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New Mercury Living Presence Mastering

Eloquence, the Australian label has recently released two recorded sets of Paul Paray conducting the Detroit Symphony from the original Mercury Living Presence catalog.
These extensive new sets have been remastered by Thomas Fine, son of the original producer Robert Fine. After listening for a while, I discovered to my dismay that he has emasculated the original Mercury sound to sound like run of the mill current commercial CD recordings.
No less of an authority than Henry Fogel in a review misguidedly calls them “excellent restorations,” presuming that they NEEDED restoration.
These are classic recordings that were incredible sounding when first released on LP and subsequently on CD transfers by Philips.
It’s a travesty! All the magic is gone. On a high resolution set the sound is comparatively lifeless and homogenized. Evidently Thomas thought he was “fixing” the sound to appeal to mid-fi consumers.
What a missed opportunity!

128x128rvpiano
mahler123
3,028 posts
 

I bought the first two boxes of the Mercury reissues that was released about 5 years ago, and then the 10 disc Paray set  from a Japanese exporter around 2 years ago.  I was surprised when the Eloquence box had a fair amount of material not covered by those releases.  How does the Eloquence sound compared to the reissues that I presently own?  I might just pass, but the performances were superb.  I grew up in Detroit and it’s nice to see these recordings being recognized as the great performances they are

curiousjim's avatar
curiousjim
4,115 posts
 

@tablejockey 

I am jealous 😁

I am fortunate to live with a neighborhood store with Classical gems from the "Golden Age" coming in almost weekly for cheap, because there is little demand for them.

rvpiano's avatar
rvpiano OP
2,413 posts
 

@mahler123 

 I can’t tell you how they compare because I don’t have the ten disc Paray set you speak of.

rvpiano's avatar
rvpiano OP
2,413 posts
 

If you want to hear the difference between the original Philips Mercury Golden Import CD and the new mastering go to Qobuz and type in “Paray Carmen” and you’ll see the two masterings. The Philips is the one that starts with the Patri Overture.

It’s pretty clear to me which one sounds better.

mahler123
3,028 posts
 

For me the real question here is the Mercury recording approach. It seems to me to have been regarded as a sine qua non in high fidelity for the time, but also lauded simultaneously as somewhat minimalist in comparison to some alternative technologies, such as Decca/London Phase4, which was regarded as stressing hi fi thrills over a natural perspective. I know that in Detroit at least Mercury placed great emphasis on the Hall, initially Orchestra Hall, which was being supplanted at the time by the acoustically monstrous Ford Auditorium, and also experimenting with Cass Tech High School. Get the Hall right and good things will happen.

I bought a few of the Paray recordings when they were released in SACD, namely theCharbier collection and Berlioz Symphony Fantastique. Wilma Cozart Fine was supposedly not involved in these digitalizations and viewed them as tragedies. To my ears they are spectacular, enhancing the originals to no small degree

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