I love this album. I love all of Gregory Porter’s albums. Great choice!
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Leftfield is a new find for me, just discovered their stuff a couple months back! Played the hell out of Afroleft, good recording as well.
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I’m having a trawl through the albums I listened to when I was a student in the 90s! I shall post more of them as I get to them! Leftism and the follow up Rhythm and Stealth were albums I binged listened to while writing my Masters thesis.
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Lately I’ve been going through old albums that I listened to a lot in my youth but not with the audiophile ear I have today. Interesting listening to songs I knew so well yet finding out that I didn’t know the recordings at all. Some great, some not so great and the disparity can be great.
Easy to tell who cared for the production as much as they cared for the music and who didn’t.
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It’s often a case of who was allowed to care about production, generally it involved a lot more studio time and more expensive studios to do it well, and not every label would foot the bill.
You also never know what you are listening to when you go back.
I find modern remasters of classic recordings to be very informative.
Black Sabbath’s Paranoid was recorded on a 4 track tape mixed to mono for it’s original release, but the remaster is stunningly good considering, so the original individual tracks must have still existed and been in decent shape.
Which is unlikely to be generally the case, because it was common to physically splice magnetic tapes from different takes together before a final mix down.
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Completely agree, there’s not only the additional studio costs associated but who happened to have a producer and engineer with a good ear for the music they were working on.
There’s also the fact that quality recordings in certain time periods and certain or genres may have been considered more of the norm than other periods or genres. Classic rock for examples. Maybe it’s a BBC influence of quality sound, but Pink Floyd, Steely Dan, Dire Straits, all great recordings for the most part.
Parallel Lines one of my favorite complete albums, the recording is mediocre and that bothers the audiophile. If the original recording wasn’t great, no amount of remastering will bring it back and that’s the case with Parallel Lines IMO.
Where the term looped it comes from before the age of digital. lol
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Oddly enough this links back to my
as I wrote about John Cage, who was one of the pioneers of tape splicing to create physically remixed sounds in his early compositions along with some other mid twentieth century composers. My personal feeling is that it reached its pinnacle with the music of Delia Derbyshire and other members of the BBC Radiophonic workshop.
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All bands with lots of money at the time. Though I’ll give the nod to dire straits the OG recordings of the material before Brothers in Arms are all stellar.
depends a bit on what was actually archived, if the individual tracks still exist in good shape it’s amazing what’s been done (the sabbath example above was supposed to convey some of that) but if the issue is in how those recordings were physically setup, there isn’t much that can be done.
The Piano at the beginning of bat out of hell for example sounds like it was recorded underwater in a phonebooth, no ammount of remastering is going to fix that short of literally rerecording that part of the track.
The Beetles remasters (Abbey Road) in particular go to fairly extreme lengths to make those tracks sound more “up to date”, and I’d not be surprised if some of what’s on there wasn’t in the original studio recordings and were recorded specifically for the remasters.
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I agree. In the end it seems like it’s all over the place, but I listen to music from all over the place. If there are folks with collections in more focused genres they probably get more consistent well output.
Some really good recordings came out of Detroit/Motown simply because the studios did so much volume with so many artist that were professional studio musicians the were set up long term and had time to perfect things without having to set up tear down with each new vocalist that came along. So money was definitely a factor but it wasn’t a exclusionary factor to quality. If you happened to record in the right place at the right time.
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This one is quite harsh:
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Great album!! Thanks for posting this… Big fan of his music.
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Nice. I was just listening to Guess I’m Doing Fine. 
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NOW Noon cdt. On YT Frankfurt Symphony Prokofiev Piano Concerto.
Love that I can do this!!!
This album released in full while I was on a trip to Seattle and I refrained from listening until I got back home and my main rig electronics were warmed back up. Was worth the wait IMO.
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