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

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.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. SOB2K is a completely new performance done using
modern instruments & authentic tunings. It should not be viewed in the
same light as SOB, the only common elements are the name of the album
and the Bach works composed (there is one new one). Carlos hadn't
listened to the original SOB for around 13 years when she did SOB2K, and
quite deliberately avoided it. The intentions in both cases were
completely different, and the two works stand separately side by side.

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.

The recurring theme here is that she was forced to do things with her
master recording that she didn't want to do, and which she felt
compromised the sound.

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

They operate on actual sound.

This is an absurd argument. Why is it necessary to make a distinction
over whether or not a sound has passed through air before it gets
recorded? Why is this musically relevant ? When it gets played back from
the recording it's not "actual sound" is it ?

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

I think you missed this part:

I am not interested in your opinions on why certain instruments selected
are "unnatural" for certain arbitrary reasons - dogma has no place in
music.

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.

Though in that case, the artificial and real sounds are blended to the
point where in some cases you can't tell the difference, although other
sounds are obviously synthesized. The rest of what you're saying is just
waffle, like the sort of thing you'd read in a university thesis, where
bored academics go around trying to manufacture their own relevance by
attempting to classify the unclassifiable and restricting every little
detail into little boxes for the purposes of snobbery.

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

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

You're saying that the same instrument changes between being artificial
or not artificial according to how it is recorded. That's whacky
religious zealotry.

--

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