[78-L] Murray Hill Caruso was Worst reprocessed reissue

[fnarf at comcast.net]

This kind of thing still goes on, with modern music -- or at least it did in the early CD era. I think a lot of engineers at first didn't understand that digital requires very different processing than analog, starting with the fact that when you push the needles into the red you don't get a warm fuzzy vibe; you get dreck. Some early attempts at compression resulted in truly horrible sound.

I have a German issue of a CD, "Tallulah", from 1987, by a group none of you have ever heard of, Australia's The Go-Betweens. The UK and American CDs sound great, but this German one has had something dreadful done to it that makes it sound like it's playing in a barrel.

The worst LP I've ever heard, at least by a legit company that should know better, is a "Duophonic" Capitol reissue of Sinatra's "Swing Easy!" LP. Same barrel echo effect. I dunno if this was their first stab at fake stereo or what, but it sounds really horrible.



----- Original Message -----
From: "Michael Biel" <mbiel at mbiel.com>
To: "78-L Mail List" <78-l at klickitat.78online.com>
Sent: Tuesday, December 22, 2009 12:28:36 PM GMT -08:00 US/Canada Pacific
Subject: Re: [78-L] Murray Hill Caruso was Worst reprocessed reissue

From: "Thomas Stern" <sternth at attglobal.net>
> I was aware of that set, but never was able to find it.
> IIRC it became an instant "collectable".

It was on the front cover of a Publisher's Central Bureau catalog. 
$15.95 I think for 14 or 16 LPs.  A few people who quickly ordered it
got it, but most were told it was out of stock.  It was well known that
RCA had ordered it off the market.  A few months later the subject came
up at ARSC, and I remember it was during a field trip on a bus that one
of the guys said that there are copies available at, I think, Berkshire
Records.  I QUICKLY ordered two copies and got them!  One is still
sealed in my warehouse.

> I have a vague recollection that the rumored source was a UK label
> (Olympic ??) which had issued a 'complete caruso' on a series of
> single LPs. I think I had a few of them, perhaps a generic
> green/yellow??? jacket. Anyone know if that is correct? 

I think so.  Olympic was the label name as part of the Everest Group
that issued those Jolson and Cohan fake Quad LPs I mentioned, and those
covers had green/yellow covers with an overlay painting of the artist. 
These records and all the Everest Group stuff was in the PCB catalogs
and also in the annual college bookstore traveling record sales in the
70s to mid-80s.  

But, the 1902 and 03 recordings match the masters from the old Scala or
TAP (Top Artist Platters) issues in the 50s, one of which used the John
Secrist collection.  I do have these 3 LPs, although I never bought any
of the other Caruso LPs the small companies put out because I had all of
the RCA Victor LPs including the 3-disc white padded cover limited
edition "Caruso".  (That album was a quest of mine when I was ten years
old in 1956 when it came out.  When I finally got together the $20
allowance and birthday gift money to get it, and my mother took me to
Sam Goody's 49th Street, they had no shelf copies, only the one in the
window.  In later years I realized that it was probably Sam Goody
Himself who told the clerk to get the set out of the window for the
kid.)  

> Did Murray Hill reprocess the UK albums, or were they direct copies?
> Best wishes, Thomas.

I can tell you that the extreme pumping processing is not on the Scala
or TAP version of the 02 and 03 records, and that the compression is on
the whole set.  I think the booklet talks about this new technique of
hiding the surface noise by dropping the level in the silent and low
level musical passages but allowing it to be behind the louder sections
when the music would cover it -- rather than take out all the highs
throughout the whole record.  

Could they have been using one end of a Dolby A processor??  Dolby and
other active noise reduction units compress on recording and expand on
playback.  If you play the encoded recording without decoding, it sounds
crazy.  Actually, the more I think about it, they were expanding the
recording, not compressing it.  They were forcing the low levels lower
and raising the high levels higher.  If they used a Dolby A, that was a
four-band processor.  It took the frequency range and split it into four
bands and treated each one separately.  They might have just used the
high band, and the level might have been triggered by one of the
mid-range bands. 

I have a Dolby-A encoded master that I used to play in my recording
class un-decoded to show them what the processor does.  We had DBX on
our multi-track, and I would play for the class recordings regular
recordings thru the de-processor, and processed recordings
un-deprocessed so they could hear what the DBX does.  It has been
decades since I listened to any of the Caruso box (I never played the
whole thing) but thinking about it now, it probably sounds like an
unprocessed recording being played thru the Dolby A de-processor.  Dolby
and DBX are not meant to remove noise from the original recording, they
are only designed to remove the noise from this generation of recording
that otherwise would be added to the original recording.

If that is the case, the Caruso box set proved that Dolby type noise
reduction cannot be used to remove noise from previous generations of
recordings!

Mike Biel  mbiel at mbiel.com     



----Original Message-----
From: Michael Biel

Has anybody played the Everest/Olympic fake QUAD LPs of Al Jolson and
George M. Cohan IN Quad?? They are bad enough when they put them out in
fake stereo, but then to take that and encode it into fake quad! I've
never put them thru a decoder. 


And then there is the Murray Hill complete Caruso box with a compressor
pumping the surface noise up and down with the modulation. RCA got that
one pulled off the market but fast, but I did get a chance to get one to
document it as dreck. The problem is when I get these horrible things I
need to keep them to show people how lousy they are. I suppose David's
Lestchenko Request LP is going up on his wall somewhere.

Mike Biel mbiel at mbiel.com 



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