Are new cast recordings "The aural equivalent of an airbrushed photograph,"

Well, I had listened to the cast recording of Legally Blonde in the car and noticed the spoken parts sounded way quieter than the singing. I have noticed this with quite a few cast recordings. Maybe it's my car stereo but sometimes I have trouble hearing what the characters are saying.

I agree that the sound can be tinny and mechanical at times. Alot of these recordings just don't have that warmth of sound they used to you know?

I find on practically all cast recordings with dialogue from Gilbert & Sullivan to Follies the dialogue is quieter which can be irritating it is fine if you are sitting down quietly but it you are not, half the time i think something is wrong with the recording and then check to find it's the dialogue I think the reason is that while recorded at the same volume the songs come across louder as they tend to projected more.

I can't disagree with that review, there's an obsessive cleanliness to modern cast recordings that can stamp down the living aspect of theatre. When it comes to sound I tend to prefer a lively performance over a clean sound, which is why my favorite album right now is "Applause", which is an ecstatic recording even if it is, aurually, a mess in comparison to modern cast recordings. To me it's sort of like how you can hear if someone's smiling while they sing, their voice takes on a certain ebullient quality and I think it's certainly possible that obsessively scrubbing a performance could, and sometimes does, kill that. Of course, I'm also averse to the pitch-perfect "American Idol" style of singing, so I suppose take this with a pinch of salt. I'd rather hear character than staff lines.

The studio-created reverb on today's OCR can be annoying. Especially in the spoken moments.j

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>> Like they are recorded in a concrete room with a keyboard

... which is pretty much how all recordings are done these days After all, when the bulk of the industry is four guys, a couple of guitars, and a drum kit, how much room do you need? So now we have recordings done with 10-member "orchestras" and the cast brought in separately to record over it, and some electronic enhancement to autotune the whole thing... just to make it note-wise perfect. But that's been the case now for a decade.

After all, the original London cast of Miss Saigon was recorded in what year?

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SeanMartin, you are right, it is like that nowadays and it really is a shame.

But I don't see why "nowadays" should equal "bad acoustics", "lesser talent (not singing on key without autotune)", "bad quality microphones" and an overall cheap sound in Broadway Cast Recordings.

What is it that was available in the 90's that does not exist anymore? Because plenty of those recordings sound excellent.

"What is it that was available in the 90's that does not exist anymore? Because plenty of those recordings sound excellent."

It's cheaper. Cast recordings are a niche market now- and it doesn't help that most of their sales are undoubtedly now coming from digital downloads. They keep their overhead costs lower so they could more easily be made back or exceeded.

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Things have changed even since the 90s. The market has shrunk more. How music has sold has changed- the industry has changed. And many of the studios that were producing cast albums have folded or been sold or folded into other departments .

Here's an article from 2002 about the difficulties facing cast recordings.
THEATER; Hard Times for Cast Albums, to Broadway's Regret

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That is a great article you have linked, Kad. The question of teh cost of making a cast album comes up frequently on BWW as does teh question of how many units teh record has to sell to break even:

'It is very difficult to record a new Broadway show for under $300,000 and, quite frankly, it can be much more than that,' said Denis McNamara, senior vice president for Decca/Decca Broadway, part of the Universal Classics group. 'You really have to sell in excess of 150,000 units to see a profit."

Every time Bryan whines about no cast album for CRY BABY this article explains why it was never done. It would not be a profitable venture for a label to back, and the show's producers were unwilling to underwrite the cost. Revivals are even less likely to be recorded because they compete with the "original" OCR's which further diminishes the sales of newer editions. The original 78-rpm set of OKLAHOMA! sold over a million copies. A year after it was released on CD, the reissue was reported as having sold 80,000 units. Very few modern cast albums sell that well or consistently. WICKED, RENT and JERSEY BOYS have. Would a CD of HANDS ON A HARD BODY sell like that? Probably not.



