Re: RCA Victrola

[William Sommerwerck]

I have double-posted this to rec.audio.pro, in the hope that someone there
will know something about transferring acoustical recordings. Please remove
rec.audio.pro when responding.

>> Yes. Some of the Toscanini titles were examples. For the most part,
>> Victrola monos of Toscanini recordings sounded better than their Red
>> Seal counterparts; they remain excellent. But there were phony stereo
>> versions of some of the titles that were sonic travesties (i.e.
Mendelssohn
>> Midsummer Night's Dream Music). The worst part is that RCA deleted the
>> mono Victrola counterparts very quickly, and those good-sounding versions
>> became both hard to find and little-known for sound quality. At a time
>> (circa 1967/8) that some people thought that any mono recording was both
>> worthless and dispensable. The involved artists included.

> This is one of the reasons I find Nimbus' Pseudo Voce series
objectionable.
> They're mediocre transfers, blurred and smeared and otherwise falsified
> with added reverb, massively marketed so that the unwary and potential
> beginning collectors are fooled and tricked into thinking that golden age
> singers actually sounded like that.

Here we go again...

I need to correct one major error in your statement... The "Pseudo Voce"
recordings do not contain /any/ added reverberation. What you hear is how
acoustic playback of these /acoustically dead/ recordings would sound in an
acoustically appropriate listening space. This is no more "added
reverberation" than the sound of a concert hall is "added reverberation".

Ignoring the fact that we don't really know /exactly/ how these singers
sounded, why should an acoustical reproduction of an acoustical recording
/necessarily/ be less accurate than one transcribed electrically?

This is /not/ a rhetorical question, nor is it a question that has a simple
answer. Nimbus is /in principle/ playing the recordings as they were
intended to be played. The /only/ valid criticism (that I can think of) is
that their reproducing mechanism does not match that of any particular
record company's. (One assumes that a Columbia disk would have the best
fidelity on a Columbia player, an RCA on an RCA, and so on, given that
recording and playback would have been tweaked for the best fidelity or the
company's preferred "sound".)

Transferring the recording electrically does not automatically resolve these
issues. The engineer still has to decide on an overall EQ that gives the
perception of flat response. As for horn and cutter-/playback-head
resonances... he has to isolate and correct these.

Rather than continue to argue this, I would hope that some experienced
transfer engineer would tell us about his experiences with /acoustical/
recordings. I'm perfectly willing to change my opinion -- but I would like
some hard, objective facts first.

---------------
The digital transfers of (most of) Caruso's recordings were individually
equalized so that the detailed tonal balance matched that of modern
electrical recordings of the same works. To my ears, the sound of Caruso's
voice /did not/ match that of what I was used to hearing. It didn't sound
like him, and I really didn't like the voice. Yet people who had heard
Caruso sing live proclaimed the new transfers as more-accurate renditions.

---------------
Some comments on mono recordings... I generally don't like them, partly
because few are of truly high fidelity (the same could be said about too
many stereo recordings!), and, of course, they lack the spaciousness of
stereo. Generally speaking, though, the better the playback system, the
better mono recordings sound -- even more so than stereo recordings. And...
If you have a hall synthesizer, you can generate stereo ambience to the
sides and rear, which grossly improves the sound quality, without in any way
degrading the original.

[Matthew B. Tepper]

"William Sommerwerck" > appears to have caused
the following letters to be typed in
:

> I have double-posted this to rec.audio.pro, in the hope that someone
> there will know something about transferring acoustical recordings.
> Please remove rec.audio.pro when responding.
>
>>> Yes. Some of the Toscanini titles were examples. For the most part,
>>> Victrola monos of Toscanini recordings sounded better than their Red
>>> Seal counterparts; they remain excellent. But there were phony stereo
>>> versions of some of the titles that were sonic travesties (i.e.
>>> Mendelssohn Midsummer Night's Dream Music). The worst part is that RCA
>>> deleted the mono Victrola counterparts very quickly, and those good-
>>> sounding versions became both hard to find and little-known for sound
>>> quality. At a time (circa 1967/8) that some people thought that any
>>> mono recording was both worthless and dispensable. The involved artists
>>> included.
>
>> This is one of the reasons I find Nimbus' Pseudo Voce series
>> objectionable. They're mediocre transfers, blurred and smeared and
>> otherwise falsified with added reverb, massively marketed so that the
>> unwary and potential beginning collectors are fooled and tricked into
>> thinking that golden age singers actually sounded like that.
>
> Here we go again...
>
> I need to correct one major error in your statement... The "Pseudo Voce"
> recordings do not contain /any/ added reverberation. What you hear is how
> acoustic playback of these /acoustically dead/ recordings would sound in
> an acoustically appropriate listening space. This is no more "added
> reverberation" than the sound of a concert hall is "added reverberation".

The reverb is not in the recordings themselves. Therefore, it is added.
By which method is not important, and does not change the fact.

> Ignoring the fact that we don't really know /exactly/ how these singers
> sounded, why should an acoustical reproduction of an acoustical recording
> /necessarily/ be less accurate than one transcribed electrically?
>
> This is /not/ a rhetorical question, nor is it a question that has a
> simple answer. Nimbus is /in principle/ playing the recordings as they
> were intended to be played.

How do we know that? Does it say so on the original record labels, the way
some rock records from the '60s said "PLAY THIS RECORD LOUD"? (And I'm
sure the folks at Beltone have enjoyed their uptick in sales ever since.)

The concept of being required to hear/view something the way the original
hearers/viewers did is utterly ridiculous. It is like going to view the
antiquities at the Getty, and a guard stands at the door to remove the
eyeglasses from anybody who dares to try to get in wearing them.

I say it's broccoli, er, added reverb, and I say the hell with it.

--
Matthew B. Tepper: WWW, science fiction, classical music, ducks!
Read about "Proty" here: http://home.earthlink.net/~oy/proty.html
To write to me, do for my address what Androcles did for the lion
Opinions expressed here are not necessarily those of my employers

[Scott Dorsey]

William Sommerwerck > wrote:
>
>> This is one of the reasons I find Nimbus' Pseudo Voce series
>objectionable.
>> They're mediocre transfers, blurred and smeared and otherwise falsified
>> with added reverb, massively marketed so that the unwary and potential
>> beginning collectors are fooled and tricked into thinking that golden age
>> singers actually sounded like that.
>
>Here we go again...
>
>I need to correct one major error in your statement... The "Pseudo Voce"
>recordings do not contain /any/ added reverberation. What you hear is how
>acoustic playback of these /acoustically dead/ recordings would sound in an
>acoustically appropriate listening space. This is no more "added
>reverberation" than the sound of a concert hall is "added reverberation".
>
>Ignoring the fact that we don't really know /exactly/ how these singers
>sounded, why should an acoustical reproduction of an acoustical recording
>/necessarily/ be less accurate than one transcribed electrically?

Well, it sounds less like an actual person singing.

But there is a valid artistic argument, in that the playback method very
accurately reproduces what a person actually listening to a record in
1920 would have heard.

The question is whether you, as a listener, want to recreate the experience
of listening to a record in 1920, or want to recreate something as close as
possible to the original performance. (And sadly, as close as possible to
the original performance isn't really very close anyway.)

>This is /not/ a rhetorical question, nor is it a question that has a simple
>answer. Nimbus is /in principle/ playing the recordings as they were
>intended to be played. The /only/ valid criticism (that I can think of) is
>that their reproducing mechanism does not match that of any particular
>record company's. (One assumes that a Columbia disk would have the best
>fidelity on a Columbia player, an RCA on an RCA, and so on, given that
>recording and playback would have been tweaked for the best fidelity or the
>company's preferred "sound".)

No, it is a _very_ valid criticism to say that their playback method is
less accurate at reproducing the original sound in the original studio.

However, since electrical playback methods are also very inaccurate at
doing that, the baseline isn't that much lower.

>Transferring the recording electrically does not automatically resolve these
>issues. The engineer still has to decide on an overall EQ that gives the
>perception of flat response. As for horn and cutter-/playback-head
>resonances... he has to isolate and correct these.
>
>Rather than continue to argue this, I would hope that some experienced
>transfer engineer would tell us about his experiences with /acoustical/
>recordings. I'm perfectly willing to change my opinion -- but I would like
>some hard, objective facts first.

There are no hard objective facts. I can take an acoustic disc and I can
remove a couple of the worst horn resonances. But you still have a recording
that has a lot of horn artifacts, mechanical cutting artifacts, and on top
of that it's usually performed with odd arrangements, instruments, and
orchestral configurations in order to suit the limitations of the recording
horn.

So... even if you WERE to reproduce the sound in the original studio
accurately, it would still be very different than the sound that you
would hear from the same performers in concert.

Given that, you could make a valid argument that since it would be
impossible to reproduce such a nonexistent concert, that the most
authentic thing to do would be to make an accurate reproduction of
what a period disc playback would have sounded like.

>---------------
>The digital transfers of (most of) Caruso's recordings were individually
>equalized so that the detailed tonal balance matched that of modern
>electrical recordings of the same works. To my ears, the sound of Caruso's
>voice /did not/ match that of what I was used to hearing. It didn't sound
>like him, and I really didn't like the voice. Yet people who had heard
>Caruso sing live proclaimed the new transfers as more-accurate renditions.
>---------------

This is referring to the Stockham work... and Stockham actually started
doing this before the beginning of the digital era. He wound up with
one of the first digital notch filter systems and he notched the hell out
of anything that looked like a narrowband resonance. He killed horn
resonances, room resonances, and possibly body resonances.

I don't like the way those transfers sound either, but again I think he
took a valid technique and became a little bit too enthusiastic about it.
This is fairly common when any new technology appears.

The honest truth is that all of this stuff is a judgement call, since it
is clearly impossible to make anything approaching an accurate reproduction
of the original performance. So it becomes a matter of what the end
listener is most willing to live with.

If you don't like the Stockham reissue, or you don't like the Nimbus
reissue, or if you prefer them... they are all valid artistic judgements.
And it all comes down to artistic judgements.

Personally I would hope you would ignore all this stuff and start buying
more later big band radio transcription reissues because I need the money.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

[Adrian Tuddenham[_2_]]

William Sommerwerck > wrote:

[...]
> Rather than continue to argue this, I would hope that some experienced
> transfer engineer would tell us about his experiences with /acoustical/
> recordings.

Norman White, who supervised the Nimbus acoustic transfers is a friend
of mine. Before joining Nimbus he was an opera singer and before that
he was an electronics engineer, so he is fairly well qualified to know
both sides of the arguments.

I agree that those transfers are a matter of taste, but if Norman can't
get them to sound good to someone who likes that sort of thing, I would
be very surprised if anyone else could do any better.

--
~ Adrian Tuddenham ~
(Remove the ".invalid"s and add ".co.uk" to reply)
www.poppyrecords.co.uk

[ivanmaxim]

On Sep 29, 10:54*am, (Adrian
Tuddenham) wrote:
> William Sommerwerck > wrote:
>
> [...]
>
> > Rather than continue to argue this, I would hope that some experienced
> > transfer engineer would tell us about his experiences with /acoustical/
> > recordings.
>
> Norman White, who supervised the Nimbus acoustic transfers is a friend
> of mine. *Before joining Nimbus he was an opera singer and before that
> he was an electronics engineer, so he is fairly well qualified to know
> both sides of the arguments.
>
> I agree that those transfers are a matter of taste, but if Norman can't
> get them to sound good to someone who likes that sort of thing, I would
> be very surprised if anyone else could do any better.
>
> --
> ~ Adrian Tuddenham ~
> (Remove the ".invalid"s and add ".co.uk" to reply)www.poppyrecords.co.uk

The way I listen to the Nimbus vocal recordings is thinking that I am
listening to the voices from the balcony of the theatre - that way
they sound closer to what I actually hear from the balcony of an opera
house. Wagner Fan

[Scott Dorsey]

ivanmaxim > wrote:
>
>The way I listen to the Nimbus vocal recordings is thinking that I am
>listening to the voices from the balcony of the theatre - that way
>they sound closer to what I actually hear from the balcony of an opera
>house. Wagner Fan

Don't think about it that way. Think that you are sitting in someone's
Paris salon in 1920 and listening to the best phonograph made at the time.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

[Bob Lombard]

"Matthew B. Tepper" > wrote in message
...
> "William Sommerwerck" > appears to have caused
> the following letters to be typed in
> :
>
>>
>> This is /not/ a rhetorical question, nor is it a question that has a
>> simple answer. Nimbus is /in principle/ playing the recordings as they
>> were intended to be played.
>
> How do we know that? Does it say so on the original record labels, the
> way
> some rock records from the '60s said "PLAY THIS RECORD LOUD"? (And I'm
> sure the folks at Beltone have enjoyed their uptick in sales ever since.)

Acoustic recordings were intended to be played back acoustically. It is even
reasonable to suggest that Columbia '78s' sounded better played in a
Grafonola than in a Victrola. Nimbus' superhorn is a questionable element in
the re-recording chain, and their highly revererant room is fairly silly,
but those are another story.
>
> The concept of being required to hear/view something the way the original
> hearers/viewers did is utterly ridiculous. It is like going to view the
> antiquities at the Getty, and a guard stands at the door to remove the
> eyeglasses from anybody who dares to try to get in wearing them.

Your simile is certainly ridiculous.

bl

[William Sommerwerck]

>> Ignoring the fact that we don't really know /exactly/ how these singers
>> sounded, why should an acoustical reproduction of an acoustical recording
>> /necessarily/ be less accurate than one transcribed electrically?

> Well, it sounds less like an actual person singing.

So when I switch on my JVC hall synthesizer, the net result is /less/ like
the sound of a live orchestra? (Let's not get into an argument over the fact
that the hall synthesizer is optional, whereas the ambience on the Nimbus
disks is part of the recording. It has nothing to do with this particular
point.)


> The question is whether you, as a listener, want to recreate the
experience
> of listening to a record in 1920, or want to recreate something as close
as
> possible to the original performance. (And sadly, as close as possible to
> the original performance isn't really very close anyway.)

Agreed. And the issue is a sticky one, because acoustical recordings were
generally "dead" because reverberation blurred the sound.

Note, however, that there's a difference between reverberation /in the
recording/, and reverberation /in the room/ where the recording is being
played. The latter comes from the same direction as the direct sound (which
is generally undesirable), while the latter comes from multiple directions,
which a stereo or surround recording captures.


> No, it is a _very_ valid criticism to say that their playback method is
> less accurate at reproducing the original sound in the original studio.

But that isn't necessarily what we want. Would Carouso, Sherman-Tank, et al,
have objected to someone listening to their recordings from 10' or so back,
and letting the room add some "bloom" to the sound? I don't think so. They
probably would have preferred it. (Does anyone know for sure?)


>> Rather than continue to argue this, I would hope that some experienced
>> transfer engineer would tell us about his experiences with /acoustical/
>> recordings. I'm perfectly willing to change my opinion -- but I would
like
>> some hard, objective facts first.

> There are no hard objective facts. I can take an acoustic disc and I can
> remove a couple of the worst horn resonances. But you still have a
recording
> that has a lot of horn artifacts, mechanical cutting artifacts, and on top
> of that it's usually performed with odd arrangements, instruments, and
> orchestral configurations in order to suit the limitations of the
recording
> horn.

> So... even if you WERE to reproduce the sound in the original studio
> accurately, it would still be very different than the sound that you
> would hear from the same performers in concert.

> Given that, you could make a valid argument that since it would be
> impossible to reproduce such a nonexistent concert, that the most
> authentic thing to do would be to make an accurate reproduction of
> what a period disc playback would have sounded like.

So we sort-of agree. Okay. So -- and this is an open question -- how would
you go about doing that? Nimbus has given us one possible answer. Are there
any others?

<interesting stuff I pretty much agree with snipped>

[Scott Dorsey]

William Sommerwerck > wrote:
>
>> No, it is a _very_ valid criticism to say that their playback method is
>> less accurate at reproducing the original sound in the original studio.
>
>But that isn't necessarily what we want. Would Carouso, Sherman-Tank, et al,
>have objected to someone listening to their recordings from 10' or so back,
>and letting the room add some "bloom" to the sound? I don't think so. They
>probably would have preferred it. (Does anyone know for sure?)

Well, that's true. But if you don't want that, don't buy the reissue made
that way.

I don't personally like the process, so I wouldn't buy those reissues at
all. But that doesn't mean the process isn't artistically valid or that
someone else might not prefer them.

>> Given that, you could make a valid argument that since it would be
>> impossible to reproduce such a nonexistent concert, that the most
>> authentic thing to do would be to make an accurate reproduction of
>> what a period disc playback would have sounded like.
>
>So we sort-of agree. Okay. So -- and this is an open question -- how would
>you go about doing that? Nimbus has given us one possible answer. Are there
>any others?

I think the Nimbus process is very well done for what it is. You could
make arguments that a smaller horn would be a better idea and I would tend
to agree with that, though.
--scott

--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

[William Sommerwerck]

> I don't personally like the process, so I wouldn't buy those
> reissues at all. But that doesn't mean the process isn't
> artistically valid or that someone else might not prefer them.

I like them because I enjoy the "bloom". I also have six-channel Ambisonic
playback. (UHJ recordings can sound overly reverberant in stereo. They
actually sound less reverberant when properly decoded. The same was true of
SQ recordings.)


>> So we sort-of agree. Okay. So -- and this is an open question
>> -- how would you go about doing that? Nimbus has given us
>> one possible answer. Are there any others?

> I think the Nimbus process is very well done for what it is. You
> could make arguments that a smaller horn would be a better idea
> and I would tend to agree with that, though.

I don't remember why they chose such a large horn. Bass? Volume level?

[[email protected]]

On Sep 29, 11:13*am, "William Sommerwerck"
> wrote:
> >> Ignoring the fact that we don't really know /exactly/ how these singers
> >> sounded, why should an acoustical reproduction of an acoustical recording
> >> /necessarily/ be less accurate than one transcribed electrically?
> > Well, it sounds less like an actual person singing.
>
> So when I switch on my JVC hall synthesizer, the net result is /less/ like
> the sound of a live orchestra? (Let's not get into an argument over the fact
> that the hall synthesizer is optional, whereas the ambience on the Nimbus
> disks is part of the recording. It has nothing to do with this particular
> point.)

The ambience on the Nimbus CDs is not a part of the recordings
themselves. It is the result of the method used to play the discs: an
unusually large machine in a very large room, recorded with
microphones distant enough to pick up the considerable resonance of
the room and add it to the sound of the record being played. The
resonance is a part of the recording only in the sense that that is
how it has been reproduced. It's not on the discs themselves.

