products from the 50’s that I find superior to products today

Posted by Robert C. Lang (A) on August 20, 2010 at 14:44:35

In Reply to: RE: There are precious few products from the 50’s that I find superior to products today posted by jazz1 on August 20, 2010 at 13:13:37:

You may have overlooked my opening paragraph of my post:

*****I, too, am a fan of the RCA Living Stereo recordings…….but far more for the performances than how they sound. I like the sound, too, but only so far as I think they are the best sound of the era. Speaking only of recording realism/quality and not performance......****,

You, too, may have overlooked my very last paragraph from that same post that stated:

***Of course, “performances” are another issue altogether***

To further clarify:

1) Over the years in discussions like these I have tried to learn to separate “performance” from “recording quality” and in my post to you I was focusing *only* and clearly on recording quality. I think I can appreciate the performance every bit as much as you do but still see the flaws in the *recording*.

2) I was not so much being critical of RCA Living Stereo as I was uplifting the modern recordings which I find more accurately replicate what I regularly hear at live performances. I have and enjoy and appreciate *numerous* RCA Living Stereos. I listened to the Munch “Harold In Italy” on Tuesday. And especially if you count my Lps, who knows I may have as many as you.

3) I was “dissecting” only for the purposes of this discussion. When listening to music this rarely occurs unless the flaws really jump out. And yes it was very apparent that when listening to old school stereo recordings immediately after listening to mono recordings how much they are alike than unlike in how they sound. This has nothing to with performance.

4) There are many who religiously tout the importance of “performance over sound” but they do so through the most expensive stereo that they can afford and they rarely listen to the mono recordings of the 30s ,40s, and 50s no matter how great the performance. Why? Because mono gets in between them and the performance. Why would that be? I have and listen to numerous mono recordings because I appreciate the performance.

5) Regarding taking Reiner over Fischer “any day”. See #1. But also, there is some Reiner that I like and some I don’t. There are some I *used* to like but like no longer, especially his “warhorses”. Over the years I have come to find some of those performance of warhorses “frenzied”. But that was not necessarily Reiner’s fault. The style and tastes back then tilted in that direction, especially to show of the new technology (Yeah, technology sometimes affected performance). Also, there are other influences that I was reading about in some of my American music history books (I inherited a couple of hundred of these books from my Dad). Many of these speak to the recorded history of music. Apparently, it was not uncommon for *performances* of the “golden age of recordings” to be “tailored” to the time limitations of LP. This could be done with cuts of repeats, for example, and/or “hurrying” the performance to fit the LP (the composition be damned). You might not like to hear that but it’s true (at least according to some history books). Performance is not always as pure as you hold it up to be.

6) As far as you being “old fashion”, no problem with that. My kids say the same thing about me. (Indeed, anyone who sits in a chair painstakingly positioned midway between two or more speakers is probably “old fashion”).

7) These bears repeating because they speak to the primary points I was making.
a) Modern recordings consistently more accurately replicate what I regularly hear at live performances and b) If a recording label were to make a corporate decision to return to the 50s way of recording/engineering I would look elsewhere to purchase my music (probably back to my Lp collection).

Robert C. Lang

Edits: 08/20/10 08/20/10

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