Organ and vinyl

Rodrigo de Sá

Rodrigo de Sá

This club's crushing bore
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This is the second time in a few weeks: a remastered vinyl that shows a dirty or defective stylus.

This time it is Gilbert's record of organ works by Buxtehude, Böhm and Walther.

I really cannot listen to this, and it strongly reminds me of all the horrors I had to endure before CD.

As these remasterings were certainly done with every precaution, I feel this is a characteristic behaviour of styluses with organ recordings.

I do not want to start another irrational discussion on the merits and demerits of CD or vinyl. I'm just stating that organ and styluses seem incompatible.
 
Are the deep notes (and therefore heavily modulated grooves) the problem, Rodrigo?

In a slightly different context, Telarc, a US specialist label, used to have a version of the "1812" Overture that featured real cannons. The record came with a warning on the sleeve that your hi-fi might not be up to the task of playing it, and that you might end up with the cartridge on one side of the record and the cantilever and stylus on the other.
 
I think it is the mixtures and cymbals plus the heavy bass, but perhaps chiefly the very high and complex interaction of the upper pipes. I will check, but it is painful to listen to!!
 
tones said:
Are the deep notes (and therefore heavily modulated grooves) the problem, Rodrigo?

In a slightly different context, Telarc, a US specialist label, used to have a version of the "1812" Overture that featured real cannons. The record came with a warning on the sleeve that your hi-fi might not be up to the task of playing it, and that you might end up with the cartridge on one side of the record and the cantilever and stylus on the other.
Click to expand...

Real cannons?! - that sounds like great fun! I shudder to think of the SPL!

Do you have any details on that session?

I once built an extreme ribbon microphone prototype that had enough excursion at LF to quietly pop out the woofers from studio monitors when the heavy-sealed live-room door swung closed during a test session.

It was a very quiet crinkling/flopping sound. Oops.

Andy
 
from the title i could have sworn this was a requirements list for an S&M evening.
 
Rodrigo de Sá said:
This is the second time in a few weeks: a remastered vinyl that shows a dirty or defective stylus.

This time it is Gilbert's record of organ works by Buxtehude, Böhm and Walther.

I really cannot listen to this, and it strongly reminds me of all the horrors I had to endure before CD.

As these remasterings were certainly done with every precaution, I feel this is a characteristic behaviour of styluses with organ recordings.

I do not want to start another irrational discussion on the merits and demerits of CD or vinyl. I'm just stating that organ and styluses seem incompatible.
Click to expand...


I used to own this Gilbert recital on two different Canadian organs on LP, and I do not remember any annoying distortion.

As to the double CD release of Walchas Art of Fugue: IIRC you talked about the Isis release, and I suppose they used the second Archive LP release from ca 1970 as source material. This was - as opposed to the original Archiv release from the 1950es -
unfortunately cut with rather much distortion, so much that I discarded it and tracked down the original release second hand.
I have recently acquired the new DG rerelease of the Art of Fugue, and find no annoying distortion.
 

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