> > The question is whether you, as a listener, want to recreate the
> experience
> > of listening to a record in 1920, or want to recreate something as close
> as
> > possible to the original performance. (And sadly, as close as possible to
> > the original performance isn't really very close anyway.)
>
> Agreed. And the issue is a sticky one, because acoustical recordings were
> generally "dead" because reverberation blurred the sound.
>
> Note, however, that there's a difference between reverberation /in the
> recording/, and reverberation /in the room/ where the recording is being
> played.

But the original recordings had no resonance. No reverberation.
Acoustical recordings are acoustically dead. There is no resonance.
None. I own many hundreds of them and am speaking from personal
experience derived from playing them. Caruso, Schumann-Heink,
Chaliapin, Galli-Curci, Battistini, Fritz Kreisler, Elgar conducting,
whoever: the recordings were made in acoustically deadened studios.
Adding resonance to the records' sound is not recreating something as
close as possible to the original performance. It is adding a modern
sonic element to the evidence we have of the original performance,
evidence which is derived from and recorded with an admittedly crude
technology (i.e. the acoustical process).

I can only think that a modern artificial reverberation machine,
which you mentioned, is essentially no different from re-recording
acoustical recordings in a modern setup when they are played in a very
large room and the results are recorded so as to include the resonance
of the room, as Nimbus did. They are different methods, one electronic
and the other based on acoustics, but are both a doctoring of the
sound of the original sources.

Don Tait

[Matthew B. Tepper]

appears to have caused the following letters to be
typed in news:74604124-4276-4da7-b71e-ba4d80b3dc64
@w19g2000yqb.googlegroups.com:

> I can only think that a modern artificial reverberation machine,
> which you mentioned, is essentially no different from re-recording
> acoustical recordings in a modern setup when they are played in a very
> large room and the results are recorded so as to include the resonance
> of the room, as Nimbus did. They are different methods, one electronic
> and the other based on acoustics, but are both a doctoring of the
> sound of the original sources.

I agree, and I don't like either of them. At least Pristine allows you the
choice of one or the other, and you only have to pay for whichever one you
want. Testament (at least with their latest Klemperer Mahler 2nd release)
makes you take both and pay for both. Nimbus gives you no choice at all.

--
Matthew B. Tepper: WWW, science fiction, classical music, ducks!
Read about "Proty" here: http://home.earthlink.net/~oy/proty.html
To write to me, do for my address what Androcles did for the lion
Opinions expressed here are not necessarily those of my employers

[Matthew B. Tepper]

"William Sommerwerck" > appears to have caused the
following letters to be typed in -
september.org:

> I don't remember why they chose such a large horn. Bass? Volume level?

Because it looks really impressive in the photographs they release saying how
wonderful their process is?

--
Matthew B. Tepper: WWW, science fiction, classical music, ducks!
Read about "Proty" here: http://home.earthlink.net/~oy/proty.html
To write to me, do for my address what Androcles did for the lion
Opinions expressed here are not necessarily those of my employers

[Matthew B. Tepper]

(Scott Dorsey) appears to have caused the following
letters to be typed in :

> William Sommerwerck > wrote:
>>
>> But that isn't necessarily what we want. Would Carouso, Sherman-Tank, et
>> al, have objected to someone listening to their recordings from 10' or
>> so back, and letting the room add some "bloom" to the sound? I don't
>> think so. They probably would have preferred it. (Does anyone know for
>> sure?)
>
> Well, that's true. But if you don't want that, don't buy the reissue
> made that way.

And indeed I don't. But I should be very cross indeed if the proliferation
of Nimbus tiled-bathroom recordings were to crowd the others out of the
marketplace. I believe I've seen them on iTunes; I wonder how they sell?

--
Matthew B. Tepper: WWW, science fiction, classical music, ducks!
Read about "Proty" here: http://home.earthlink.net/~oy/proty.html
To write to me, do for my address what Androcles did for the lion
Opinions expressed here are not necessarily those of my employers

[Adrian Tuddenham[_2_]]

> wrote:

[...]
> Acoustical recordings are acoustically dead. There is no resonance.
> None. I own many hundreds of them and am speaking from personal
> experience derived from playing them. Caruso, Schumann-Heink,
> Chaliapin, Galli-Curci, Battistini, Fritz Kreisler, Elgar conducting,
> whoever: the recordings were made in acoustically deadened studios.

Nearly all of those were recorded by the big companies and are classical
repertoire. There were some acoustic recordings made in reverberant
surroundings, although most of the ones I have heard were on recordings
of popular music, so you might not have encountered them.

Columbia in the UK used a wood-panelled recording room which boomed
badly. You might have mistaken that for a recording fault, but it was
actually an attempt to get as much bass as possible into the horn. It
wasn't a very good acoustic, but it certainly doesn't count as 'dead'.

You need a really effective de-clicker and complex equalisation before
you can begin to hear the sound of the recording room through the noise
and frequency distortion. Many digitally de-clicked reissues of both
acoustic and electrically-recorded discs have the reverberant 'tails'
cut off as they disappear into the noise, but the tails were there on
the originals and you could hear them even as they dived below the noise
level.

--
~ Adrian Tuddenham ~
(Remove the ".invalid"s and add ".co.uk" to reply)
www.poppyrecords.co.uk

[Scott Dorsey]

Adrian Tuddenham > wrote:
> wrote:
>
>[...]
>> Acoustical recordings are acoustically dead. There is no resonance.
>> None. I own many hundreds of them and am speaking from personal
>> experience derived from playing them. Caruso, Schumann-Heink,
>> Chaliapin, Galli-Curci, Battistini, Fritz Kreisler, Elgar conducting,
>> whoever: the recordings were made in acoustically deadened studios.
>
>Nearly all of those were recorded by the big companies and are classical
>repertoire. There were some acoustic recordings made in reverberant
>surroundings, although most of the ones I have heard were on recordings
>of popular music, so you might not have encountered them.

And MUCH of they reason why they were recorded in such a dead environment
was to get the optimal intellibility from a recording that would be played
back through a big resonant horn.

>Columbia in the UK used a wood-panelled recording room which boomed
>badly. You might have mistaken that for a recording fault, but it was
>actually an attempt to get as much bass as possible into the horn. It
>wasn't a very good acoustic, but it certainly doesn't count as 'dead'.

ALL of these recordings have very artificial sounds and were made in
very artificial environments, because of the manner in which they were
expected to be played back.

So NO possible playback can ever be natural.

>You need a really effective de-clicker and complex equalisation before
>you can begin to hear the sound of the recording room through the noise
>and frequency distortion. Many digitally de-clicked reissues of both
>acoustic and electrically-recorded discs have the reverberant 'tails'
>cut off as they disappear into the noise, but the tails were there on
>the originals and you could hear them even as they dived below the noise
>level.

I'll pick the noise over the chopped tails any day, but that is just me
and many folks feel differently.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

[William Sommerwerck]

> But the original recordings had no resonance. No reverberation.
Acoustical recordings are acoustically dead. There is no resonance.
None. I own many hundreds of them and am speaking from personal
experience derived from playing them. Caruso, Schumann-Heink,
Chaliapin, Galli-Curci, Battistini, Fritz Kreisler, Elgar conducting,
whoever: the recordings were made in acoustically deadened studios.
Adding resonance to the records' sound is not recreating something as
close as possible to the original performance. It is adding a modern
sonic element to the evidence we have of the original performance,
evidence which is derived from and recorded with an admittedly crude
technology (i.e. the acoustical process).

Isn't there some confusion here between "performance" and "recording"? The
lack of ambience was not so much an aesthetic decision as it was an acoustic
one.

By the same reasoning, I shouldn't be using a hall synthesizer.


> I can only think that a modern artificial reverberation machine,
> which you mentioned, is essentially no different from re-recording
> acoustical recordings in a modern setup when they are played in a very
> large room and the results are recorded so as to include the resonance
> of the room, as Nimbus did.

Except, of course, that I have the choice of using the synthesizer. The
purchaser of the Nimbus recordings has no choice.


> They are different methods, one electronic
> and the other based on acoustics, but are both a doctoring of the
> sound of the original sources.

I'm going to be fussy about this, and say that the people who made the
acoustic recordings would have wanted them to be heard in a room that added
what was missing.

[William Sommerwerck]

>> I can only think that a modern artificial reverberation machine,
>> which you mentioned, is essentially no different from re-recording
>> acoustical recordings in a modern setup when they are played in a very
>> large room and the results are recorded so as to include the resonance
>> of the room, as Nimbus did. They are different methods, one electronic
>> and the other based on acoustics, but are both a doctoring of the
>> sound of the original sources.

> I agree, and I don't like either of them. At least Pristine allows you
the
> choice of one or the other, and you only have to pay for whichever one you
> want. Testament (at least with their latest Klemperer Mahler 2nd release)
> makes you take both and pay for both. Nimbus gives you no choice at all.

The output of the hall synthesizer goes to separate speakers -- it does not
pass through the main speakers. You also have full control of it. The reason
you don't like such processing is that you've probably never heard it used
correctly. When it's set up and adjusted correctly, you aren't aware of the
enhancement -- until it's shut off. I wish I could give you a demo.

[William Sommerwerck]

> You need a really effective de-clicker and complex equalisation before
> you can begin to hear the sound of the recording room through the noise
> and frequency distortion. Many digitally de-clicked reissues of both
> acoustic and electrically-recorded discs have the reverberant 'tails'
> cut off as they disappear into the noise, but the tails were there on
> the originals and you could hear them even as they dived below the noise
> level.

Can you point us to a book or article that discusses this in more detail?

[William Sommerwerck]

>> I don't remember why they chose such a large horn. Bass?
>> Volume level?

> Because it looks really impressive in the photographs they release
> saying how wonderful their process is?

It would add a certain sense of... gravitas, would it not?

[William Sommerwerck]

> And indeed I don't. But I should be very cross indeed if the
proliferation
> of Nimbus tiled-bathroom recordings were to crowd the others out of the
> marketplace. I believe I've seen them on iTunes; I wonder how they sell?

I would hardly call the acoustics "tiled-bathroom".

[MiNe 109]

In article >,
"William Sommerwerck" > wrote:

> > And indeed I don't. But I should be very cross indeed if the
> proliferation
> > of Nimbus tiled-bathroom recordings were to crowd the others out of the
> > marketplace. I believe I've seen them on iTunes; I wonder how they sell?
>
> I would hardly call the acoustics "tiled-bathroom".

At this point I'd like an example or two of reverberant Nimbi. I just
listened to The Golden Age of Singing Vol 4 and didn't notice excessive
echo.

Stephen

[[email protected]]

On Sep 29, 3:25*pm, MiNe 109 > wrote:
> In article >,
> *"William Sommerwerck" > wrote:
>
> > > And indeed I don't. *But I should be very cross indeed if the
> > proliferation
> > > of Nimbus tiled-bathroom recordings were to crowd the others out of the
> > > marketplace. I believe I've seen them on iTunes; I wonder how they sell?
>
> > I would hardly call the acoustics "tiled-bathroom".
>
> At this point I'd like an example or two of reverberant Nimbi. I just
> listened to The Golden Age of Singing Vol 4 and didn't notice excessive
> echo.
>
> Stephen

When I worked at a radio station (WFMT in Chicago), a couple of
Caruso cuts were scheduled from Nimbus CDs. I thought the basic sound
reproduction was very good, very similar to what I got from the
original discs; but the added resonance of Nimbus's room made it sound
as if Caruso were singing in the empty Concertgebouw or Boston's
Symphony Hall and recorded from a distance in both cases. And that
resonance is not a part of the original discs. But try Caruso if you
can, and see what you think.

Don Tait

[rje]

On Sep 29, 10:08*am, "William Sommerwerck"
> wrote:
> I have double-posted this to rec.audio.pro, in the hope that someone there
> will know something about transferring acoustical recordings. Please remove
> rec.audio.pro when responding.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> >> Yes. Some of the Toscanini titles were examples. For the most part,
> >> Victrola monos of Toscanini recordings sounded better than their Red
> >> Seal counterparts; they remain excellent. But there were phony stereo
> >> versions of some of the titles that were sonic travesties (i.e.
> Mendelssohn
> >> Midsummer Night's Dream Music). The worst part is that RCA deleted the
> >> mono Victrola counterparts very quickly, and those good-sounding versions
> >> became both hard to find and little-known for sound quality. At a time
> >> (circa 1967/8) that some people thought that any mono recording was both
> >> worthless and dispensable. The involved artists included.
> > This is one of the reasons I find Nimbus' Pseudo Voce series
> objectionable.
> > They're mediocre transfers, blurred and smeared and otherwise falsified
> > with added reverb, massively marketed so that the unwary and potential
> > beginning collectors are fooled and tricked into thinking that golden age
> > singers actually sounded like that.
>
> Here we go again...
>
> I need to correct one major error in your statement... The "Pseudo Voce"
> recordings do not contain /any/ added reverberation. What you hear is how
> acoustic playback of these /acoustically dead/ recordings would sound in an
> acoustically appropriate listening space. This is no more "added
> reverberation" than the sound of a concert hall is "added reverberation".

And the recording of this acoustic gramophone sounds no more like
being in the room with it than a recording of a grand piano in that
room sounds like being in the room with that piano.

In fact, many acoustic vocal recordings are not "acoustically dead." A
vinyl strike from an original metal pressing part played with a modern
pickup can pick up room sound (and some vocal "bloom") that is partly
submerged in the noise of a shellac pressing. In Nimbus' approach,
these mechanical noises (and any original room sound) are submerged in
the reverberation of their recording space.

In Read & Welch's "From Tin Foil to Stereo" (1959, 549pp Howard W.
Sams, Pub.) You will find this: "The Columbia recording experts (ca
1908) devoted much of their effort to record the difficult bass
registers and the resonance of the recording studio..." (page 184).

> Ignoring the fact that we don't really know /exactly/ how these singers
> sounded, why should an acoustical reproduction of an acoustical recording
> /necessarily/ be less accurate than one transcribed electrically?
>
> This is /not/ a rhetorical question, nor is it a question that has a simple
> answer. Nimbus is /in principle/ playing the recordings as they were
> intended to be played. The /only/ valid criticism (that I can think of) is
> that their reproducing mechanism does not match that of any particular
> record company's. (One assumes that a Columbia disk would have the best
> fidelity on a Columbia player, an RCA on an RCA, and so on, given that
> recording and playback would have been tweaked for the best fidelity or the
> company's preferred "sound".)

Every model from every brand of acoustic record player had a different
sound. Some horns were made of wood, some from metal, almost all of
them had different shapes. Console machines had a variety of patented
interior folding horns. Reproducers were constantly being upgraded and
tweaked to achieve the most brilliant and loudest sound.


> Transferring the recording electrically does not automatically resolve these
> issues. The engineer still has to decide on an overall EQ that gives the
> perception of flat response. As for horn and cutter-/playback-head
> resonances... he has to isolate and correct these.

The modern sound engineer can resolve these issues if he/she uses his/
her ears, and knows what to listen for. Anyone who has heard any of
Ward Marston's historic vocal transfers, for instance, will know this
is true.

The one size fits all Nimbus approach (they even used that acoustic
playback system for electrical records!) unfortunately falls short in
every respect.



>
> Rather than continue to argue this, I would hope that some experienced
> transfer engineer would tell us about his experiences with /acoustical/
> recordings. I'm perfectly willing to change my opinion -- but I would like
> some hard, objective facts first.
>
> ---------------
> The digital transfers of (most of) Caruso's recordings were individually
> equalized so that the detailed tonal balance matched that of modern
> electrical recordings of the same works. To my ears, the sound of Caruso's
> voice /did not/ match that of what I was used to hearing. It didn't sound
> like him, and I really didn't like the voice. Yet people who had heard
> Caruso sing live proclaimed the new transfers as more-accurate renditions..

The memory of how someone's voice sounded sixty years later is amazing
and probably not reliable.

>
> ---------------
> Some comments on mono recordings... I generally don't like them, partly
> because few are of truly high fidelity (the same could be said about too
> many stereo recordings!), and, of course, they lack the spaciousness of
> stereo. Generally speaking, though, the better the playback system, the
> better mono recordings sound -- even more so than stereo recordings. And....
> If you have a hall synthesizer, you can generate stereo ambience to the
> sides and rear, which grossly improves the sound quality, without in any way
> degrading the original.

[Adrian Tuddenham[_2_]]

William Sommerwerck > wrote:

> > You need a really effective de-clicker and complex equalisation before
> > you can begin to hear the sound of the recording room through the noise
> > and frequency distortion. Many digitally de-clicked reissues of both
> > acoustic and electrically-recorded discs have the reverberant 'tails'
> > cut off as they disappear into the noise, but the tails were there on
> > the originals and you could hear them even as they dived below the noise
> > level.
>
> Can you point us to a book or article that discusses this in more detail?

Not really. Those comments were based on my personal experience of
operating a de-clicker and listening to the results of other people's
attempts.

The comments on recording rooms are the combined results of 'reading
between the lines' of lots of different articles, listening to lots of
acoustic recordings and looking closely at the few photographs which are
available from that era.


--
~ Adrian Tuddenham ~
(Remove the ".invalid"s and add ".co.uk" to reply)
www.poppyrecords.co.uk

[[email protected]]

On Sep 29, 3:37*pm, rje > wrote:
> On Sep 29, 10:08*am, "William Sommerwerck"

[big editing]

> > wrote:
> > I have double-posted this to rec.audio.pro, in the hope that someone there
> > will know something about transferring acoustical recordings. Please remove
> > rec.audio.pro when responding.

(Ray wrote)

> Every model from every brand of acoustic record player had a different
> sound. Some horns were made of wood, some from metal, almost all of
> them had different shapes. Console machines had a variety of patented
> interior folding horns. Reproducers were constantly being upgraded and
> tweaked to achieve the most brilliant and loudest sound.

Yes! Leaving side the descriptions of Nimbus's acoustical setup in
their CD booklets, which make it seem like something very, very
special, acoustical reproduction could be complex. One has only to
read The Gramophone pre-1926 to see the articles, even ads, advocating
various devices to improve reproduction. As I recall, "The Lifeboat,"
some kind of rubber gasket for tone-arms, was highly recommended for
altering ("improving") reproduction. And of course there was the
needle issue: "Loud"? "Medium"? "Soft"? One could buy any of them to
give different playback sound. Not to mention "fibre" -- cactus or
something else? The Phonograph Monthly Review in the USA was the same
after 1925.

The idea that just playing an acoustical recording on an acoustical
machine automatically resolves all reproduction questions of records
made that way is as fallacious as saying that a Fairchild or G-E or
Grado early stereo LP cartridge yields the same sound as a Shure V-15-
V or another top-of-the-line recent stereo one.

> > The digital transfers of (most of) Caruso's recordings were individually
> > equalized so that the detailed tonal balance matched that of modern
> > electrical recordings of the same works. To my ears, the sound of Caruso's
> > voice /did not/ match that of what I was used to hearing. It didn't sound
> > like him, and I really didn't like the voice. Yet people who had heard
> > Caruso sing live proclaimed the new transfers as more-accurate renditions.
>
> The memory of how someone's voice sounded sixty years later is amazing
> and probably not reliable.

Indeed. And as I think others posted about this earlier, Thomas
Stockham (for we are talking about his 1970s/early 80s RCA LPs) was
quoted -- as I recall -- as saying that he fed the sound of Jussi
Bjoerling's voice into his computer and instructed the computer to
deconstruct the sound of Caruso's acoustical recordings and
"reconstruct" the voice in Bjoerling's vocal image. Because he
(Stockham) thought their voices sounded similar, and he wanted his
computer to recreate Caruso's voice as it would have sounded -- as
sung by Jussi Bjoerling. In Stockham's mind.

That is at least what I remember; and I am willing to be corrected
if my memory is faulty.

Don Tait

[William Sommerwerck]

>>> The digital transfers of (most of) Caruso's recordings were individually
>>> equalized so that the detailed tonal balance matched that of modern
>>> electrical recordings of the same works. To my ears, the sound of
Caruso's
>>> voice /did not/ match that of what I was used to hearing. It didn't
sound
>>> like him, and I really didn't like the voice. Yet people who had heard
>>> Caruso sing live proclaimed the new transfers as more-accurate
renditions.

>> The memory of how someone's voice sounded sixty years later is amazing
>> and probably not reliable.

> Indeed. And as I think others posted about this earlier, Thomas
> Stockham (for we are talking about his 1970s/early 80s RCA LPs)
> was quoted -- as I recall -- as saying that he fed the sound of Jussi
> Bjoerling's voice into his computer and instructed the computer to
> deconstruct the sound of Caruso's acoustical recordings and
> "reconstruct" the voice in Bjoerling's vocal image. Because he
> (Stockham) thought their voices sounded similar, and he wanted
> his computer to recreate Caruso's voice as it would have sounded
> -- as sung by Jussi Bjoerling. In Stockham's mind.

> That is at least what I remember; and I am willing to be corrected
> if my memory is faulty.

That sounds Just Plain Weird, as computers of that era weren't powerful
enough to do such things quickly. It's also aesthetically questionable, as
why would anyone want to make Caruso sound like Bjoerling? Or vicky-versy?

My understanding is that if, say, a Caruso recording of "Nissan datsun" was
being transferred, a modern recording of it was compared with the Caruso to
find the differences in "energy response" -- at what frequencies or bands
the modern recording had (relatively) more or less energy than the acoustic
recording. The acoustic recording was then EQ'd accordingly.

The "catch" of course is that some of these differences might represent
/real/ differences in the sound of their voices, rather than
recording-process errors. The effect would be to make Caruso sound more like
Bjoerling. Or whoever's recording was being used as a reference.

[MiNe 109]

In article
>,
wrote:

> On Sep 29, 3:25*pm, MiNe 109 > wrote:
> > In article >,
> > *"William Sommerwerck" > wrote:
> >
> > > > And indeed I don't. *But I should be very cross indeed if the
> > > proliferation
> > > > of Nimbus tiled-bathroom recordings were to crowd the others out of the
> > > > marketplace. I believe I've seen them on iTunes; I wonder how they sell?
> >
> > > I would hardly call the acoustics "tiled-bathroom".
> >
> > At this point I'd like an example or two of reverberant Nimbi. I just
> > listened to The Golden Age of Singing Vol 4 and didn't notice excessive
> > echo.
> >
> > Stephen
>
> When I worked at a radio station (WFMT in Chicago), a couple of
> Caruso cuts were scheduled from Nimbus CDs. I thought the basic sound
> reproduction was very good, very similar to what I got from the
> original discs; but the added resonance of Nimbus's room made it sound
> as if Caruso were singing in the empty Concertgebouw or Boston's
> Symphony Hall and recorded from a distance in both cases. And that
> resonance is not a part of the original discs. But try Caruso if you
> can, and see what you think.

Thanks! I'll have to look for online samples, as the Nimbus Caruso I
have isn't from the specific collections. I did enjoy hearing the
Pearlfisher tracks on Highlights from Faust and French Opera with
Caruso, Farrar and Journet. Definite horn resonances but not excessively
reverberant, as far as I can tell without reference to a dry transfer.

Stephen

Stephen

[Scott Dorsey]

William Sommerwerck > wrote:
>> But the original recordings had no resonance. No reverberation.
>Acoustical recordings are acoustically dead. There is no resonance.
>None. I own many hundreds of them and am speaking from personal
>experience derived from playing them. Caruso, Schumann-Heink,
>Chaliapin, Galli-Curci, Battistini, Fritz Kreisler, Elgar conducting,
>whoever: the recordings were made in acoustically deadened studios.
>Adding resonance to the records' sound is not recreating something as
>close as possible to the original performance. It is adding a modern
>sonic element to the evidence we have of the original performance,
>evidence which is derived from and recorded with an admittedly crude
>technology (i.e. the acoustical process).
>
>Isn't there some confusion here between "performance" and "recording"? The
>lack of ambience was not so much an aesthetic decision as it was an acoustic
>one.

The lack of ambience was an aesthetic decision based upon how the original
recordings were expected to be played back. Since we are not playing those
recordings back in the same way, that is not necessarily a thing we should
avoid trying to alter.

>By the same reasoning, I shouldn't be using a hall synthesizer.

You, however, are playing back modern recordings that are intended to be
played back in a somewhat dry room through two speakers, and consequently
using a hall synthesizer on them is NOT appropriate and is shameful
disregard for the wishes of the original producer. (Unless you are playing
them in some other way than intended, like through headphones for instance.)

>> They are different methods, one electronic
>> and the other based on acoustics, but are both a doctoring of the
>> sound of the original sources.
>
>I'm going to be fussy about this, and say that the people who made the
>acoustic recordings would have wanted them to be heard in a room that added
>what was missing.

Possibly, but that is not necessarily an argument for the Nimbus method,
so much as an argument for doing whatever other tailoring might make the
sound quality more pleasant.
--scott


--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

[Scott Dorsey]

> wrote:
>
> When I worked at a radio station (WFMT in Chicago), a couple of
>Caruso cuts were scheduled from Nimbus CDs. I thought the basic sound
>reproduction was very good, very similar to what I got from the
>original discs; but the added resonance of Nimbus's room made it sound
>as if Caruso were singing in the empty Concertgebouw or Boston's
>Symphony Hall and recorded from a distance in both cases. And that
>resonance is not a part of the original discs. But try Caruso if you
>can, and see what you think.

I think what you are hearing isn't the resonance of the room but the
resonance of the playback horn and the playback diaphragm arrangement.

And no, it wasn't a part of the original discs, but it _was_ a part of
what a typical listener of those recordings a century ago would have
heard.

I don't like it at all, but it _is_ authentic.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

[Scott Dorsey]

William Sommerwerck > wrote:
>
>> Indeed. And as I think others posted about this earlier, Thomas
>> Stockham (for we are talking about his 1970s/early 80s RCA LPs)
>> was quoted -- as I recall -- as saying that he fed the sound of Jussi
>> Bjoerling's voice into his computer and instructed the computer to
>> deconstruct the sound of Caruso's acoustical recordings and
>> "reconstruct" the voice in Bjoerling's vocal image. Because he
>> (Stockham) thought their voices sounded similar, and he wanted
>> his computer to recreate Caruso's voice as it would have sounded
>> -- as sung by Jussi Bjoerling. In Stockham's mind.

This is ONE of the techniques that Stockham fooled around with, and there
was an AES conference paper on the subject. That technique was not used
on the RCA LP (and later CD) reissue that Stockham worked on, though.

>> That is at least what I remember; and I am willing to be corrected
>> if my memory is faulty.
>
>That sounds Just Plain Weird, as computers of that era weren't powerful
>enough to do such things quickly. It's also aesthetically questionable, as
>why would anyone want to make Caruso sound like Bjoerling? Or vicky-versy?

Stockham didn't do anything quickly, he did things in short pieces with
enormous long runs on very small datasets. He was in every way one of the
great pioneers of digital recording and digital signal processing for audio.

And, sadly, everything I ever heard from his studio sounded pretty awful.

>My understanding is that if, say, a Caruso recording of "Nissan datsun" was
>being transferred, a modern recording of it was compared with the Caruso to
>find the differences in "energy response" -- at what frequencies or bands
>the modern recording had (relatively) more or less energy than the acoustic
>recording. The acoustic recording was then EQ'd accordingly.
>
>The "catch" of course is that some of these differences might represent
>/real/ differences in the sound of their voices, rather than
>recording-process errors. The effect would be to make Caruso sound more like
>Bjoerling. Or whoever's recording was being used as a reference.

