I hear "warmth" !

[rasputin1963]

Listening today to this great filmscore from 1970. And there it is: the "warmth" of the oldschool that people talk about. I can't get over just how "dark" and "sanded down" every sonority is. (And it would be heard as being even more muted and smeary over much hardware of that era). Listen how very muted the strummed folk guitar is... very little of the guitar's "shine" is allowed to happen.. Here it's just a tubby "purr". I wouldn't say things sounded "muddy", but they do sound very tastefully muted.

 

 

I guarantee no mixer today would allow his mix sonorities to be so blunted as they are in this recording, as if a Low Pass filter were applied to everything, with a upper-level roll-off frequency band placed astonishingly low. Nowadays it's so easy-- and tempting-- to give your mix voices lots of sheen, "presence" and crispy brilliance... I guess mixers of the 60's took very seriously the idea that upper frequencies were indeed "fatiguing". This mix "saves" all its high frequencies for "special occasions"... when some higher frequencies will peek delicately, with musical meaning, over the warm mud of lower-mids and bass. I suppose that's a very musical way to mix; and of course, this album was meant to be an "easy listening" affair, never startling listeners with too many high frequencies.

 

Your thoughts?

 

[video=youtube;SHKH5-_2T1Q]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHKH5-_2T1Q

[nat whilk II]

Most striking to me is the way that horn part that ends the first section sounds almost like there's a mute in the horn, but I don't think there is. Very different than the little horn parts that spice up Bacharach's material - there's usually little bright bite in those parts - those little horn parts are about as 60s as it gets.

 

I guess they were going for the sexy connotations of "warmth" for moviegoers - intensity, intimacy, but still cinematic. It works to my ear, very well indeed. It's so warm and mellow, it's more like a consciously chosen effect than a simple result of the analog process I'm thinking.

 

nat whilk ii

 

 

 

[dboomer]

Magnetic tape is a pretty good low pass filter. So are MIS-aligned RIAA curves

[Anderton]

Magnetic tape is a pretty good low pass filter. So are MIS-aligned RIAA curves

 

One thing I learned at the last AES was that RIAA curves are sometimes "tweaked" by companies to make things sound a little "warmer" or "brighter" or whatever. In other words, some of what people like about vinyl compared to playing a CD may have more to do with those tweaks that hype the vinyl sound a bit.

[Phil O'Keefe]

I hear distance. YMMV

[UstadKhanAli]

I love hearing the space of the room in recordings.

[rasputin1963]

RIAA standards was all about groove-cutting and playback apparatus, I gather. This is a case in which the medium was something of a bitch-goddess that prescribed a myriad of compromises in recording, pressing and playback. I guess the digital revolution was an attempt to obviate a lot of those necessary restrictions? Or are there still some pesky restrictions in the digital domain?

[WRGKMC]

If its a film track, the music may have been mixed to target an optical sound track. A musical recording may have been made from the film track, not the other way around.

 

I haven't looked but I'm sure Dolby changed in theatres quite a bit over the years. Maybe the audio track was mixed for optimal performance of the theatre sound systems of the day. If it released 1970 its likely a year or two older as well. Many films were still being played in Drive in Theatres with those crappy 70v speakers you hung on your door.

 

Having the music track mixed to the playback systems as backing music to the actors voices may not have yielded the high quality sound tracks you hear today. Then again, some of the movie sound tracks recorded in Hollywood by people like Bernard Herman in the 50's and 60's still sound fantastic on CD's compared to the actual movie versions.