Going from yesterday’s epitome of 1970s lo-fi, to the other extreme – a 1990 paragon of audio cassette fidelity. High spec chromium-dioxide tape media, XDR quality control processing, Dolby HX Pro noise reduction, full digital remastering – all in a highly successful effort to bring a 1965 recording up to 1990s fidelity standards.
It’s another offering from EMI’s Studio DRM series of classical works (earlier one here) – this time featuring Jacqueline Du Pre perfoming Beethoven’s Cello Sonata No.3 (A major) and Cello Sonata No.5 (D major), at Abbey Road studios back in the Beatles era. Stephen Bishop-Kovacevich was the piano accompanist.
It’s fascinating to look back at how consumer music media changed over the last quarter of the twentieth century. There was a time, in the 1980s, when albums in particular sold phenomenally well on compact cassette.
Vinyl was dramatically losing ground, due primarily to the arrival of portable or travel-focused player systems like the boom box, car stereo and Walkman – which, because of the delicacy of the record-playing mechanism, could not be designed around vinyl.
The same lack of portable player options also limited sales of the new compact discs, but even home CD players were prohibitively expensive for most. Four hundred quid was hailed as a “breakthrough price” for a CD deck in 1985, but compared to the sub-£100 cassette decks that could produce a high definition sound with chrome tape, that was still a considerable leap to be taking.
So in the early to mid 1980s, cassette tapes really took the lead in the album market, and purveyors of high quality music pulled out all the technological stops in a bid to eliminate the problems people associated with audio tape. As is evident in this product, from the tail end of the cassette album’s heyday, it was possible for tapes to compete with CDs as a sophisticated listening experience. Even when the content was dynamically rich, with whisper-quiet passages, the background hiss could be all but eliminated.
But the sonic personality of audio tape still adds a warmth and attractiveness you just don’t get with a CD. With a good chrome formulation preserving high treble definition, and all that tech keeping the nasty stuff out, you hear a truly beautiful sound.
The next point of interest is the way a 1965 recording which would have been committed to reel to reel in mono, has been given a sense of dimension. There’s no reference to stereo or mono on the product, but put on the headphones and you hear a stereo image. It’s clear that the piano has been recorded with a single mic, and so has the cello. It’s harder to tell whether the two instruments were recorded to separate tape tracks which could then be split for some semblance of stereo at the remastering stage.
Whether or not the instruments were splittable, the positioning of them within the stereo image is basically central. The piano is dead centre and the cello sounds just off centre. And even if the piano and cello were not split at the recording stage, late 1980s technology would allow a remastering producer to isolate and subtly pan certain frequencies. This could give an impression of the cello sitting at a slightly different position from the piano in the stereo image. There was a variety of artificial stereo imaging production tools by the time this recording was remastered.
But the real sense of stereo comes from what is almost certainly a very high quality 1980s digital reverb. We’re not talking Alesis MIDIVERB here – perhaps something more like the horrendously expensive but eminently capable Lexicon 480L. Especially with headphones, you hear the spatial halo sitting around the instruments like the walls of a sizeable venue. They did not have reverb of that quality in the ‘sixties, so it’s definitely part of the remastering.
If the goal was to make a 1965 recording sound like a 1990 recording, that goal was only a cat’s whisker short of being achieved.
It’s good to remember an era in which technology was almost invariably used for great good within the consumer world – like reviving and spectacularly enhancing a wonderful performance by a brilliant cellist who had tragically been taken away. Today, we’re more used to seeing technological innovation in the consumer domain focused on spying and mass surveillance. The Internet didn’t change everything for the better.
Tape Tardis 