Tweet Enough of pseudo remastering of Beatles recordings

This is how EMI sells this Carlos Gardel recording from 1922, although it is in the public domain:



Gardel hated EMI and despised that company and that name (faithfully getting out when they fired Max Glücksmann)... he preferred the name Odeon, which is the way tango people refers to that company.

This is how the tango should sound:

what does this post have to do with the Beatles??

This is how EMI sells this Carlos Gardel recording from 1922, although it is in the public domain:

(snip)

Gardel hated EMI and despised that company and that name (faithfully getting out when they fired Max Glücksmann)... he preferred the name Odeon, which is the way tango people refers to that company.

This is how the tango should sound:

(snip)

The EMI recording is closer to how a 1922 disc played on a 78rpm player should sound. Your "remastering" noise reduction has left behind audible artifacts. Try again.

Derek

This is how EMI sells this Carlos Gardel recording from 1922, although it is in the public domain:

(snip)

Gardel hated EMI and despised that company and that name (faithfully getting out when they fired Max Glücksmann)... he preferred the name Odeon, which is the way tango people refers to that company.

This is how the tango should sound:

(snip)

The EMI recording is closer to how a 1922 disc played on a 78rpm player should sound. Your "remastering" noise reduction has left behind audible artifacts. Try again.

Derek

You are wrong, the artifacts are unobtrusive as they should be. EMI does a bad job (some of their "remasterings" are even worse) and I have listed to the recordings in on authentic 78rpm players from well preserved records: the noise is in a secondary level, and the artifacts sound exactly as I left it in my repair. Collectors have agree with me for the last ten years.

This is how EMI sells this Carlos Gardel recording from 1922, although it is in the public domain:

(snip)

Gardel hated EMI and despised that company and that name (faithfully getting out when they fired Max Glücksmann)... he preferred the name Odeon, which is the way tango people refers to that company.

This is how the tango should sound:

(snip)

The EMI recording is closer to how a 1922 disc played on a 78rpm player should sound. Your "remastering" noise reduction has left behind audible artifacts. Try again.

Derek

You are wrong, the artifacts are unobtrusive as they should be. EMI does a bad job (some of their "remasterings" are even worse) and I have listed to the recordings in on authentic 78rpm players from well preserved records: the noise is in a secondary level, and the artifacts sound exactly as I left it in my repair. Collectors have agree with me for the last ten years.

No, I'm an audiophile and very skeptical of your assessment. I've also remastered 78's before myself. I'll send your YouTube link to a couple of professional audio engineer friends of mine and see if they agree.

Derek

I am no professional and no longer a collector (I can't do it here). I do my repairs from a tango point of view.

Send my recording to anyone you want... in the meantime... how do we repair something when we don't have elements?

This is the lousy original:



This is my repair, at the correct speed and approved by the family of the conductor of the orchestra:

I am no professional and no longer a collector (I can't do it here). I do my repairs from a tango point of view.

Send my recording to anyone you want... in the meantime... how do we repair something when we don't have elements?

My engineer friends are out of town - one's on vacation and the other is working on the west coast. Hopefully, I'll hear from them when they return.

It's very tough to restore a 78rpm recording when you don't have the original disc to work with. If you've ripped the audio from a CD, someone's already processed the raw file, and probably wiped out information you need. Most CD reissues of songs start right at the beginning of the music, eliminating any lead-in noise that you could use to create a noiseprint. The CD reissues tend to EQ the discs very flat, so they sound fairly lifeless compared to the original disc.

I spent about an hour playing with the same source file in two different audio programs (one of which was specifically designed for 78rpm restoration), and got similar results to yours. Which program were you working with?

Derek

I am no professional and no longer a collector (I can't do it here). I do my repairs from a tango point of view.

Send my recording to anyone you want... in the meantime... how do we repair something when we don't have elements?

My engineer friends are out of town - one's on vacation and the other is working on the west coast. Hopefully, I'll hear from them when they return.

It's very tough to restore a 78rpm recording when you don't have the original disc to work with. If you've ripped the audio from a CD, someone's already processed the raw file, and probably wiped out information you need. Most CD reissues of songs start right at the beginning of the music, eliminating any lead-in noise that you could use to create a noiseprint. The CD reissues tend to EQ the discs very flat, so they sound fairly lifeless compared to the original disc.

I spent about an hour playing with the same source file in two different audio programs (one of which was specifically designed for 78rpm restoration), and got similar results to yours. Which program were you working with?

