OBCR of FOLLIES remixed and remastered! — Page 2

"Delightful. Too bad they didn't record any extra material. I would love to have a good recording of the Bolero (better than the soundboard), played at the right tempo. That Paper Mill version is funereal."

Are we sure that the Paper Mill version is not the right tempo? The OBC tempos are quite fast (e.g. BUDDY'S EYES is faster than it was written) and didn't we conclude the Soundboard was sped up?

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I'm pretty sure we did conclude that the soundboard was sped up with age. There's no way the Prologue was played that fast.

"In any case, the recordings of those Angel releases never sounded as good as their respective original CD releases, such as THE MUSIC MAN and THE UNSINKABLE MOLLY BROWN, or especially the Capitol R&H soundtrack releases. "

The first CD release of Music Man--at least the one I have--used the 60s release with extra stereo reverb that I find unlistenable, personally. I also find the Angel releases of Forum, Funny Girl and especially Zorba are big improvements on the earlier CD releases, but that may be a matter of taste.

So much for logic

It's gonna be fun to see that one come back to bite.

just ordered my copy...THANKS FOR POSTING THIS!

the SONDHEIMMANIAC

Oh, trust me, I know the difference, hehehe.

I've never heard of pros panning vocals hard-left or right for the duration of anything, much less a whole song, so was just curious who was responsible for that original mix.

I think even a deaf person knows not to pan something hard-right or left, lol.

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The panning was popular in the early days of stereo - it stopped being popular in the late 1960s, probably even before. The producer of the original Follies mix was responsible for how it was mixed - one day, and not well.

I can only tell you, as you can probably hear in our audio samples, this is more than just a minor step up - I'm hoping it will be a revelation to everyone - you're going to hear things with such clarity and detail, and orchestrations that were buried in the original mix. Someone mentioned Losing My Mind - if you listen to the intro you will, at long last, hear the piano part that should be playing with the violins - the piano part was completely missing in the original mix for the entire song - gone, not buried, just gone. The panning is now normal, but it's the clarity that will astonish, I think - it sure astonished me. I actually turned to my engineer at some point and said, "After all these years of thinking this was a stinky recording (not the mix, the recording itself), who knew it was actually recorded well, and then completely screwed up in the mix. Both previous CD masterings were off the two-track album masters - there was only so much they could do and they didn't do it especially well .

It's interesting that Dick Jones did that--I guess he really was rushed (or trying to do something more theatrical with poor results), as there aren't issues with that extreme panning with other Jones' produced albums I know (off the top of my head, Forum, Funny Girl and Zorba). But as BK said I certainly have encountered it before--particularly in the early days of stereo (I also have an LP of the OBCR of Company that's mixed for quadrophonic speakers and, maybe that's why, but it suffers from a lot of that too--though I know even the original CD release had some of that which Shepherd rectified when he did the extensive remix in the 1990s for the remastered version--you can tell which version is which because before that remaster, the opening busy tone signal didn't match the orchestral echo of it in pitch, something he changed for the remaster--).

Re Losing My Mind--it always bugged and puzzled me why you can ONLY hear the violas in the intro to it (which stands out even more, because some of the other recordings--I think the Londona nd maybe the Concert one dropped the violas almost entirely from the intro).

HAHA I should pull it out--I have no doubt you're right. Liberson, of course, was much smarter with stereo right from the start--for the most part very early Columbia stereo recordings like West Side Story and Candide still sound terrific.

I was there. :) It was actually Michael Kerker who plugged it and it was very sweet of him to do so.

I still live in hope for-
Riverwind - Original Cast
Androcles And The Lion - TV Soundtrack
Merry Christmas, 1975 - Harvey Schmidt
Two Film Scores For Solo Piano - Harvey Schmidt
Movie Music In A Small Texas Town (4 vols.) - Harvey Schmidt
I'm Old Fashioned - Inga Swenson

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Updated On: 7/15/12 at 01:30 AM

And how about The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole???