[Mike Rivers[_2_]]

On 2/13/2019 12:30 AM, PStamler wrote:
I've been working on digitizing and cleaning up an album from 1981 that I'd say was done right; the engineers held back on the compression and limiting, and the album has decent dynamic range. As in a crest factor of 14dB, which is more that 99% of my LPs have, and more than 99% of my CDs. And it sounds clear and natural as anything I've heard. The album is "Fennigmania" by Fennig's All-Star String Band

There's probably about three of us here who knew Bill Spence, and only a
handful of us who were listening music of this genre in the 1970s-80s.
With his day-job background in audio and video, he understood the
technology and knew the right and wrong ways of recording acoustic
string music. In those days, young folk musicians were just starting to
make records didn't have much luck with the studios that they could
afford. Among folk musicians recording in those days, compression and
reverb were dirty words, and Bill offered an alternative recording
environment.

His recordings were simply recorded with good equipment and care, played
live by people who could play what they wanted listeners to hear. In the
studio, or what served as one, recording was usually direct to stereo or
mono, moving the musicians and singers around to get the right balance
rather than close-miking everything and mixing it later.

Distortion was to be avoided at all costs. And there was no reason to
compete for loudness in a stack of records - we'd put on an LP and
listen to a whole side so any variations in loudness were what the band
wanted us to hear. Radio DJs who played this kind of music were, and
still are, pretty rare (thanks, Paul, for sticking with it). They played
the music because they loved it, and if a record was a little softer
than the last one, they turned the knob on the console.

I haven't seen Bill for 20 years or so, but I'm sure that when modern
recording technology became inexpensive enough to fit into his budget,
he adopted it intelligently, without compromising the quality of his work.

--
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