magiccarpetride;613593 Wrote: > Good question. My example (Weather Report "Mr. Gone") miraculously > covers both -- it is the worst sounding music in my collection, and > also the worst sounding recording in my collection. > > For the purposes of this thread, let's mostly try to focus on the worst > sounding recording, even if the recorded music is brilliant. I realize > that it's much harder to top "Mr. Gone" and find an album that is > equally atrocious in both areas.
I have lots and lots of truly great and timeless which by today's standards are terrible sounding recordings but at the time of their recording were not particularly bad sounding. I'm speaking of many of the early jazz recordings such as Louis Armstrong and the Hot Five, several of which were acoustically recorded, as in directly to a wax cylinder without any electronics involved. There is no bass, okay mid range and rather tin sounding high end but the music is outstanding. Many, if not most, modern popular music recordings suffer from two sound killing techniques. First and foremost there is the use of dynamic range compression, aka the Loudness War, which make the recordings sound decent on crappy computer speakers and bad car stereos but horrible on almost anything else. Second there is over use of multi-track recording so that final recording has no spacial information and usually sound better in the next room where the all the separate tracks have had a chance to blend together. An example of this would be either of Elvis Costello's first two Warner Bros. recordings, "Spike" and "Mighty Like A Rose" - proudly touted as be recorded in several places and sounding like it. -- ralphpnj Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels -> Snatch -> The Transporter -> Transporter 2 (oops) -> Touch 'Last.fm' (http://www.last.fm/user/jazzfann/) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ralphpnj's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=10827 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=85882 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
