In article , Stewart
Pinkerton wrote:
On 26 Sep 2004 16:57:57 GMT, John Phillips
wrote:

In article , Stewart
Pinkerton wrote:
...
1955-70 stereo LPs, which era also contained many of the very best
master tapes ever created. Thanks to CD, we can all now hear just how
good those masters were, ...

Hear, hear! I keep asking myself how it is that modern digital re-masters
from analogue master tapes can often sound as good as the best quality
digital recordings of recent years.

Well, in terms of fidelity to the mic feed, they don't. OTOH, those
old analogue masters have nice euphonic artifacts built in........

Indeed - by "as good" I was referring to something of an overall quality
which is clearly not perfect in just the "high fidelity" sense (although
on some - e.g. my 1973 Kleiber/Freischutz - it's amazingly good in
that sense).

However I keep asking myself whether it realy is euphonic imperfections
or other qualities (or both) which keeps me going back to remarkably old
analogue recordings in preference to clean but less involving modern ones.
(NB this is not true in all cases - my favourite Zauberflote - Solti 1990
- is a modern digital recording which has many of the recording qualities
of the Freischutz as mentioned above but is cleaner and clearly has more
dynamic range.)

There's an interesting comparison in my collection - Gould's all-digital
1981 Goldberg Variations and the recent re-master from the analogue
backup tape. The difference in Gould's low-level humming between these
two is fascinating.

--
John Phillips