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

[Don Cox <doncox@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 26/04/07, David Lennick wrote:

> 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 I mean we occasionally make allowances for historical documents and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.

Acoustic recordings were often made with more than one horn. I haven't
been able to find a picture of this, or to find out how the sounds were
combined.

Regards
-- 
Don Cox
doncox@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx