reading more accurately the topic (i dont have internet at home since a couple of months, and time/money ain't tall)
SO (i think my flow of consciousness style of writing may result a bit unpleasant...? ) it's time I put it simple:
THANKS FOR THE BEAUTIFUL WORK , ANDREW
and ...please KEEP UP !!
and tnx for the tech notes , i'll see if that can improve my sound engineering

glad some folks agree with me, Alan and Nina , blind lemon guitar playing is really hard to recognize at times... indeed and blind willie ...oh well... that would be really moving...
BEST WISHES FOR EVRYTHIN YOU CARE ABOUT, evrybody...

CIAO

Bring on Mr. McTell - I'll get that one too - lot's of fun hearing this stuff so clearly.

Happy Holidays All!
BK

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You know I just don't hear this as an improvement. Maybe its me but doing a side by side comparison of the samples with the '97 re-master of the Columbia 2 disc set I find that they come off sounding not so good - there's too much bass and too much re-verb added (which must be part of their process since the demo sample of their classical releases are drenched in it too.)

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I don't mind the fact that this isn't your cup of tea - clearly it's quite a radical step forward which some will not appreciate, but I would like to take issue with a couple of your comments, if that's OK?

It's funny you should mention the Columbia 2-disc set as I have this (and several other sets). Although the tracks are generally quite clean, there is simply no bottom end there at all. They really are quite bizarre - there's a complete cut of everything below 150Hz. Other transfers clearly show that this was present in the originals, as you would expect it to be. The degree of bass present has been very carefully calibrated against that of modern recordings of similar music played on similar instruments in an attempt to compensate for the unnatural thinness of many previous issues. If you can find me a full-sized guitar which emits no sound below 150Hz I'll send you my Sony/Columbia 2-disc set!

As for the question of reverb - no, I haven't added any. The samples from our first CD, in which reverb may be discerned, are as a result of the efforts of previous transfer engineers, not myself. If you'd read the notes to Volume Two you'd realise that this was something which was raised in criticism of the first issue and which I addressed when compiling the second CD, going out of my way to avoid anything which had been tampered with in this way.

I suggest, therefore, that you listen to the samples of CD2.

Finally, with regard to our classical releases - and I'm not sure which 'demo sample' you're referring to, as there are over 230 on our website - it is now quite some time since I last used any reverb, and have never 'drenched' anything in it. Alas this displeases many listeners, who find Toscanini's Studio 8H recordings particularly difficult to listen to because of their dryness. Personally I do find many pre-war 78rpm classical releases to be very dry, something which can be softened with a very small amount of reverb - though nothing by comparison to the dreadful sound on many modern issues - but after much debate I've gone the way of the purists in this regard and left it out altogether.

As far as I'm aware we don't know what microphone was used, nor the finer details of the amplification circuitry or characteristics of the record cutting head. We don't have any information on microphone placement - height, distance relative to both Johnson and walls - and we don't know anything about the acoustic characteristics of the wall, floor and ceiling coverings. Likewise, other factors which might have an acoustic impact - proximity of other hard surfaces and soft furnishings etc. are unknown.

Given this lack of information, it's not possible to devise what you might think of as a 'forward' approach to this type of recording. Instead one works backwards, using other recordings of similar material played and sung by reasonably similar voice and guitar set-ups. What does not change through microphone placement and room acoustics are the fundamental relationships between root frequencies and harmonics in voice and strings, and though these may be modified to an extent by, for example, guitar body size and microphone proximity, these are often quite minor variations by comparison to the gross complex distortions found in most pre-war recordings.

Of course an absolutely ideal reference would involve the recreation of the sessions with the same type of guitar, the same room, someone with a similar voice and the use of high quality modern recording equipment with the same microphone placement - if all of this could be accurately determined. If anyone would like to fund this I'd be happy to participate! In the absence of this opportunity right now, I think we could do worse than adopt the approach I've taken here.

