Question for classical vinyl collectors

[narabdela]

I recently bought La Fille Mal Gardee-Decca SXL 2313 from Tony, unbelievable quality and worth every single penny of the £30 I paid for it.

It's probably the best record I've ever heard in terms of quality and clarity considering it is nearly 50 years old, to me it sounds brand new as if it's never been played.

I bought it on the basis of a review by someone in the thread in which it was being sold in and, as excellent as the review was it didn't even go anywhere near how good the recording actually is.

Tony

Not quite on topic (nowhere near tbh), and the above quote is almost twelve years old now; but I have this recording on CD and the recording quality is truly astonishingly good. Given that it was recorded 60 years ago, it begs the question, have we really made any worthwhile advances in recording technology in the intervening decades?

 

[Barrymagrec]

It depends on your definition of worthwhile. By about 1960 the quality of recordings could be such that they are unsurpassed by modern versions, however this was not always the case and many indifferent recordings from that era survive.

The improvements in tape technology and then digital recording since then don`t translate directly into better quality recordings but the hardware limitations are less and it is easier and much cheaper to get a reasonable result, however, to get a really good recording still takes a great deal of skill and care.

Modern multi mike multi channel techniques allow takes with lots of expensive musicians to be over quickly on the assumption that it can all fixed later in the mix but if the initial recording is poorly executed no amount of fiddling later will give a good result, in the old days it wasn`t possible to do too much later so it had to be right first time.

 

[MJSM]

I'm sure all of this has been debated endlessly on here before but I have not read it personally. My thinking is that although it is of course possible to use multiple microphones, multi-track recordings and mixer desks to manipulate the music any way you like, it is then dependent on the recording engineers to ensure that instruments are given their correct level in the master recording.

On that subject, who is to say what is the correct level for a particular instrument or section of the orchestra. To me it is intuitively based on their positioning on the stage, e.g. violins on the left, violas to the right etc as heard by everybody in the audience in slightly different ways based on their location in the concert hall. In the early days of electrical recordings microphones were placed in a single location according to only two different methods (amply described here - https://www.mixonline.com/recording/orchestral-recording-365592) with essentially only 2 or 3 microphones dependent on the method adopted. My personal thinking is that this was as good as it could be since it reflects one (the best hopefully) location in the concerto hall to appreciate the entire orchestra, much as any one person could do if they were sitting there.

The obvious problem with multi-microphone method (I understand that they now adopt the 'Decca Tree' method with additional spot mikes placed in each orchestra section) is that the essence of the orchestra is then adjusted according to whatever the recording/mixing engineer (or sometimes the conductor !) thinks is right for the piece of music being performed. I understand that this is also adjusted during the recording session to emphasise particular instruments in the mix before the final recording is ready for replication, which is potentially even further away from the original production.

I think the previous poster made some very pertinent points there, 'in the old days they had to get it right first time' and 'to get a really good recording still takes a great deal of skill and care'. It's also worth noting that many of the recordings that we can buy these days are essentially re-mastered versions of recordings done 60 or more years ago (good and bad) as noted above. Not all of the re-mastering is 'successful' in my view.

Just my two pennyworth obviously.