Home Vinyl Asylum

Welcome Licorice Pizza (LP) lovers! Setup guides and Vinyl FAQ.

I have some of them

In the 1980s, I was somewhat of a Toscanini fanatic (less so now), and I was always looking out for reissues that I hoped might be better pressings/masterings than what I already had. These vinyl pressings are fairly good quality, but the masterings vary from good to very bad.

They were issued by RCA-Italia so they should have had access to reasonably good masters. The problem is their usage of various electronic processing (equalization, reverb, noise reduction). In some cases, I think it did help the sound but much of the time the effects were over applied, which killed the music or made it sound a bit strange. Nowadays, the processing would be done digitally with better results.

As for the half speed mastering, I think it was purely a marketing ploy. Half speed mastering isn’t going to help recordings that were poorly engineered to begin with. It is a shame that RCA made such poor sounding recordings of Toscanini (they do not compare favorably with other orchestral recordings of the time).


This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors:
  Crux Audio  


Follow Ups Full Thread
Follow Ups
  • I have some of them - rkw 07/26/0319:33:53 07/26/03 (0)


You can not post to an archived thread.