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

[Marek Boym]

You wrote "I bought some CD's from Time-Life of  50's music that had
been enhanced;"  Wrong, Larry, the word should be "DISENHANCED!"

I have a Jabbo Smith LP that has been "cleaned."  On one track there
is a solo by an instrument I could not identify!  AA friend acquired
an uncleaned version on Biograph, and lo and behold - the clarinet
comes through loud and clear, albeit with some of the scratches on the
original used!
Cheers
On 26/12/2007, Larry Walton Entertainment - St. Louis
<larrys.bands at charter.net> wrote:
> >> 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
>
>
>
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