In the same way, there are harmonic imbalances which we hear when listening to older recordings which give them that characteristic 'vintage' sound. That's partly why a movie-style faked 'vintage' sound, done by merely chopping off the top end, adding fake surface noise and boosting the upper midrange, simply doesn't sound remotely authentic to anyone used to older recordings, as it fails to take into account the often alarming non-linearity of vintage recording systems.

The system I use was originally developed to cope with a particularly brilliant but poorly recorded Toscanini Beethoven 7th Symphony from 1936, and has since been used on dozens of classical recordings to dramatic effect and often rave reviews.

The classical recordings are both easier and tougher to work with. Easier in that it's not usually hard to find reference recordings suitable for use - I often use multiple references these days, chained together to provide as neutral an overall reference as possible. Harder in that the dynamic range of the recordings makes them potentially far more revealing of surface flaws and noise than a hot-cut blues or jazz disc.

What I wanted to do with the RJ recordings, and since then Charlie Parker (and others currently in production), was adapt the system I used for classical music to work in other genres of music where a direct and absolute note-perfect modern rendition of the same piece is unlikely to be found. What these recordings have proved to me is that not only is this possible with a considerable degree of success, but that also, even today, there is a strong demand for these recordings sounding better than before, even from (or perhaps especially from) those who may already have the same recordings in their collections.

This is somewhat surprising - received wisdom in the classical record market is that you simply don't put out anything already in the catalogue. Moreover, you think twice about putting out anything that's been out in the last five years, or has been remastered within the last ten years. Being a web-based company we've been able to ignore much of this, largely because we don't have thousands tied up in expensively produced yet unsold stock, which is the conventional risk (and has seen some companies go under in the last few years).

My plan for 2008 is to continue in both the classical and jazz/blues vein. Once the latter builds to a reasonable number of releases we'll probably split them off the classical website and develop the almost-redundant pristineaudio.com website as a home for non-classical material. Looks like it's going to be a busy year!

Happy New Year to all here.

Ignore the armchair producer naysayers and just keep going. Whatever you're doing, you're doing really well. Like the smart person upthread said, we'll never know the exact conditions anyway, so a close approximation with a wonderful end result isn't such a bad thing after all. I know I'll be buying more CDs from you.

Here's an idea, maybe you'd consider doing a compilation blues CD with some of the people mentioned here. That way we wouldn't have to wait so long to get a good taste of what we've been waiting so long to hear, and it would be sort of a sampler intro to future CD solo releases.

http://www.pristineclassical.com/LargeWorks/Orchestral/PAJZ001.php

(N.B. If you're using Firefox and have Real Player 11 installed, please disable the download option as this clashes with the Flash MP3 player used on our site.)

I've no plans to go back over any of the material I've reached - you can go round and round in circles with this kind of thing if you're not careful, and I'm equally happy with both.

I've been experimenting this weekend with music by other blues artists of the early 1930's and invite you to take a listen to some work in progress:

1. Bessie Smith

This is 'Gimme a Pigfoot', rec. 1933, taken from the same overall source as the first volume of Robert Johnson material and, as such, with the same added reverb. I was really looking to fix the tonal balance of the sound and figure out a suitable reference for her, rather than create a finished recording, as I have quite a lot of source material for Smith currently on order. Nevertheless, I think this sounds pretty terrific!

http://tinyurl.com/2q35wv

2. Blind Willie McTell

Different source this time, without added reverb. Again, this is work in progress - though I'd say it's probably closer to a releasable version than the previous, there's still work to do on residual hiss around some peaks. It's 'Georgia Rag', rec. 1931, solo McTell, originally issued under the pseudonym Georgia Bill, and this time I was able to use both modern 12-string blues recordings and later, post-war recordings of McTell himself in order to put together tonal reference files:

http://tinyurl.com/339kkc

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Originally posted by Andrew Rose:

I appreciate Charlie Parker is way off-topic for this forum -

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Not really......there's many eclectic musical folks here.
I have a few of the Parker with strings .78 discs....are they worth anything?