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Ken Kessler Article In Christopher Ward Watch magazine

the caretaker said:
John Mcormack is a very good example..my mum loved his voice..hearing the records of him singing when I was a kid is a cherished memory..but when I listen now on you tube or qobuz.it leaves me a bit cold..so I think there is something going in the transfer?
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My enthusiasm tends to be for Barbirolli. If you've had a chance to hear some of the ancient 78-era recordings as 'digitally' cleaned up that are in the recent box set then you may find the sound quality of many to be astonishngly good.

Closer to your comments, though, may be the way Nimbus 'Living Voice' recordings sound on CD. Variable, but sometimes quite remarkable. Yet all come to us via CD now.
 
Jim Audiomisc said:
My enthusiasm tends to be for Barbirolli. If you've had a chance to hear some of the ancient 78-era recordings as 'digitally' cleaned up that are in the recent box set then you may find the sound quality of many to be astonishngly good.

Closer to your comments, though, may be the way Nimbus 'Living Voice' recordings sound on CD. Variable, but sometimes quite remarkable. Yet all come to us via CD now.
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I have a 78 of ' I hear you calling me ' with John Mcormacks signature scribed in on the run off...ps I can sing this song..quite well..it was a practice song when I had singing lesssons..I was a light tenor then..baritone nowadays
 
Jim Audiomisc said:
I love the way George Malcolm played the harpsichord. For Bach, etc, on that, he's the one for me. However Hewitt wins by a mile for me on Piano when it comes to Bach. In part, perhaps aided by her choice of piano. Bach on a Steinway seems overblown to me.
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I like bosendorfer pianos..always have..my father used to export grand pianos to Amsterdam back in the day..
 
Jim Audiomisc said:
My enthusiasm tends to be for Barbirolli. If you've had a chance to hear some of the ancient 78-era recordings as 'digitally' cleaned up that are in the recent box set then you may find the sound quality of many to be astonishngly good.

Closer to your comments, though, may be the way Nimbus 'Living Voice' recordings sound on CD. Variable, but sometimes quite remarkable. Yet all come to us via CD now.
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I'll have a look at those ' living voice ,' recordings.i have a few ' living voice " lps..the 1812 is rather good...
 
the caretaker said:
I like bosendorfer pianos..always have..my father used to export grand pianos to Amsterdam back in the day..
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I tend to feel that the choice of piano depends on the era/type of the music to be played. So models like the big Steinways etc, are good for music like romanic piano concertos. But for Bach they tend to swamp the clarity. Ambivalent about Haydn's piano music. Like the Brautigam set using a fortepiano, but also like Brendel, on later designs.
 
Jim Audiomisc said:
I found it an example of the kind of 'misdiagnosis' that medics all too often inflct upon their patients. The reality is that an 'MD' isn't a scientist or an engineer. Some of them are lethal. cf some of my web pages where they - more than once - nearly led to the death of my wife. And they failed to diagnose my medical problem for *over a decade* whilst barring any real investigation.
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Gosh that sounds awful.
In the case of Diamond I think it's pure and simple crankery. The author of "Perfecting Sound Forever" notes tersely that no one was able to reproduce his results.
 
zarniwoop said:
It’s surprising that someone who’s been in the business as long as Ken still doesn’t understand digital.



It’s fine if people aren’t interested in what’s going on but annoying when when an audio journalist is furthering misunderstanding.
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It's certainly annoying, but it is what Kessler's target audience believes and wants to continue believing.
 
TLS said:
I do not think digital was developped to improve a musical signal. The only reason is the pursuit of profit.
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In the beginning of 1980s already classical music recording industry was almost exclusively using digital. Why do you think that was?
 
Octavian said:
In the beginning of 1980s already classical music recording industry was almost exclusively using digital. Why do you think that was?
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Shiny new labels as marketing. Lyritas from that era generally sound a lot better than pretty much any early digital LP.
 
Cmon, digital ain't all that, no perfect sync filter exists in any real world digital playback device, so it's all basically broken...


Surely..?
 
gingermrkettle said:
Shiny new labels as marketing. Lyritas from that era generally sound a lot better than pretty much any early digital LP.
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Why did they adopt digital, a hugely expensive and cumbersome process at the time? Why have they not returned to analog?
 
Octavian said:
Why did they adopt digital, a hugely expensive and cumbersome process at the time?
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gingermrkettle said:
In case you missed that first time round. Remember all of those diagonal Digital labels on the corner of LP sleeves?
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Sure, I remember those. Let me see: record companies could have just stated that silver cables or magic crystals were used in the recording and printed that on the sleeves. Yet they adopted digital recording process despite of it being a hugely expensive and cumbersome process. Decca even designed their own converters. But - if you are to be believed - they did all this just to be able to print diagonal labels on record sleeves. And this marketing campaign has continued for more than 40 years. The diagonal labels are mostly gone but the record companies have not gone back to analog.
 
Octavian said:
Why have they not returned to analog?
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Would that have something to do with the fact that lots of analogue tape has disintegrated and copying an analogue tape involves a snr penalty for every generation (?)
The question seems to me not to be whether record companies are motivated by profit (of course), by why they thought that digital would be good for their business. This answer (albeit with reference to broadcast) seems sensible:
davidsrsb said:
No, the goal was that after digital you can copy perfectly and post-process in a predictable way.
I used to deal with analogue TV and audio broadcast and the build up of distortions in a studio was significant
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In addition you have the long -term storage problem. And in practial terms production and editing does require copying (which will incur an snr/distortion penalty every time in analogue).
Added to that the experience with radio and other areas woud have given a pretty good indication that digital transfer and reproduction did not incur any practical penalty in quality. All of this seems to fit with orthodox engineering thinking. I can't see any need to impute any subordination of quality issues to the profit motive.
I find it astounding that in an area where people make outlandish claims about things which make absolutely minute if any difference to an audio signal, it might be suggested that the industry should have held onto analogue technology which imposed very significant technical constraints on the quality of recorded and reproduced sound. (Incidentally IIRC @F1eng who knows a thing or two about analogue engineering, has been pretty clear in the past about those limitations and the transparency of a digital capture of an analogue recording).
 
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