As for how albums are recorded, somebody asked "is there a reason why they can't record a few of the live performances and take the best cuts from each one? It would be cheaper, and most people would probably prefer a live recording. I know I would."

I would NOT.

Sound quality is a huge issue because the Broadway theaters were not built to be recording studios. Compare the sound of audience-made bootleg tapes with sound board feeds and then with studio made recordings. The audience made tapes require you follow along with a script to be able to understand every line being said of sung. The soudn system tapes are full of stage noise as performers move about the set and again many lines are off-mic and lost.

Also, If you record live, the performers cannot adjust the performances to play for the ear alone when they are so involved with playing to spectators. Dialogue could not be changed, song intros and endings could not be altered, tempos could not be increased resulting in a loss of enthusiasm and excitement. Then you would have the added concerns of audience noise; watches beeping, cell phones going off..we don't want those preserved on a cast album. Album producers could not enlarge the orchestras for a richer fuller sound and the albums would sound very thin.

People who advocate for live recordings are seeking a direct souvenir of their experience, forgetting that a majority of people who buy cast albums are outside of New York and may never get to see these shows live. If you eliminate that market by catering to the core audience who see shows on Broadway, sales will be significantly reduced.

Also I am not sure how to come to the conclusion it would be cheaper. Remote engineering is quite expensive, you would still have to pay the cast and musicians equity minimums and the extra costs (arrangers fees, copyists fees, fees to use production photos in the booklets, poster artwork) would still apply.

No major savings woudl result.

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Doing it live just gets a little bit of magic that's not there in studio.

That "live" magic can be created in studio. Cast album producers going back to Goddard Lieberson and Jack Kapp quickly learned how to translate the feeling of a live performance from stage to records. The performers had to learn to adjust their performances accordingly but the very best studio made albums communicate vivid theatricality: The 1959 OBCR of GYPSY and the 1970 OBCR of COMPANY have it to spare. Part of it is the recording technique...the placement of microphones and the separation between singers. When you see pictures or recent cast album sessions, singers are placed in isolation booths so not only do they record as isolated tracks, they also do not have the interaction with co-stars. That's the bigger problem.

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I really don't like the techniques used on many OCRs today. There's no sense of space. It's as if every performer is standing directly beside you in a small soundproof padded booth and speaking directly into your ear. I know many will argue that an OCR is a different medium and it's not necessarily supposed to sound like you're sitting in the theatre but I wish there was a way to make recordings just a bit more theatrical.

Compare the original Promises Promises overture to the recent revival. The orginal seems to really leap off the disc but the revival just lays there without any energy at all.

"I certainly understand where he's coming from and I think a lot of people here would agree, but I do not. I love the way the new Follies recording sounds compared to the OBC and I think it's a major improvement. There are some older recordings that are still leaps and bounds better than their revival recordings in terms of audio quality, and the warmth of the sound that he's talking about, but not Follies. "

Really. Because I find the newly remixed Follies to be so far and away superior to the recent recording it's not even funny. Perhaps you haven't heard the remix because it is a whole different beast than the original two CDs that were out on Angel. All these years they've blamed bad engineering on the original Follies - the engineering was superb - the mixing was the problem and that was grotesque, but it's all been changed and fixed now and Follies, the one and only, sounds just like any of the classic Sondheim cast albums from Columbia. The new one, for my taste, sounds thin, too dry, and makes a huge band sound like fifteen. And that happens with a lot of today's albums - several of today's producers do not understand "space" and "air" and things sound antiseptic and like they were recorded in a closet when you don't have the proper space and air. Just listen to any Goddard Lieberson cast album and you'll hear how it should be.

As to dialogue levels, producers today like to shut off ALL reverb for the dialogue and that is just a ridiculous thing - to have talking in one space and singing and music in an entirely other kind of space. And then they don't even out the levels, which is why you can't hear stuff. That thing on amazon is right save for one comment - it has nothing to do with digital and everything to do with producers who simply do not understand sound. It's really that simple.

Updated On: 4/14/13 at 01:44 AM