Klarinet Archive - Posting 000453.txt from 2005/01

From: Bill Hausmann <bhausmann1@-----.net>
Subj: Re: [kl] RE: Edison recordings
Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2005 07:33:55 -0500

At 10:09 AM 1/27/2005 +0100, Joseph Wakeling wrote:
>What I object to is not *playing* the film at a different speed but
>altering the frames so as to make them "fit" with our modern equipment.
>As I said in my previous email, "[W]here it's simply a case of our
>equipment not being able to process them properly then we need to alter
>our equipment, not the data." It shouldn't be too difficult, in an age of
>DVD players and computers, to be able to set up our systems to play at 16
>frames per second instead of 24 (for example). That would be
>fine. Altering the frames of the movie to make it "fit" our systems, on
>the other hand, is not (IMO).

The world has been moving rapidly to your view, as DVDs and tapes of movies
are now mostly available in the original aspect ratio. But correct film
SPEED should be built into the DVD/tape and not require user
adjustment. By the same token, an audio recording made at 84 rpm should be
digitized AT 84 RPM so the pitch and tempo will be correct. It is OK if we
want to alter these things in playback at out discretion, but they should
default to correct values.

>>The artifacts of the recording process cannot be completely removed, but
>>they can be minimized. It is actually quite surprising how much
>>information is present in those early acoustical recordings!
>
>
>I personally think that the artifacts of the recording process can be an
>important part of the character of certain recordings. I don't mind
>restoration, but I do think it's important to preserve the recordings as
>well as to try to recapture the performances. My ideal would be to have
>double CDs with on one CD the recording "as is" and on the other to have
>the restored performance.
>
>But I'm just an idealist... ;-)

It think the process is only in the RAREST of cases important. Mostly, it
is a limitation which the artists had to overcome or work around as best
they could. But mostly, I think it was ignored. They made the music they
made and let the engineers sort it out. If they COULD have had today's
digital recording quality, they would have jumped on it. Still, I have no
objection to your plan to have the original AVAILABLE for listening and/or
study (although most folks would listen to it ONCE and reject it).

Recently, Columbia (Sony) re-mastered the Benny Goodman 1938 Carnegie Hall
Concert. They determined that the original remastering had been overly
filtered and, while the surface noise of the original recordings was much
reduced, some of the hall ambience had been lost. Unfortunately, in the
intervening 50 years since the originals were transferred to tape, the old
acetate disks had deteriorated from age and were noisier than they were
before! The result is that they got their ambience back (for what it is
worth) but the new version has quite a bit of distracting extraneous
noise. Aside from the inclusion of some material that had been edited out
in the earlier release, I think it is a wash.

Bill Hausmann

If you have to mic a saxophone, the rest of the band is TOO LOUD!

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