[net.audio] RCA .5 Reissues

greg@olivej.UUCP (08/31/84)

More bitching and complaining, I'm afraid.

Heard by themselves, these premium-priced, snazzily
packaged reissues of "classic" performances are not
at all bad.  The surfaces are considerably quieter than
the originals.  The sound is, in all cases I've heard,
clear and agreeable.  The choice of what to bring out
of the vaults seems to have been generally well made,
aiming for a good balance of easily marketable repertoire,
highly regarded performances, and original masters with
high quality sound.

The liner notes describe the process by which the 
tapes have been remastered, removing the dynamic restrictions
which were placed on the original disk masters and running
at half speed.  So far, so good.  There is also mention of
"noise reduction" being applied.  I suspect this is the problem.

Ex post facto noise reduction is a tricky business since you
have to try to remove those signals which are detected by the
ear as noise while leaving the rest of the "music" information
intact.  These .5 issues don't have the clearly audible tape
hiss that the original RCA LSC issues do.  They also don't
have a good deal of the vibrancy and "presence" and, here
it comes again, "ambience" of the originals.  For my ears,
it's something of a case of throwing out the baby with the
bath.

As with the Philips "Golden Imports" reissues of the Mercury
Living Presence series, if you have the originals and were
thinking of disposing of them in order to get clean new copies
DON'T DO IT.  Or, if you really want to do it, dispose them
in this direction.


	- Greg Paley