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Re: [ARSCLIST] Fwd: Peter Copeland on RCA Victor recordings (1941)
David Lennick wrote:
Dumb question again..were a lot of late 40s Victors compressed and EQd
beyond all belief because of something opposite in the players they
were manufacturing at the time? I once heard Freddy Martin's Managua,
Nicaragua played on a 1947 Victor machine and it sounded fabulous.
Most Victors made from December 1944, including Toscanini and Henri
Rene and Spike and Tommy Dorsey, are impossible to EQ (and they get
even worse in Canada because they sent up production masters which
were re-dubbed in Montreal, complete with wow, clipped first notes,
chopped last notes, and more wow). This seems to end around 1950-51.
dl
Michael Biel wrote:
Tom Fine wrote:
You can hear that Victor was doing compression/limiting for sure by
the 40s. Listen to Spike Jones "Popcorn Sack" for instance, or other
material if you prefer less corny.
Spike Jones might not be a good example to use because a lot of his
masters were dubbed. The ledger sheets note some specific examples
where it was done because a gunshot or something overloaded the
recording, but I have a feeling that a lot of the release masters
were routinely dubs.
Actually I think the question is not whether Victor was doing it, but
if it was done simultaneously on each mic individually. It could be
that they were doing it selectively on a particular mic, or, of
course, on the composite mix. And considering your father's
technique of simplicity and single-mic recording, I would love to
have found out what his opinion would be of having all these
electronics compressing a half dozen mics separately!
Mike Biel mbiel@xxxxxxxxx
The evidence of records made by RCA from 1944 onwards into the early
50s, including those made on tape, make it clear, at least to me, that a
limiter was being inserted into the recording chain, most likely after
the mixer output and before the recorder. There isn't any direct
evidence for this from RCA's recording sheets, but since these were made
up after the session, and we seem to have lost any session-day
documents, including any purely engineering documents, we've lost the
key paperwork that some light on this very disappointing practice.
Mike Gray