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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
mapman's avatar
mapman
22,180 posts
 

Messing with MLP? Now THAT’s a travesty almost certainly.

In any case it would be an interesting listen. Something a little different? I will reserve final judgement until after I might hear. At least it’s likely for real and not some placebo solely  in people’s minds We will see/hear….

 

 

clearthinker's avatar
clearthinker
1,582 posts
 

Retreat to the Golden Age.  Many 'improvements' since then are illusory.

mahler123
3,312 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
4,678 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
2,654 posts
 

@mahler123 

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

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