Right. On top of which the acoustic recording system was fearfully nonlinear
which means the relative frequencies at one level may be different than those
at a different level. So the whole idea is pretty misguided. Oh, well.
--scott

--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

[William Sommerwerck]

>> By the same reasoning, I shouldn't be using a hall synthesizer.

> You, however, are playing back modern recordings that are
> intended to be played back in a somewhat dry room through
> two speakers, and consequently using a hall synthesizer on
> them is NOT appropriate and is shameful disregard for the
> wishes of the original producer. (Unless you are playing them
> in some other way than intended, like through headphones
> for instance.)

I assume your tongue is planted firmly in your cheek. (I hope it is!) Stereo
recordings cannot correctly reproduce lateral sounds. The synthesizer
generates rear and lateral sounds (according to measurements made in real
halls), and presents them through rear and side speakers. The result is a
great improvement in the illusion of realism, and this is done without in
any way altering the original recording.

[[email protected]]

It strikes me that adding room characteristics to an old recording
carries with it a fundamental longterm flaw. That is, presumably it is
being done because technology has improved and so we are able now to
add some depth to the recording (for whatever reason). Well, wouldn't
it stand to reason that technology will continue to improve, and therefore
wouldn't it be wiser to simply provide the recording in it's fullest,
original detail (i.e., flat), so that said improved future technology
wouldn't have to also wrestle with undoing the (then) inferior tamperings
that we did?

In this case, I think I'd rather have the cleanest, untampered recording
possible, and I could add my own processing during playback if I really want
to hear it that way.

[William Sommerwerck]

> wrote in message
...
> It strikes me that adding room characteristics to an old recording
> carries with it a fundamental longterm flaw. That is, presumably it is
> being done because technology has improved and so we are able now to
> add some depth to the recording (for whatever reason). Well, wouldn't
> it stand to reason that technology will continue to improve, and therefore
> wouldn't it be wiser to simply provide the recording in it's fullest,
> original detail (i.e., flat), so that said improved future technology
> wouldn't have to also wrestle with undoing the (then) inferior tamperings
> that we did?

> In this case, I think I'd rather have the cleanest, untampered recording
> possible, and I could add my own processing during playback if I really
want
> to hear it that way.

That's a perfectly reasonable point of view. But just try to get an
"audiophile" to purchase a room synthesizer and additional speakers. I would
guess that less than 1% of audiophiles use such devices -- which are no
longer manufactured -- despite the improvement they bring.

[rje]

On Sep 29, 8:12*pm, wrote:
> It strikes me that adding room characteristics to an old recording
> carries with it a fundamental longterm flaw. *That is, presumably it is
> being done because technology has improved and so we are able now to
> add some depth to the recording (for whatever reason). *Well, wouldn't
> it stand to reason that technology will continue to improve, and therefore
> wouldn't it be wiser to simply provide the recording in it's fullest,
> original detail (i.e., flat), so that said improved future technology
> wouldn't have to also wrestle with undoing the (then) inferior tamperings
> that we did?
>
> In this case, I think I'd rather have the cleanest, untampered recording
> possible, and I could add my own processing during playback if I really want
> to hear it that way.

I don't think we're talking about archival preservation as far as
Nimbus is concerned. They just wanted to make acoustic records more
palatable to listeners who would normally avoid historic recordings.

As long as original pressings of historic recordings exist in
collections and archives, there will probably be some new device or
computer program developed that will reduce all of the noise and
retain all of the signal.

If you want to hear what the acoustic process was capable of
capturing, listen to "The Edison Trials" on Marston Records. These
vocal test recordings were blessed by never having been played until
they were transferred several years ago. There are recordings from
1912 that sound like electrical recordings with lots of room sound
ambience. Amazing stuff.

[Scott Dorsey]

William Sommerwerck > wrote:
>>> By the same reasoning, I shouldn't be using a hall synthesizer.
>
>> You, however, are playing back modern recordings that are
>> intended to be played back in a somewhat dry room through
>> two speakers, and consequently using a hall synthesizer on
>> them is NOT appropriate and is shameful disregard for the
>> wishes of the original producer. (Unless you are playing them
>> in some other way than intended, like through headphones
>> for instance.)
>
>I assume your tongue is planted firmly in your cheek. (I hope it is!) Stereo
>recordings cannot correctly reproduce lateral sounds. The synthesizer
>generates rear and lateral sounds (according to measurements made in real
>halls), and presents them through rear and side speakers. The result is a
>great improvement in the illusion of realism, and this is done without in
>any way altering the original recording.

It's only _slightly_ in cheek. Because then we get to the question about
whether fake lateral sounds are worse than none.

I'm not sure the improvement is "great" and I have seen the technique
used since the days of the Fisher Spacexpander.

But it's an example of the kind of alteration unforseen by the original
engineers. If they knew you were going to do that, they might have mixed
very differently.
--scott

--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

[Scott Dorsey]

> wrote:
>It strikes me that adding room characteristics to an old recording
>carries with it a fundamental longterm flaw. That is, presumably it is
>being done because technology has improved and so we are able now to
>add some depth to the recording (for whatever reason). Well, wouldn't
>it stand to reason that technology will continue to improve, and therefore
>wouldn't it be wiser to simply provide the recording in it's fullest,
>original detail (i.e., flat), so that said improved future technology
>wouldn't have to also wrestle with undoing the (then) inferior tamperings
>that we did?

For archival storage, this is absolutely the case. The main goal is to
do no wrong and provide as close as possible to the original medium.

But for distribution copies this is not necessarily the case.. as long
as there is a best-possible copy somewhere, making distribution copies
that are more listenable (if less accurate) is a reasonable decision to
make.

>In this case, I think I'd rather have the cleanest, untampered recording
>possible, and I could add my own processing during playback if I really want
>to hear it that way.

The world of online downloading should make this possible... you should
be able to choose which distribution version you prefer and pick your
choice of an unprocessed or several different processed versions. This
is where online distribution really can shine and provide added value to
the end-user over CDs or LPs.
--scott

--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

[William Sommerwerck]

> It's only _slightly_ in cheek. Because then we get to the
> question about whether fake lateral sounds are worse than none.

It's not fake. It's /supposedly/ a good approximation of what you'd hear in
a specific hall. (On the JVC and Yamaha synthesizers, hall #1 is the
Concertgebow.)


> I'm not sure the improvement is "great" and I have seen the
> technique used since the days of the Fisher Spacexpander.

The SpaceXpander? You're kidding! Boing, boing, boing, boing.

The difference is huge. You'll obviously never heard a proper demonstration.
Please stop by.


> But it's an example of the kind of alteration unforseen by the
> original engineers. If they knew you were going to do that, they
> might have mixed very differently.

A valid point, perhaps. The "great killer of young recordings", though, has
long been artificial ambience /mixed in/ to the stereo channels.

Oddly, the synthesized ambience makes the recordings sound /less/
reverberant, /lower/ in subjective coloration, and generally reveals /more/
detail. Clearly, adding synthetic ambience "does something" that the ear
appreciates.

[MiNe 109]

In article
>,
rje > wrote:

> On Sep 29, 8:12*pm, wrote:
> > It strikes me that adding room characteristics to an old recording
> > carries with it a fundamental longterm flaw. *That is, presumably it is
> > being done because technology has improved and so we are able now to
> > add some depth to the recording (for whatever reason). *Well, wouldn't
> > it stand to reason that technology will continue to improve, and therefore
> > wouldn't it be wiser to simply provide the recording in it's fullest,
> > original detail (i.e., flat), so that said improved future technology
> > wouldn't have to also wrestle with undoing the (then) inferior tamperings
> > that we did?
> >
> > In this case, I think I'd rather have the cleanest, untampered recording
> > possible, and I could add my own processing during playback if I really want
> > to hear it that way.
>
> I don't think we're talking about archival preservation as far as
> Nimbus is concerned. They just wanted to make acoustic records more
> palatable to listeners who would normally avoid historic recordings.
>
> As long as original pressings of historic recordings exist in
> collections and archives, there will probably be some new device or
> computer program developed that will reduce all of the noise and
> retain all of the signal.
>
> If you want to hear what the acoustic process was capable of
> capturing, listen to "The Edison Trials" on Marston Records. These
> vocal test recordings were blessed by never having been played until
> they were transferred several years ago. There are recordings from
> 1912 that sound like electrical recordings with lots of room sound
> ambience. Amazing stuff.

Yes, I have these! They're not so great programming-wise, sort of
American Idol for European unknown opera singers doing short auditions,
but fascinating for the surprisingly good sound and the taste of what
"ordinary" singers were like.

Stephen

[Matthew B. Tepper]

"William Sommerwerck" > appears to have caused
the following letters to be typed in
:

>>> I can only think that a modern artificial reverberation machine,
>>> which you mentioned, is essentially no different from re-recording
>>> acoustical recordings in a modern setup when they are played in a very
>>> large room and the results are recorded so as to include the resonance
>>> of the room, as Nimbus did. They are different methods, one electronic
>>> and the other based on acoustics, but are both a doctoring of the
>>> sound of the original sources.
>
>> I agree, and I don't like either of them. At least Pristine allows you
>> the choice of one or the other, and you only have to pay for whichever
>> one you want. Testament (at least with their latest Klemperer Mahler 2nd
>> release) makes you take both and pay for both. Nimbus gives you no
>> choice at all.
>
> The output of the hall synthesizer goes to separate speakers -- it does
> not pass through the main speakers. You also have full control of it.
> The reason you don't like such processing is that you've probably never
> heard it used correctly. When it's set up and adjusted correctly, you
> aren't aware of the enhancement -- until it's shut off. I wish I could
> give you a demo.

