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In Reply to: ...are waaaay overrated posted by madisonears on August 20, 2010 at 20:32:45:
I don't dispute the problems you listed with the Living Stereo and Living Presence recordings from the "golden age of audio": sure there are extraneous noises, tape hiss, and rumble - I guess I have a higher tolerance for this kind of noise, because the sound itself onthese recordings is so holistic sounding: I feel that the instruments are more in their natural relationship to each other, without the "help" from the control room that was so obvious in subsequent (multi-microphoned) recordings. In fact, I resent the engineers "helping" the musicians along in such an obvious way on the multi-microphoned recordings (as in the first Solti/Chicago Mahler Fifth). As far as the Living Stereo recordings are concerned, there is only one thing that does bother me, and that's the overload distortion on some of these recordings: the Stokowski Rhapsodies, the end of the Munch Organ Symphony, parts of the Reiner Scheherazade, etc. Even here though, one has to be careful: the Wagner selections on the Stokowski disc are not inflicted with this distortion and sound great! I mean, when I put Reiner's "Spain" disc on, it's hard to hear how recording technology has progressed very much in the intervening 50 years.
I was really struck by this when a local radio station played excerpts from two CSO recordings of the Emperor Concerto one after the other: Cliburn/Reiner, and Ashkenazy/Solti. Compared to the Cliburn/Reiner, the Ashkenazy/Solti recording was the cloudy mess, and I remember thinking how engineering just seemed to be devolving at that time.
Regarding the "strident high end" of the Living Presence recordings, that is indeed sometimes true, especially with the older ones where they were using the U47 microphones. Nevertheless, the Living Presence recordings demonstrate a similar wonderful holistic sound field, and, in general, I just do not agree that the high end is all that strident.
And I do prefer modern recordings in some cases: I like the Bychkov SACD of Strauss's Elektra better than I do the Reiner/CSO excerpts on a justly celebrated Living Stereo recording, which, indeed, does show its age.
I think maybe this is where our semantic differences lie: I personally do not claim that the LS and LP recordings are superior in every way - far from it. And I certainly enjoy many modern recordings from an engineering point of view. But in that one important respect, the "integrity of the sound field", I still think the LS and LP recordings hard to beat. In fact, the ONLY modern recordings that I've heard in recent years that compare in this respect with these golden age recordings are the Nishimura recordings from a few years ago (released on DVD-Audio and no longer available): here, engineer Tatsuo Nishimura used only five microphones (omnidirectional) for the five channels (one mike for each channel). The results are often revelatory - even when he's got soloists, chorus, and orchestra (as in the Mendelssohn "Lobgesang" Symphony), his use of the five microphones captures the NATURAL and exact placement of the musicians in a way that engineers who record with multi-microphoning techniques can only dream about - no matter how much these multi-microphoning techniques have improved over the years.
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Follow Ups
- Noooo waaaay overrated! - Chris from Lafayette 09:05:42 08/21/10 (4)
- Well put!! Agree 110% - jazz1 20:15:53 08/21/10 (0)
- I like lots of old stuff, too - madisonears 10:30:58 08/21/10 (2)
- RE: I like lots of old stuff, too - ahendler 13:01:55 08/21/10 (0)
- RE: I like lots of old stuff, too - Mali 10:44:39 08/21/10 (0)
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