Bruce Latham On Stereo v Mono Classical Recordings / Decca & EMI Releases / Audio Playback

We sat down with Bruce Latham to hear his thoughts on a range of topics and issues among the world of early classical vinyl recordings.
We are privileged to have Bruce write for our blog and his posts can be found by visiting - vinyl-house.tum...

[@FILMCOLLECTOR16]

BRILLIANT ADVICE FROM BRUCE! too many microphones on the soundstage these days keep it simple!!! JDP

[@stephenparker4735]

Very, very interesting. Can Bruce do more please?

[@danielsalter4339]

Is there a part 2? or when it cuts off is that all? cheers

[@nattyco]

What a shame you cut the video before the end. It's good to have first hand information about how vintage records we now cherish, sometimes for spurious reasons, were made and sold.

[@lizichell2]

Stereo is superb I love it

[@1mctous]

The Klemperer Beethoven and Brahms recordings produce a fine sense of the width and depth of the orchestra in stereo. I've heard some mono playback of the Beethoven cycle and it did not have much phase cancellation because the stereo image is well focused. The spaced omni mic array Mercury used did have a lot of phase cancellation so they used only the center mic track for the mono versions.

[@LambentOrt]

Fascinating

[@britishcomposers]

Another engineer who bought into the 'CD (and subsequently Digital) is better' camp. He has quite possibly not listened to a seriously top-tier analogue hi-fi playback system. Those LP's, where well mastered and cut, will most definitely outperform any digital remaster. No contest. The master tape will have deteriorated for starters, whereas a well preserved LP will have better retained it's qualities. It's not easy to get the right components together that have synergy: arm, cartridge, turntable, phono stage, amplifier, loudspeakers, interconnects & cables, hi-fi stand with good isolation properties, RFI filtered mains supply of the correct design, and lastly a room that is well suited acoustically. Get all this right and the sounds from the best LP's (and there are many) is only bettered by newly recorded open-reel. Digital is now such a magnificent sounding medium, but the recording engineers on those early recordings did something that no amount of modern tech seems to uphold beyond or even near to the black disc original.

[@raymond.clarke]

I agree with your comments, and I appreciate that you are clearly knowledgeable about audio. But I think you're misunderstanding Mr. Latham's viewpoint by assuming that he's claiming that CD/digital is better - surely he's just acknowledging that applying DDD remastering technology to analogue tapes can introduce problems. The only point he makes that I would question (1:26 - 1:42) is when he says that if you play modern stereo recordings in mono the sound is 'absolutely terrible'. That's true, but what else should we expect when such recordings are specifically balanced for stereo? The EMI Rosenkavalier recording that he cites (incidentally, it's from 1956, not 1958 as he says) was recorded with two separate microphone set-ups: one for mono, one for stereo, because the engineers realised that a single set-up could not be optimum for both. EMI has reissued the mono version of the 1956 Rosenkavalier on CD in addition to the stereo version, and the sound from the remastered mono tapes is certainly not the same as one would hear from listening to the stereo version with both channels combined into a single mono output (I'd guess that there would be cancellation of left/right signals when both channels are combined). I was a bit nervous at the casual way he was handling those rare LPs; at 7:24 he's holding a copy of SAX 2323 (Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto played by Leonid Kogan), not the rarest of the Kogan recordings, but nevertheless an LP that won't leave a buyer with much change out of £1,000. If I was handling it, I'd be more careful to avoid any risk of dropping it!

[@britishcomposers]

Interesting information. Having watched this again, I have to address one aspect that Mr. Latham has got entirely wrong. That of surface noise. The noise heard when intrusive is an indicator of a poor arm and cartridge match, re- compliances, as well as the turntable's design with energy dissipation. Without explaining the intricacies here, my set up, combined with the use of a record cleaner, delivers the most silent, free of surface noise playback imaginable. Even on very quiet programme and end-of-side tracking, such as Ralph Vaugham Williams' 'Epilogue' on his 6th Symphony, I have no intrusion; and this on secondhand LP records. As for older equipment not being as good, a pair of wideband PYE mono power amplifiers driving a pair of QUAD Electrostatics held in high-mass elevated stands with all the sackcloth and felt removed and stood one-third into a rectangular room using a Thorens TD124, an SME 3012 and an Ortofon SPU cartridge with Radford pre-amp would more than cut it as high-end system realism by today's standards. My biggest bug-bear is that some record labels are now getting drawn into a new kind of sound balance: that of overdone low-frequency heft and dynamic range expansion that resembles those awful hi-fi test recording CD's that never sounded real; going beyond reality. I heard a BBC Phil. recording today on Radio 3 of Gustav Holst's Oriental Suite and the bass drum had what seemed like twice the energy and impact of that arm-throwing Telarc 1812 recording. That would never have been acceptable 30-years ago, but I fear we're entering a new generation of engineers; some of whom haven't studied the architecture and background of recorded sound sufficient as to knowing where not to go with some of this.

[@charleslaine]

back in my day....

[@hectorberlioz1449]

Grwat video!

[@fredswart7205]

FANTASTIC!!!