[Paul Stamler]

"ansermetniac" wrote in message
...
It's not just the "early music" that's swamped in reverb -- most
recordings
of the music of any era has added reverb.

I've felt for some years that we're not hearing early (and Baroque) music
properly, because this added reverb audibly "contradicts" the acoustics
of
the relatively small spaces in which these works were performed. (I'm not
talking about the Vespers of 1610, okay?)


I have NEVER seen a review in stereophile saying the recording was too
reverberant. Interpret this as you like

I did, back when J. Gordon Holt was running Stereophile. Sometime in the
1980s-1990s, perhaps in reaction to the close-miked Deutsche Grammophon &
similar recordings, classical producers began opting for much "wetter"
recordings -- i.e., more reverb -- whether via placing the mics farther back
or adding artificial reverb. This coincided with the shift in audiophile
publications, led at the time by The Absolute Sound in the USA and Hi-Fi
News & Record Review in the UK, toward an emphasis on soundstaging as the
be-all-and-end-all of audio quality, rather than tonal accuracy. (This
reached the absurd point where reviewers were raving about speakers with
utterly skewed tonal response but incredible soundstaging, like the Spicas.)
The recordings followed suit; heck, what's the point of having
super-soundstaging in your playback system and not using it? So now the
recordings are swamped with reverberberberb.

Peace,
Paul