[78-L] Average age was

[David Lennick]

Oh, I dunno..Decca was pretty hamhanded with the echo and fake stereo by the 
early sixties. And Victor would produce an "electronically reprocessed" stereo 
edition of a compilation, and if that weren't enough of a sin, they'd mix it 
down for the mono issue rather than use the original, slightly cleaner original 
tape. At least Columbia's box sets of classic jazz in the sixties were free 
from reverb, if not from excessive rolloff where they had only noisy shellac 
pressings of Vocalions to work from.

dl

On 11/12/2010 8:03 PM, Royal Pemberton wrote:
> True....sad as well that the majors also saw fit to inflict heavy-handed
> processing on the sound of the old recordings, compressing and limiting what
> dynamic range they had out of them, drenching them in reverb....and that's
> just the mono editions.  (I'm mostly thinking of RCA Victor; I think
> Columbia and Decca used more sense or at least great restraint in altering
> the sound of any of their vintage items.)
>
> On Sat, Nov 13, 2010 at 12:20 AM, David Lennick<dlennick at sympatico.ca>wrote:
>
>> On 11/12/2010 7:10 PM, Steven wrote:
>>>>
>>> Oddly enough, it was the sudden growth of the "independent re-issue"
>>> labels that led to their "sudden" demise! All of this vintage jazz
>> material
>>> was "owned" by Victor and/or American Record Corporation; however,
>>> neither firm was aware of the amount of interest in the stuff...! When
>>> the "pirate" re-issue operations became rather successful (as well as
>>> profitable..!), Victor and particularly ARC realized the potential value
>>> of re-issuing the material. They quickly forced the new labels to shut
>>> down...and started their own re-issue projects!
>>>
>>> Steven C. Barr
>>
>> And promptly screwed them up. Great starts, fuggedaboudit follow-up. Victor
>> didn't really do a comprehensive reissue series till the Vintage line in
>> the
>> 60s, despite the X label, the Downbeat Series and keeping the Glenn Miller
>> flame alive (and some occasional Fats and Duke and Artie and other greatest
>> hits). Columbia's reissues were few and far between except for Louis, Bix
>> and
>> Bessie, till the 60s. If there hadn't been film bios of Eddy Duchin and
>> Ruth
>> Etting, we wouldn't have had reissues of them at all from Columbia.
>>
>> dl
>>
>> _________________________________