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In the Forum: Playback Listening
In the Thread: Attention Sound Engineers (compression and loudness)
Post Subject: Noise reduction and editingPosted by yoshi on: 9/19/2007
One Japanese classical music reviewer, Naoya Hirabayashi, who seems to be very keen on recording issues, blames heavy use of noise reduction and editing (combining rehersal takes, adding reverb, digitally correcting mis-notes, etc.) as two major problems of today's digital mastering. He compares many different issues of the same recording in his book to prove his point.
I only have one example he mentions, which is the famous Kleiber's Beethoven 5th with Vienna (DG). One is the early 80's Japanese issue (has only 5th) and the other is the newer "Original-Image Bit-Processing" issue (has 5th and 7th).
On the jacket, DG says;
ORIGINAL-IMAGE BIT-PROCESSING now makes it possible to remix older recordings in order to "recreate" the original sound-image. This recreation employs -wherever possible- physio-acoustical principles to compensate for delay factors (such as the time required for sounds to reach the main michrophone) as well as an extremely high-resolution processing of the musical signals.
To my ears, it sounds like they just added reverb, and as the result, some details of fast passages became hard to distinguish whereas I can hear them more clearly on the old issue.
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