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