Was lowered fidelity of 60's tv show music a function of how it was recorded or something else in the production pipeline?
On 14/07/2020 18:36, James wrote:
For example - the Batman series Blu-Ray release which I gather was given the royal treatment - the original films were scanned and then digitally massaged. While the release looks amazing the mono audio is decent but not as good as the mono hi-fi that had existed for some time as heard on numerous LP's. Presumably they used the best version available for the release.
A common way to distribute TV shows to stations at the period was to use
16mm film with an optical sound track. If the original sound recordings
made on set are not available, there is no easy way to transfer voice
and effects independently of the music, and reconstructing dialogue sync
would be a nightmare anyway. While good enough for the broadcasting
chain at the time, modern equipment shows up the problems.
With care, well shot 16mm film can be scanned to produce better than
normal HD images, and if they used 35mm film, with care, 4K could easily
be achieved for image resolution.
Optical sound has a sound frequency range not much better than a
telephone, and has, by modern standards, a truly awful distortion spectrum.
For UK releases, it doesn't help that American TV film for broadcast was
shot at 24 fps, not the 25 fps used in the UK, so the pitch of the sound
is normally 4% higher than it should be, as the audio artifacts produced
by shift pitching are easily noticeable.
As a result, it is far easier to get good quality images on re-releases
from 16mm film than even barely acceptable sound. If they exist, better
sound can be got from magnetic sound tracks, but they cost more to copy,
so were very rarely used for TV show distribution until later on.
The LP producers would have had access to the original tape recordings
of the music sessions.
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Tciao for Now!
John.
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