Robert Johnson - Classic or Dud?

yeah but the older recordings are, to borrow your metaphor, pictures taken with cheap cameras under suboptimal lighting. you photoshop that to try to see what the photographer saw.

I think what it boils down to for me is the recording, flaws and all, is the work of art. Nobody now living saw/heard Robert Johnson play live. And modern recording technology didn't exist back then. So you listen to the recordings that they were able to make, to the best of their abilities at the time, and you accept that the content is inextricable from the medium. I think cleaning up the original source material as best you can is not only permissible, it's desirable. But this goes beyond that into what amounts to colorization. You shouldn't colorize black and white movies because the cinematographers knew they were shooting in black and white and they operated accordingly. And you shouldn't add echo and reverb to make it sound like Robert Johnson was performing in a concert hall, when he was sitting in a hotel room, tucked into a corner, facing a single microphone.

There's actually a lot of debate about these remasters among audiophiles. Someone in this forum writes that "anything that reverse engineers is fabricated and thus not the original recording anymore. It is a synthetic re-creation based on elements of the original recording."

― TO BE A JAZZ SINGER YOU HAVE TO BE ABLE TO SCAT (Jazzbo)

authenticity narratives are super interesting to me. hmmm. let me kinda try to break down my feelings in text.

if something can be argued as being a new creative work, or at least a derivative creative work, my only real concern is whether that work was ethically sourced, if you will. if pristine classical was saying this _wasn't_ robert johnson's work, but their own original work, that would be objectionable (remember when somebody tried to do that with the beatles' records? applied some processing filter to it and claimed it as an 'original work' not subject to the beatles' copyright? very stupid.) if someone stole other peoples' copyrighted creative work and used it to feed a computer program to "enhance" robert johnson's work, that would be objectionable (some people don't find this ethically objectionable, but i do). neither seems to be the case.

so i'm inclined to judge it on its merits. the tradition of duophonic being seen as "fake stereo". my problem with duophonic isn't that it's fake, it's that it's not good sounding stereo. a stereo remix of "good vibrations", including the vocals, is just as "fake", i'd say, but it fucking sounds great.

doing an a/b with the 2011 recording, it sounds different i guess. idk. i'm a lo-fi head. i got an aesthetic preference for stuff that sounds bad. most people prefer things that sound good to things that sound bad, though. legit.

Pfft. This guy is brazenly stealing Robert Parker's whole engineering shtick on vintage material from the same era, right down to his exact reasoning for doing so.
Robert Parker was best known for creating fake, digital stereo reproductions of old mono recordings. Not the same at all.

most people prefer things that sound good to things that sound bad, though.

Yeah, but what's "good" in this case? "I want this mono recording of a dude playing an acoustic guitar in 1937 to have the rich, full soundstage of a Pink Floyd album from 1973" is not "good" to my mind.

seems a bit like colorizing a B&W film. would the filmmakers have used color if they could have? i bet in most cases, absolutely. but it still sucks to colorize a B&W film. idk about this at all.

Robert Parker was best known for creating fake, digital stereo reproductions of old mono recordings. Not the same at all.

I realize he called his label "Jazz Classics in Digital Stereo" (so logically it would make sense it would be exactly that - fake, digital stereo), but I had the Muggsy Spanier one for a while, and if you read the booklet, it has some notes that could very well be in all of his releases. Basically, the relevant part repeats a lot of what's bolded upthread - people listened to jazz in dance halls and concert halls, where the music reverberated off the walls! They didn't sound "dead" like they do on those old '78s - nobody draped carpets and blankets on the walls like they did in recording studios - so I'm putting back the ambience that you would have rightfully heard if you were there!

I'm sure the methods aren't the same, but that's exactly what they're both arguing for in print and you hear it too - far more than any modest stereo spread, the attempt at making this "live" sound from a dry sounding record is what stands out the most on Parker's CD's.

"I want this mono recording of a dude playing an acoustic guitar in 1937 to have the rich, full soundstage of a Pink Floyd album from 1973" is not "good" to my mind.
I certainly don't think the Pristine release makes Robert Johnson sound anything like that! If they sounded unnatural to me, I wouldn't be interested. You can’t tell me which versions are more “authentic” any more than I can, because none of us were in that room.

You shouldn't colorize black and white movies because the cinematographers knew they were shooting in black and white and they operated accordingly. And you shouldn't add echo and reverb to make it sound like Robert Johnson was performing in a concert hall, when he was sitting in a hotel room, tucked into a corner, facing a single microphone.