Are you saying there's a way to listen to Nimbus' vocal transfers without
having to hear all the reverb? Please tell me more.

--
Matthew B. Tepper: WWW, science fiction, classical music, ducks!
Read about "Proty" here: http://home.earthlink.net/~oy/proty.html
To write to me, do for my address what Androcles did for the lion
***** War is Peace **** Freedom is Slavery **** Fox is News *****
Opinions expressed here are not necessarily those of my employers

[Matthew B. Tepper]

"William Sommerwerck" > appears to have caused
the following letters to be typed in
:

> The "catch" of course is that some of these differences might represent
> /real/ differences in the sound of their voices, rather than recording-
> process errors. The effect would be to make Caruso sound more like
> Bjoerling. Or whoever's recording was being used as a reference.

Which reminds me -- has it ever been revealed just how John Culshaw and his
team made Wolfgang Windgassen sound like Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau in that one
scene in "Götterdämmerung"?

--
Matthew B. Tepper: WWW, science fiction, classical music, ducks!
Read about "Proty" here: http://home.earthlink.net/~oy/proty.html
To write to me, do for my address what Androcles did for the lion
***** War is Peace **** Freedom is Slavery **** Fox is News *****
Opinions expressed here are not necessarily those of my employers

[Matthew B. Tepper]

appears to have caused the following
letters to be typed in :

> It strikes me that adding room characteristics to an old recording
> carries with it a fundamental longterm flaw. That is, presumably it is
> being done because technology has improved and so we are able now to add
> some depth to the recording (for whatever reason). Well, wouldn't it
> stand to reason that technology will continue to improve, and therefore
> wouldn't it be wiser to simply provide the recording in its fullest,
> original detail (i.e., flat), so that said improved future technology
> wouldn't have to also wrestle with undoing the (then) inferior tamperings
> that we did?
>
> In this case, I think I'd rather have the cleanest, untampered recording
> possible, and I could add my own processing during playback if I really
> want to hear it that way.

Full agreement here, which is one of the reasons I buy recordings on the
Symposium label.

--
Matthew B. Tepper: WWW, science fiction, classical music, ducks!
Read about "Proty" here: http://home.earthlink.net/~oy/proty.html
To write to me, do for my address what Androcles did for the lion
***** War is Peace **** Freedom is Slavery **** Fox is News *****
Opinions expressed here are not necessarily those of my employers

[Matthew B. Tepper]

rje > appears to have caused the following letters to be
typed in news:36c1925a-f4c4-409d-815e-eb7183a6b632
@f26g2000vbm.googlegroups.com:

> If you want to hear what the acoustic process was capable of capturing,
> listen to "The Edison Trials" on Marston Records. These vocal test
> recordings were blessed by never having been played until they were
> transferred several years ago. There are recordings from 1912 that sound
> like electrical recordings with lots of room sound ambience. Amazing stuff.

The Mapleson Cylinders did not have the benefit of being hidden away unplayed
for many years, but I certainly get a feel for what the ambience in the old
brick brewery must have been like.

--
Matthew B. Tepper: WWW, science fiction, classical music, ducks!
Read about "Proty" here: http://home.earthlink.net/~oy/proty.html
To write to me, do for my address what Androcles did for the lion
***** War is Peace **** Freedom is Slavery **** Fox is News *****
Opinions expressed here are not necessarily those of my employers

[William Sommerwerck]

>> The output of the hall synthesizer goes to separate speakers -- it
>> does not pass through the main speakers. You also have full control
>> of it. The reason you don't like such processing is that you've probably
>> never heard it used correctly. When it's set up and adjusted correctly,
>> you aren't aware of the enhancement -- until it's shut off. I wish I
could
>> give you a demo.

> Are you saying there's a way to listen to Nimbus' vocal transfers
> without having to hear all the reverb? Please tell me more.

No offense, but where did you get that? I was talking only about hall
synthesizers.

Oddly, the best way to minimize the effect of the reverb is to play the
Nimbus recordings through a proper Ambisonc setup. As I said in an earlier
post, this moves the ambience to where it's "supposed" to come from, which
reduces the sense of excessive ambience. The same is true of SQ recordings.

The same should be true, to a lesser extent, when using a hall synthesizer.
As odd as it might seem, adding synthesized ambiences actually makes just
about any recording sound /less/ reverberant.

[Scott Dorsey]

Matthew B. Tepper > wrote:
>"William Sommerwerck" > appears to have caused
>>
>> The output of the hall synthesizer goes to separate speakers -- it does
>> not pass through the main speakers. You also have full control of it.
>> The reason you don't like such processing is that you've probably never
>> heard it used correctly. When it's set up and adjusted correctly, you
>> aren't aware of the enhancement -- until it's shut off. I wish I could
>> give you a demo.
>
>Are you saying there's a way to listen to Nimbus' vocal transfers without
>having to hear all the reverb? Please tell me more.

No, he's using a box that _adds_ rear channel reverb to existing recordings.

The "reverb" you hear in the Nimbus transfers is just the natural result of
playing a recording back through a big horn.
--scott

--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

[Kimba W Lion[_2_]]

(Scott Dorsey) wrote:

>The "reverb" you hear in the Nimbus transfers is just the natural result of
>playing a recording back through a big horn.

....in a large, 'live' room, with a microphone setup designed for surround
sound recording.

[Scott Dorsey]

In article >,
Kimba W Lion > wrote:
(Scott Dorsey) wrote:
>
>>The "reverb" you hear in the Nimbus transfers is just the natural result of
>>playing a recording back through a big horn.
>
>...in a large, 'live' room, with a microphone setup designed for surround
>sound recording.

I think the room has a lot less to do with it than that horn.... there
are some later echoes from the room but there's so much short-time-delay
reflection.....
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

[William Sommerwerck]

> I think the room has a lot less to do with it than that horn...
> there are some later echoes from the room but there's so
> much short-time-delay reflection...

Is there? I tend to think of the wavefront as simply marching down and out
of the horn, without reflections.

[Bob Lombard]

"William Sommerwerck" > wrote in message
...
>> I think the room has a lot less to do with it than that horn...
>> there are some later echoes from the room but there's so
>> much short-time-delay reflection...
>
> Is there? I tend to think of the wavefront as simply marching down and out
> of the horn, without reflections.
>

Ouch! My mind (such as it is) zigged to remembering the sound of the Klipsch
horns I once owned. Is there a relationship?

bl

[Scott Dorsey]

William Sommerwerck > wrote:
>> I think the room has a lot less to do with it than that horn...
>> there are some later echoes from the room but there's so
>> much short-time-delay reflection...
>
>Is there? I tend to think of the wavefront as simply marching down and out
>of the horn, without reflections.

Unfortunately not, there are enormous numbers of internal reflections.
That's why the response of a typical horn system looks like a hedgehog.

And the more broadband you try and make it, the worse it gets. Horn
systems work really well for narrow bandwidths, not so good for full
audio bandwidth.
--scott

--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

[Scott Dorsey]

Bob Lombard > wrote:
>"William Sommerwerck" > wrote in message
...
>>> I think the room has a lot less to do with it than that horn...
>>> there are some later echoes from the room but there's so
>>> much short-time-delay reflection...
>>
>> Is there? I tend to think of the wavefront as simply marching down and out
>> of the horn, without reflections.
>
>Ouch! My mind (such as it is) zigged to remembering the sound of the Klipsch
>horns I once owned. Is there a relationship?

Yes, however, the Klipsch designs have the advantage of another 20 years of
engineering, and some careful mathematics. On top of this, they are
2-way or more designs, to the bandwidth in each horn is comparatively limited
and that helps a lot. But the frequency response _is_ spiky as hell, and
those spikes move around and you move around the room.

Paul Klipsch was obsessed with the notion of getting the highest possible
efficiency from loudspeakers, because he believed that doing so would give
the lowest possible system distortion and cost by reducing the amount of
amplifier power required. In 1945, this was a very reasonable and wise
design philosophy. In 1985, however, amplifiers were a lot better and
it was no longer a good idea at all.
--scott

--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

[Doug McDonald[_4_]]

On 9/30/2010 11:27 AM, Scott Dorsey wrote:

>
> Paul Klipsch was obsessed with the notion of getting the highest possible
> efficiency from loudspeakers, because he believed that doing so would give
> the lowest possible system distortion and cost by reducing the amount of
> amplifier power required. In 1945, this was a very reasonable and wise
> design philosophy. In 1985, however, amplifiers were a lot better and
> it was no longer a good idea at all.
> --scott
>

He also believed that if a speaker were 100% efficient it would
have a perfectly flat frequency response.

I think that that would in fact be true if the speaker also had
a perfectly flat resistive impedance to match to the amplifier output.
But getting a flat impedance would be hard!

But a perfectly flat power response need not imply a proper
spatial distribution of all frequencies.

Doug McDonald

[Scott Dorsey]

Doug McDonald > wrote:
>On 9/30/2010 11:27 AM, Scott Dorsey wrote:
>
>> Paul Klipsch was obsessed with the notion of getting the highest possible
>> efficiency from loudspeakers, because he believed that doing so would give
>> the lowest possible system distortion and cost by reducing the amount of
>> amplifier power required. In 1945, this was a very reasonable and wise
>> design philosophy. In 1985, however, amplifiers were a lot better and
>> it was no longer a good idea at all.
>
>He also believed that if a speaker were 100% efficient it would
>have a perfectly flat frequency response.

