Doncha get bummed?


We put a lot of time, effort, and money into getting really nice systems.

And then we have to deal with crummy recordings made by inept engineers.

Yes, many of the older recordings suffer from being from the early days of stereo, but I've gotten a couple of recent recordings that are really bad.  One even had miscellaneous noises (like scraping chairs and ruffling music pages) at the ends on numbers that weren't even edited out.  Poor mic placement resulting in bloated bass.  Bad microphone choice on the piano making it sound muffled.  These are all well-reviewed recordings, too.  Huh?

Piano in the middle with no width or depth.  Bass out of the right speaker, drums out of the left.  Ho hum.

And microphone choices for female vocals!  Terrible more often than excellent.  Veiled, compressed, metallic.  Blecch.  Sucks the testosterone right out of me.

I have one relatively recent recording where the drums are clipped in every track.  Clipped.  Awful-sounding.

If it weren't for Manfred Eicher at ECM I'd probably shoot myself.

Bums me out.  Maybe I'll go back to a Japanese transistor radio from the 60s.
bbarlow690
Many of the older recordings were made before the variable panpot, so you either got hard right, hard left or center.  Brubeck Time Out for example.  It's a great recording though and Morello's drums sound terrific. Some of the Bill Evans stuff has the drums pretty much hard left with the hihat hard right, which is very strange sounding.  But to tell the truth, most of the vinyl I buy sounds really good.  So maybe it's your system to some extent causing bloated bass or bad-sounding vocals.  Just do what everyone else does, but vehemently denies doing - only play records that sound good. :)
Buy some of the reissues of recordings on the Contemporary label reissued by Fantasy in Berkeley. 
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