[Dixielandjazz] A new thread....old recordings

[Larry Walton Entertainment - St. Louis]

>> Yet it was obvious that I was listening to an old recording.  What was my
>> brain responding to that led me to that conclusion?


Old recordings sound "old" because we like to hear a lot of stuff in music 
that early recorders just couldn't reproduce.  It's a lot more than just 
frequency response but a whole bunch of things that are inter related.  It's 
a lot like cooking.  Everyone has his own separate tastes but everyone would 
notice if something is left out of their favorite recipe and know that in 
fact something is missing even if they didn't know exactly what it was.

When recording studios try to dress up old recordings they often first do 
some sound enhancement which might involve boosting or cutting certain 
frequencies.  When a studio uses a notch filter for example to cut out hiss 
or scratch noise it leaves a sound hole.  You can't see it and you can't 
definitely hear it but it's there.  Then, at least early on, they tried to 
make mono into stereo.  That usually involved shipping certain frequencies 
to one speaker or the other.  The result was just never satisfying.

I bought some CD's from Time-Life of  50's music that had been enhanced.  I 
listened to the first couple of disks and found them just to be lacking 
something.  In the 50's we were used to that sound but today we can very 
definitely hear what is usually called presence.

As we get older we don't hear high frequencies as well as we did when we 
were 15 but that doesn't mean we can't hear them at all.  I'll bet everyone 
of us can tell the difference between a clarinet and an oboe.  The primary 
difference is in the overtone series of each instrument.  If you couldn't 
hear those frequencies you would not be able to tell the difference and be, 
in effect, sound color blind.  Older recordings are partially sound color 
blind and we can tell it.

I compare it to when they started colorizing old black and white movies. 
The first attempts were really crude back in the 20's.  They had improved by 
the 90's but you could tell they had been colorized.  Today they do it with 
computers and they are really good but still not perfect.

Maybe someday sound technology will be able to fix the re mastering problems 
but it's really unlikely.  The human ear is really amazing in what it can 
do.  You can't fool mother nature.
Larry
StL