Oldest Recordings that sound “audiophile”

Good stuff.  Lots to lookup and stream online.  Keep ‘em coming. 

This is just a FWIW follow up on my post above, but the CD version of The Ghost And Mrs. Muir I have is Varese Sarabande - VSD 5850 and The Captain From Castile is the one from the Screen Archives Entertainment label.

For The Ghost And Mrs. Muir, there is a 1975 rerecording made by Elmer Bernstein, but I have not heard it.

In looking up the materials for these two soundtracks, I found this:

"The uncovering of long-stored Hollywood archives have shown that the studios were experimenting with multiple angle, or dual channel, sound as early as M-G-M’s Meet the Baron in 1933."

The Captain From Castile: "Tony Thomas wrote in his notes for an LP reissue of the original music in 1975, '[The discs were] considered so hi-fi in their day that record dealers often used the ‘Conquest’ side as a demonstration record.'"

and even

"Newman was famous for his swooning, romantic tunes and the lushness he could obtain from the strings came to represent the epitome of “the Hollywood sound,” a sound Bernard Herrmann, for one, famously did not want."       Possibly a bit ironic here, given that the very word "swooning" is an apt description at times of Herrmann's own score for The Ghost And Mrs. Muir, but admittedly is perhaps a rare concession from him on that point nonetheless.

Ray Charles put out an album called "Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music" that was recorded in Feb 1962 and has an amazing sound stage.

@ivan_nosnibor ,

'From 1947 to 1950, excellent sounding mics were available, but they were expensive to make and uncommon and tended to be first reserved for high-profile, big-budget events.

I have two fine-sounding CD soundtracks, both in stereo, that were Hollywood films made in 1947:

The Ghost And Mrs. Muir  (Bernard Herrmann)
The Captain From Castile  (Alfred Newman)'


Those years from 1947 to 1950 were probably the most critical in all of audio.

In just a couple of years the industry went from live recordings on 78rpm shellac to taped ones on the 33.33rpm LP introduced by Columbia in 1948.

The move from heavy iron needled gramophones ploughing their way through a mere 4 minutes a side of  78rpm shellac to turntables with diamond stylii featuring up to 22 minutes a side of 33.33rpm vinyl with diamond stilli changed everything.

Even diehards like RCA and EMI, not to mention UKs Gramophone magazine were quickly forced to bow before the new fangled vinyl LP before long.

German WW2 tape technology soon took out most of the enormous labour of live recording. Recording live perfectly for 4 mins in one thing but 20 odd was nothing any performer fancied. 

Funny but this is the second mention of the Ghost and Mrs Muir I've seen recently (a friend had recommended it as lockdown fare).

Maybe I'll check out the movie.

@cd318,

Thanks for your post and the history info. I’d have to agree with you, those 3 years were maybe the most crucial for rapid changes in audio - some bridges crossed and some others burned, if you will. I enjoyed your synopsis, I like learning about this period. And evidently the increased bandwidth of lp’s helped to greenlight the implementation of stereo, too.

I have enjoyed The Ghost And Mrs Muir soundtrack, but I haven’t seen the movie in so long now I scarcely recall much from it, but it seems like I remember it having some interesting humor sprinkled through it. FTM, I have been meaning to see it again myself.