@mozartfan,
This is a fascinating subject. No matter how far you go back into the earliest days of recording you invariably find the engineers looking for some way to enhance their recordings.
Even those renowned Maria Callas recordings from the early 50s weren’t as honest as we’d like to think. Different venues, different microphones, different positions, different singing styles with miles and miles of tape used.
Eventually the best takes were very carefully selected to finally create an album such as highly regarded Tosca recorded in Milan back in 1953.
I’m getting the impression that vocal honesty and integrity were never the intention in recording. Only some kind of striving towards an imagined perfection as far as the vocalist’s talents and the technology of the time would allow.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tosca_(1953_EMI_recording)
This is a fascinating subject. No matter how far you go back into the earliest days of recording you invariably find the engineers looking for some way to enhance their recordings.
Even those renowned Maria Callas recordings from the early 50s weren’t as honest as we’d like to think. Different venues, different microphones, different positions, different singing styles with miles and miles of tape used.
Eventually the best takes were very carefully selected to finally create an album such as highly regarded Tosca recorded in Milan back in 1953.
I’m getting the impression that vocal honesty and integrity were never the intention in recording. Only some kind of striving towards an imagined perfection as far as the vocalist’s talents and the technology of the time would allow.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tosca_(1953_EMI_recording)