In article ,
Chesney Christ wrote:

A certain MiNE 109, of uk.rec.audio "fame", writes :

Carlos at no point described any of what she did as "departing from the
original". Throughout her discussion of the remastering her emphasis is
quite clearly on preserving as best as possible the full sound recorded
to the original master tapes, and she describes the pains she went to in
the process of achieving a good balance between removing blemishes and
altering the music. At no point did she suggest that she was attempting
to revise, rework or enhance those works.

She is aware of the issues and discusses them without your dogma. In a
new mastering, she chose not to be absolutely faithful to the original,
but to improve upon it, using skills, tools and experience not available
the first time around.

Carlos did not describe what she did as "improving on the master". I'll
happily be contradicted.

What is removing blemishes but improving? Remember, I mentioned her
comments positively as a thoughtful discussion of this kind of issue.

She *did* correct some tiny problems, such as the ticks produced by the
Moog's envelope generators and some of the pitch errors that became
audible, and a tad of noise reduction and pitch correction. Those
admittedly *were* on the master tape, but this does not constitute the
kind of wholesale alteration we're talking about when we do an LP
cutting master.

Where's your master tape fetish now? The pitch correction, etc, are all
changes to the original. What would you think of a pop singer
auto-tuning an old performance?

There is a cutoff point which I concede is entirely arbitrary.

Thank you for departing from the absolute. It leaves a lot of room for
agreement.

But don't
you think there's rather a difference between removing a small number of
ticks, or providing a shade of noise reduction, and re-doing the master
from scratch ? If Carlos had seen it that way she'd have gone back to
the multitracks.

She did revisit the repertoire in SOB 2K (Switched On Bach 2000 on
Telarc). I approve of her approach in trying to preserve the integrity
of the original intent but making appropriate changes.

Of course, she's not an lp mastering engineer,

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

I stand corrected. I mean that she didn't master the SOB records.
Indeed, if she had, she might have been more pleased with the results.

No. Elsewhere on her site Carlos describes the limitations of LP
mastering and how glad she was to be rid of them. The fact that union
rules prevented her from actually doing the LP cutting master part on
SOB isn't relevant.

One doesn't go into synthesis without desiring and exercising a certain
measure of control. She was clearly unhappy with the mastering, just as
she was unhappy with CBS's quad format, as she said on the website.

I didn't say she'd be happy, just more pleased.

Can you explain "artifical aural space" please ? I think you're talking
******** with that remark, to be frank about it.

It's what you get when you don't use microphones.

Last time I checked, microphones were man-made (artificial).

They operate on actual sound.

Dig around the website
somemore. Notice terms like "ambient".

http://www.valley-entertainment.com/..._The_Absolute_
Sound/

I think you missed this part:

"I mean, go figu these guys are supposed to be into the ultimate in
literalistic imagery - the goal of reproducing the sound of real
acoustic instruments in a real concert hall space. Why should they be
interested in the imaginary studio-created sounds and ambiences of
spacemusic?"

Notice the opposition of "reproducing the sounds of real acoustic
instruments" and "imaginary studio-created sounds..."

Ms Carlos can explain it better than I can. Her mix of ambient and
artifical sounds in "Sonic Seasonings" is an example before the fact of
the spacemusic style.

I take it you're including electric guitars ? Are they "artificial" ?

Depends. Miking a speaker cabinet, no. DI, maybe. Triggering
synthesizers, yes.