Well, that _is_ true. If it is converting _all_ electricity to pressure
it necessarily has to have a perfect frequency response.

But it can be 99% efficient and still have a pretty dreadful response.

>I think that that would in fact be true if the speaker also had
>a perfectly flat resistive impedance to match to the amplifier output.
>But getting a flat impedance would be hard!

That's another different (but also substantial) issue.

>But a perfectly flat power response need not imply a proper
>spatial distribution of all frequencies.

That's also completely true, and that's really more of an issue with
modern real-world drivers than anything else.

In fact, the off-axis response problems of modern small horns used only
as HF drivers cause more sonic problems than any of the group delay issues
or compression distortion in most cases.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

[William Sommerwerck]

> He also believed that if a speaker were 100% efficient
> it would have a perfectly flat frequency response.

Well, if it were 100% efficient at every frequency... <grin>

Some people also believe that a speaker's efficiency -- in the sense of how
little it has to move to reproduce sound at a particular level -- is related
to its transient response. I don't believe that's correct.

[Scott Dorsey]

William Sommerwerck > wrote:
>
>Some people also believe that a speaker's efficiency -- in the sense of how
>little it has to move to reproduce sound at a particular level -- is related
>to its transient response. I don't believe that's correct.

In 1945 that was also a good generalization to make; the smaller your moving
mass is and the better the magnetic coupling is, the better the transient
response and the better the efficiency will be.

This isn't 1945 any more and now we have a lot of very different driver
configurations that we didn't have back then.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

[Steve de Mena[_2_]]

On 9/29/10 2:47 PM, William Sommerwerck wrote:
>>>> The digital transfers of (most of) Caruso's recordings were individually
>>>> equalized so that the detailed tonal balance matched that of modern
>>>> electrical recordings of the same works. To my ears, the sound of
> Caruso's
>>>> voice /did not/ match that of what I was used to hearing. It didn't
> sound
>>>> like him, and I really didn't like the voice. Yet people who had heard
>>>> Caruso sing live proclaimed the new transfers as more-accurate
> renditions.
>
>>> The memory of how someone's voice sounded sixty years later is amazing
>>> and probably not reliable.
>
>> Indeed. And as I think others posted about this earlier, Thomas
>> Stockham (for we are talking about his 1970s/early 80s RCA LPs)
>> was quoted -- as I recall -- as saying that he fed the sound of Jussi
>> Bjoerling's voice into his computer and instructed the computer to
>> deconstruct the sound of Caruso's acoustical recordings and
>> "reconstruct" the voice in Bjoerling's vocal image. Because he
>> (Stockham) thought their voices sounded similar, and he wanted
>> his computer to recreate Caruso's voice as it would have sounded
>> -- as sung by Jussi Bjoerling. In Stockham's mind.

I'm pretty sure Stockham did use Bjoerling recordings in his Caruso
restorations and wrote about it in an IEEE white paper:
T. Stockham, T. Cannon, and R. Ingebretsen, "Blind Deconvolution
Through Digital Signal Processing", Proc. IEEE, vol. 63, Apr. 1975

Steve

[PStamler]

Oh, as Colombo used to say, one other thing.

It ain't an RCA Victrola. RCA bought Victor in 1929, well after the
acoustical-recording era had ended for that label.

Peace,
Paul

[Arny Krueger]

"Scott Dorsey" > wrote in message

> William Sommerwerck > wrote:
>>> I think the room has a lot less to do with it than that
>>> horn... there are some later echoes from the room but
>>> there's so
>>> much short-time-delay reflection...
>>
>> Is there? I tend to think of the wavefront as simply
>> marching down and out of the horn, without reflections.
>
> Unfortunately not, there are enormous numbers of internal
> reflections. That's why the response of a typical horn
> system looks like a hedgehog.

That's often the case, but not necessarily true in every situation.
Starting in the early 1990s people like Earl Geddes learned how to create a
diverse range of horn designs that were based on new solutions of the
acoustic wave equation. Up until then only a few such horn design families
had be found, and they had other limitations such as a lack of constant
directivity with frequency. Earlier Constant Directivity designs (e.g. some
designs by Keele) had used standing waves in the horn to obtain uniform
power response over their coverage pattern.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horn_speaker

[Scott Dorsey]

MiNe 109 > wrote:
> rje > wrote:
>
>> If you want to hear what the acoustic process was capable of
>> capturing, listen to "The Edison Trials" on Marston Records. These
>> vocal test recordings were blessed by never having been played until
>> they were transferred several years ago. There are recordings from
>> 1912 that sound like electrical recordings with lots of room sound
>> ambience. Amazing stuff.
>
>Yes, I have these! They're not so great programming-wise, sort of
>American Idol for European unknown opera singers doing short auditions,
>but fascinating for the surprisingly good sound and the taste of what
>"ordinary" singers were like.

I just bought this set on your recommendation, guys, and it's great! I
would love to know what processing went into it.

It's really interesting: the announcer, who is presumably well off to the
side, sounds very hollow and comb-filtered, while the performers who are
on-axis to the horn sound remarkably clean. There is some honk in there
but by acoustic record standards it's top notch.

I'd be curious if there was an attempt at notching out modes in the horn
by the folks doing the reissue. If so, I'd assume that the modes were
different off-axis and so the notching made the announcer's voice worse
even as it made the performer's voice better. If there wasn't any attempt
at notching, then the effect is strictly the result of poor off-axis response
of the horn.
--scott

--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

[PStamler]

On Oct 5, 1:17*pm, (Scott Dorsey) wrote:
> MiNe 109 * > wrote:
>
> > rje > wrote:
>
> >> If you want to hear what the acoustic process was capable of
> >> capturing, listen to "The Edison Trials" on Marston Records. These
> >> vocal test recordings were blessed by never having been played until
> >> they were transferred several years ago. There are recordings from
> >> 1912 that sound like electrical recordings with lots of room sound
> >> ambience. Amazing stuff.
>
> >Yes, I have these! They're not so great programming-wise, sort of
> >American Idol for European unknown opera singers doing short auditions,
> >but fascinating for the surprisingly good sound and the taste of what
> >"ordinary" singers were like.
>
> I just bought this set on your recommendation, guys, and it's great! *I
> would love to know what processing went into it.
>
> It's really interesting: the announcer, who is presumably well off to the
> side, sounds very hollow and comb-filtered, while the performers who are
> on-axis to the horn sound remarkably clean. *There is some honk in there
> but by acoustic record standards it's top notch.
>
> I'd be curious if there was an attempt at notching out modes in the horn
> by the folks doing the reissue. *If so, I'd assume that the modes were
> different off-axis and so the notching made the announcer's voice worse
> even as it made the performer's voice better. *If there wasn't any attempt
> at notching, then the effect is strictly the result of poor off-axis response
> of the horn.

And maybe some comb-filtering due to floor bounce.

Peace,
Paul

[Adrian Tuddenham[_2_]]

PStamler > wrote:

> On Oct 5, 1:17*pm, (Scott Dorsey) wrote:
> > MiNe 109 * > wrote:
> >
> > > rje > wrote:
> >
> > >> If you want to hear what the acoustic process was capable of
> > >> capturing, listen to "The Edison Trials" on Marston Records. These
> > >> vocal test recordings were blessed by never having been played until
> > >> they were transferred several years ago. There are recordings from
> > >> 1912 that sound like electrical recordings with lots of room sound
> > >> ambience. Amazing stuff.
> >
> > >Yes, I have these! They're not so great programming-wise, sort of
> > >American Idol for European unknown opera singers doing short auditions,
> > >but fascinating for the surprisingly good sound and the taste of what
> > >"ordinary" singers were like.
> >
> > I just bought this set on your recommendation, guys, and it's great! *I
> > would love to know what processing went into it.
> >
> > It's really interesting: the announcer, who is presumably well off to the
> > side, sounds very hollow and comb-filtered, while the performers who are
> > on-axis to the horn sound remarkably clean. *There is some honk in there
> > but by acoustic record standards it's top notch.
> >
> > I'd be curious if there was an attempt at notching out modes in the horn
> > by the folks doing the reissue. *If so, I'd assume that the modes were
> > different off-axis and so the notching made the announcer's voice worse
> > even as it made the performer's voice better. *If there wasn't any attempt
> > at notching, then the effect is strictly the result of poor off-axis
> > response of the horn.
>
> And maybe some comb-filtering due to floor bounce.

More likely wall-bounce. Most recording lathes were driven by a weight
motor which needed a four foot space beneath it for the weight to
decend. The horn could not be near the floor and any distant floor
reflection would be blocked by the performer's body.

I came across an interesting acoustic recording with real clog dancing,
which raises the interesting question of how it was recorded:

< http://www.poppyrecords.co.uk/HXP107/hxp107.htm>
Track 8

Having been a clog dancer myself, I can say that this sounds like the
geniune thing which might have to have been performed on a stone-faced
platform raised to horn height. (Believe it or not, clog dancing on the
top of a small stone pillar was a competitive sport)


--
~ Adrian Tuddenham ~
(Remove the ".invalid"s and add ".co.uk" to reply)
www.poppyrecords.co.uk