Derek

Adobe Audition... I learned to repair recordings (I don't like to say restore) when I began to meet with tango collectors when I was still in Buenos Aires. Many of them had disposed their discs and had lousy tapes (one of them, who did sell rare recordings, not only had a terrible way of recording them but also recorded the music in used tapes of commercial recordings, which made them a time bomb). I learned to do it from scratch and with no engineering training, but common sense and occasional aid from my piano teacher to correct some tempos following the sheet music scores that I used to collect too.

Collectors that still have the original records are not many and most of them are not good preparing MP3. The best collector is Héctor Lorenzo Lucci although he is in his 80s; he used to provide recordings to a tango radio show that was discontinued in the mid 90s due to changes in the industry that forced the producers to get their own sponsors and paid for the time slot. When they were finally unable to keep doing it, they launched Todotango.com and tried to make CD versions of the show; but they were discontinued because the recording industry refused the copyrights for recordings that they never preserved.

Fabio Cernuda is a great collector and had posted a number of obscure discographies in a blog.

Adobe Audition... I learned to repair recordings (I don't like to say restore) when I began to meet with tango collectors when I was still in Buenos Aires. Many of them had disposed their discs and had lousy tapes (one of them, who did sell rare recordings, not only had a terrible way of recording them but also recorded the music in used tapes of commercial recordings, which made them a time bomb). I learned to do it from scratch and with no engineering training, but common sense and occasional aid from my piano teacher to correct some tempos following the sheet music scores that I used to collect too.

Collectors that still have the original records are not many and most of them are not good preparing MP3. The best collector is Héctor Lorenzo Lucci although he is in his 80s; he used to provide recordings to a tango radio show that was discontinued in the mid 90s due to changes in the industry that forced the producers to get their own sponsors and paid for the time slot. When they were finally unable to keep doing it, they launched Todotango.com and tried to make CD versions of the show; but they were discontinued because the recording industry refused the copyrights for recordings that they never preserved.

Fabio Cernuda is a great collector and had posted a number of obscure discographies in a blog.

Have any of these tango recordings surfaced on CD in Europe on the Grey Market labels? Copyright law there is different, so as these recordings exceed 50 years or so, they revert to pubic domain and can be released by anyone in Europe. I've seen CD's of Glenn Miller and Elvis (just to name a couple).

Derek

...I've seen CD's of Glenn Miller and Elvis...

Derek

Cool! I never knew they worked together!

Most of the tango reprints that were no so legal were produced by Yonishori Oiwa and Akhito Baba in Japan, from 78 rpm discs of their own collections and from others in Argentina. Oiwa produced compilations of high quality while Baba followed the policy of not restoring anything and leave all the background noises, which was frequently annoying.

Oiwa died around 2000 while Baba continued reprinting for a while. The problem with Baba was that his editions (first in LP, then CD) could be too noisy and he tried to avoid acoustic recordings. In his later years he reprinted recordings from the fifties that most of the people that were not really appealing to collectors. One thing that he regretted was that his friends cheated him: he published a number of CDs... his friends would reprint them ad infinitum and sold them at a more expensive price, without permission.

I only met him once, and at that time I was compiling my own CDs for a group of collectors (they provided my lousy cassettes). I was trying to reprint things that nobody else was reprinting and everybody was happy with the results, including him. I mostly compiled acoustic versions from extremely lousy recorded tapes (who knows where were the original disc) and trying to come with quality results, with no technical knowledge on how to do it: my first compilations took months, since I would constantly abandon them out of frustration until I managed to find a way to do it.

The Baba and Oiwa compilations were the obvious foundations for the successors of the Victor and Odeon labels to reprint recordings under a copyright banner. Before 2000 a company that licensed recordings from Sony and EMI began to finally put quality reprints of tango compilations although they limited themselves to post 1952 recordings (when tape masters were introduced in Argentina) that, for tango collectors, are not really of interest.

The more interesting tango recordings, for the most part, are from the days before tape masters. The industry refuse to go back to those versions and it is notorious the difference between recordings mastered in the early 50s and those remastered recently (no matter if the 78s were perfectly preserved).

In the mid sixties RCA Victor produced pseudo stereo reprints of tango recordings that everybody openly hates (they added echoes that were never there): you will always find those LPs in stores while the original mono reprints are harder to find and more expensive. In many cases, sadly, those lousy reprints are the ones used for CDs and even today are the versions you can find for purchase online.