Re: [ARSCLIST] How could anybody ever have thought this was acceptable? Rant

[David Lennick <dlennick@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Steven C. Barr(x) wrote:
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "David Lennick" <dlennick@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
> > I've just been listening to a recording of Rachmaninoff's 3rd Concerto which
> > keeps shifting between the piano present and the orchestra a mile away and the
> > orchestra up close and the piano sounding as if it's at the wrong end of a
> > flooded subway tunnel. At no point is there anything remotely resembling
> "balance".
> > And no it's not the Horowitz atrocity from the 70s..it's Gilels from 1955.
> >
> > I mean we occasionally make allowances for historical documents and legendary
> > performances that could only be captured on the fly, but this was 1955 for
> > cryin' out loud! Did anybody at the time think this was a "good" recording? I
> > would have fired the producer, or at least demoted him to recording oompah
> bands.
> Monophonic LP? Thus a question of balancing the levels of two mikes (or
> sets of mikes)? So, the question is: How much multi-input recording was
> being done that far back?!
>
> Steven C. Barr
>                                                   
You'll find it as far back as the 1930s if not earlier. I was once playing a 
1935 Stokowski 78, from the Firebird Suite, in a studio at CHFI and engineer 
Burrell Haddon (ex BBC I think) walked in and said he thought they must have 
used 5 mics on it. One mike recording (Living Presence) became more popular in 
the 50s..in fact I have some Mercury Classics 78 sets from the late 40s which 
make a big deal of using this technique.

dl