Best mastered recordings

Craig,

I spend a lot of time researching the label/audio engineer/mastering. It makes an enormous difference. Budget and target audience also plays a big role - often movies soundtracks get more money and you get a much higher quality production aimed at the commercial theatre THX sound systems.

I find Telarc (Micahel Bishop and Co.) very good on the whole. I have only had severe trouble with RCA and DG. However DG also has some exceptional stuff - so it is hard to generalize by a label alone.

In more popular genres here are a few names to look for in engineers credits (you can find this info on artists direct):
Doug Sax (Sheffiled labs fame and mastering of loads of stuff)
Bob Ludwig (Mastering - loads of stuff)
Elliot Scheiner (Steely Dan)
Chuck Ainlay (Mark Knopfler sound)
Peter Walsh (Peter Gabriel...)
Hugh Padgham (Police etc.)
Quincy Jones (Earth Wind and Fire etc.)
George Massenburg
Gavin Lurssen
James Guthrie (Pink Floyd sound)
Steve Hoffman
Michael Bishop (6 Grammys)

Engineers to avoid
Steve Lillywhite (may have started the whole movement towards really horrible compressed sound - it worked for U2 and many bands followed)
Rick Rubin
Vlado Meller (Although he is noted for the Red Hot Chilli Peps and Oasis Morning Glory - overly compressed sound - he has done some great work for Tower of Power - he may be governed by the band/producers requirements desires for harsh compressed sound, in any case he has produced some over compressed stuff in the past so carries a "warning")
Ted Jensen
Rob Cavallo
Dan Hirsh
Bill Inglot
Janne Hansson
Alan Smyth
Leon Zervos
Brian Gardener
Joseph M. Palmaccio

I agree with Kal in that there is no way that you can say that the recordings involved are the same recording, but would like to point out at least one thing in general. Each of the recording companies mentioned has different recording philosophies and uses different techniques to record. Telarc has been more of a minimalist, "audiophile" label; depending on when the Telarc recording was made, they may have used as their principal miking array three spaced omni-directional mikes, which will result in a spacious but diffuse soundstage compared to a multi-miked product, such as EMI and DG use. EMI, while it does multi-mike, generally has in the past had a basic miking array that was the main source of their finished product--the spot mikes were used to fix things that didn't work as well as they had wanted in the limited time they had to make the recording in what may have been a new venue for them (this from a talk I had with one of their former recording engineers). DG's general recording philosophy, from what I have read in the past, has been to multi-mike everything, run it all through a very sophisticated mixer and let the producer (tonmeister), in conjunction with the artists, come up with a finished product. Their recording chain is highly processed, is often recorded using short takes of each part of a work rather than a complete movement, and is the antithesis of the audiophile purist recording philosophy--they will be the first to admit that their recordings are intended to appeal to the music lover rather than the audiophile, and I have found that they often tend to sound better on a mass-market system than they do on some high-quality audiophile systems. That their recordings sound like the real thing you'd hear in a concert hall is coincidental, in my view, but the fact that they sound as good as they do musically is a tribute to their artists and to the musical sensibilities of their "tonmeisters".

There, I got that off my chest. In answer to the question, ignoring the example, yes, different recording companies produce different results in their recordings, and there are some that are better than others, depending on what your priorities are in listening to music on your system. Check the archives, there are a lot of threads on this topic. I personally find that, as a general proposition, classical recordings these days of orchestral works have gotten to the point where most of them sound pretty decent to me, though my favorite labels seem to be Telarc, Reference Recordings, London/Decca, Harmonia Mundi, Bis, Ondine, Delos (now defunct, I fear) and the San Francisco Symphony's house label (and take note, there are a number of different recording philosophies represented in this group). None of these companies can match a live concert performance, but these are the labels that seem to produce a more realistic facsimile of a real performance to me. YMMV.

The guys that consistently seem to do the best jobs are Stan Ricker and Steve Hoffman. There are a few people who have made a name in the business that I think must either be deaf or just don't care, but I have yet to hear anything bad by the two afore mentioned gentlemen...

As far as the Saint-Saens Symp No3 recording, there must be dozens of them, if not considerably more, and they all sound different. There are too many places to lay the blame or responsibility for that.

O

o

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Lots of reasons why recordings sound different...to many people with input, different rooms, different mic's, different mic placement...ect...lots and lots of reasons.

Check out some of these recording sessions using Royer Labs ribbon Mic's....lots of pics, and even sound bites....you'll get the idea.

Also, some of the Stereophile recordings go into different Mic types, and setup...you can order these recordings from Stereophile.

http://www.royerlabs.com/

Dave

I really like Bernie Grundman's work. I also like Stan Ricker.