What is your favorite recording with a quirck


I recently began to play some CD's I had stored away. Two of my favorites are "Rhapsodies" Stokowski RCA Living Stero 09026-61503-2 and Shirley Horn "You Won't Forget Me" Verve 847 482-2. These stick in my mind because they are recorded well. But also they have something quircky present.

In the Stokowski recording on track #6 Tristan und Isolde when I listen closely I hear a whirring sound like a turbine starting up. I asked a friend who lived in New York city and he suggested it was the subway underneath the building where this recording was made. Intersting I thought as my audio system could resolve and reveal this sound caught on the rcording.

Another moment of testing resolving ability was on the title track of Shirley Horn's recording of You won't forget me. During the song Miles Davis makes what seems to be a sarchastic sour note and Shirley in response whispers a**hole.

Have you any favorite quircky tests of resovling power on recordings that you have found?
wavetrader
The above was a deliberate quirk - here are a few unintended ones....

How about when Tambourine is dropped on the Beatles "I'm Looking through you".

How about on the Dixie Chicks Taking the Long Way Album - great sound but you can hear where they fixed some of the vocals with autotune (a studio software to correct pitch)

Steve Ferrone "More Head", which is a great album for sound btw, but they had a problem with the Hammond about 3 minutes in on Steve's Strut and you can hear the distortion glitches.

Or Nickelback "Rockstar" which is a great tune but has clicks probably from clipping noise throughout.

Or Peter Gabriel's Games without Frontiers where Kate Bush sings so badly in french (or is badly recorded) that everyone thinks she sings "She's so popular" instead of "Jeux sans Frontiers".

On Roxanne - Sting leans on the piano at the start (by mistake) just as he starts the bass playing (it just happens to sounds ok but its actually a mistake)

I could list many more of course as you hear errors all the time and some errors are openly admitted by artists as kind of joke - like John Bonham's squeaky foot pedal.

Sometimes it is hard to tell exactly what it is and to decide if was intentional or not...but you can usually hear a bad splice, bad reverb or a musician error. At the end of the day - with music there is really no such thing as a "perfect take". I think the Beatles has been the on band where this has been studied to excruciating details.
On Duke Ellington Meet Coleman Hawkins - during the extended Hawk solo on Mood Indigo- right in the middle Hawk gives a good snort on his horn. Otherwise possibly the most beautiful tenor solo ever recorded.
HA HA!.............I will drink to that, scattered thoughts combined with vocal talent that can be bettered by most anyone singing in the shower counted as genious gets my vote.
I don't know if there are any U2 fans out there but the UK Walk On Single is played on a entirely different drum set. It is also not as badly compressed as the American verison. In the American version you can actually hear the volume adjustments being made during the song by the mastering engineer - I guess it was so hot that the guy realized he needed to turn it down in the middle to give peoples ears a rest - it is a curious effect becuase it is just as if you yourself turned the volume down a bit in the middle - i.e. it is not musical as it effects everything equally)