― Tahuti Watches L&O:SVU Reruns Without His Ape (unperson)

ok, if we're gonna dig into the weeds on this, i'm gonna start talking about doctor who

when they put out the doctor who DVDs, they would do "special editions" with new CGI effects. i think the CGI effects look like shit. i mean they literally replaced a shot of a wobbly hubcap with a CGI spaceship and i kind of prefer the hubcap. do i think they "shouldn't" have done it? well, for one, no, just because i like it doesn't mean they shouldn't have done it. for two, who fucking cares what i think? like what makes me the arbiter of what is and isn't a defacement of _real_ doctor who?

there are _so many_ examples of this from the show's history:

* replacing footage on the program as broadcast with newly created special CGI special effects
* colorizing a story originally recorded and broadcast in black and white and editing it to 45 minutes to try and gain a wider audience for that story
* manually colorizing an episode originally recorded and broadcast in color, but which no longer exists in color
* colorizing a story originally recorded and broadcast in color, using color metadata not visible in the recording, but which is still stored as part of a subcarrier signal
* colorizing a story originally recorded and broadcast in color by combining the color signal from a low-quality off-air color recording with the image from a high-quality black and white film print of the story
* using computerized techniques on a 25 fps film print of a program originally recorded and broadcast at 50 fps to give it the "look" of a 50 fps broadcast
* creating a new animated version of a "missing" story using the existing audio and creating new animated footage to let viewers see how it might have looked upon broadcast
* doing the above in black and white
* doing the above in colour
* replacing a recording by the beatles which appeared in the original soundtrack of a story with another recording, for copyright reasons
* cutting part of an episode because it contained a copyrighted performance by the beatles
* obscuring part of the audio of an episode because of its use of a highly offensive racial slur
* re-creating a few seconds of audio missing from all known recordings of the episode, including a recording of the original broadcast, by splicing together recordings of the actor saying the words in the missing line
* re-creating the video of 12 seconds of footage present on the original broadcast, but censored for overseas broadcast, and hence not part of the existing video recording

which of these "shouldn't" the copyright holders of the program have done? which of these are objectionable alterations to the original program?

personally, in every case, i'm in favor of what the people in question (often the erstwhile Restoration Team) did with these recordings. i have _personal aesthetic objections_ to the results of some of this work - some of the animations are pretty bad - but in no case do i think it's justified to say that the alterations to the original recording media _shouldn't_ have been made.

Wait, what just happened? tl;dr sorry. Nutshell: how does this stack up next to the latest Can reissues?

This whole debate goes way beyond primitive recordings from the 1930s and earlier. You’ll find countless number of rock & roll and R&B tracks from the 1950s and early ’60s on Spotify and Apple Music that sound dramatically different. They’re the same recordings, but one might be mono, the other stereo (or fake stereo). One may have a more solid bass sound, the other tinny. One may sound clear as a bell, the other muddy as the Mississippi. One might sound “dead,” another may have had excessive reverb added.
My favorite version of Little Richard’s “Rip it Up,” for example, sounds dead — no echo or reverb whatsoever — but it sounds immediate and slaps like crazy. The dead studio sound is actually pretty common for a lot of New Orleans-style rock & roll and R&B from the ’50s. That version sounds the most natural to me, but the much more common version you’ll find has reverb. Which one is the “right” one? Even the original label, Specialty, has released different-sounding versions. IDK, I just know what I like.

Did Elijah Wald weigh in yet?

A band is recording an album for my label at the beginning of March, and I'm considering putting out two versions: if you buy the CD (or the digital files from Bandcamp), you'll get stereo, but if you listen to it on a streaming service, it'll be in mono.

Not too sure about this one. It sounds a bit off and overdone to an 'uncanny valley' sort of degree.

It sounds like what it is, an attempt to turn Robert Johnson's recordings into something they are not.
They will always sound like they were done in the 1930s, because that is when they were done.
The convolution reverb is a strange idea. A musician doesn't perform the same way in a hotel room as a concert hall. I don't think you can just throw some convolution on and be done with it. And not sure if there is a need either.

The original recordings are distorted, sure. But in trying to reverse that, they are merely distorting the recordings a second time.

I actually do think you can say that the original 78 recordings are probably closer to what happened on the day. Think of it this way, the 78s add one layer of distortion, whereas these add a second layer of distortion. I think it is statistically very improbable that the second distortion brings us closer to what Robert Johnson would have sounded like in the room.

Not to come off as too much of a purist, I think the important point for me is that this one doesn't quite come off. I feel like other remasters have done a more tasteful job of cleaning up just the right amount without trying to make the recordings into something they're not.

A visual accompaniment to these new releases:

https://images.nightcafe.studio/jobs/sRzqqriSclw94h8ynDPV/sRzqqriSclw94h8ynDPV--1--5kczy.jpg
https://images.nightcafe.studio/jobs/qENHSP3bux9JsDCntYGs/qENHSP3bux9JsDCntYGs--1--otozz.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/zMMwiz5.jpeg
https://images.nightcafe.studio/jobs/JEVsJki59SYk7Dd14IJf/JEVsJki59SYk7Dd14IJf--1--kmtbm.jpg
https://cdn.openart.ai/stable_diffusion/af5110c27f02bc5a1e470ebb1bcb4db198554916_2000x2000.webp

Need one of RJ & Bonamassa shaking hands.

Lol

Dion DiMucci has a big Robert Johnson portrait he painted himself hanging prominently in his living room iirc

https://www.facebook.com/OfficialDion/photos/a.281029604934/403804609934/?type=3

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUlVCZshZOU

It’s a far cry from using echo or digital reverberation to try and hide problems in recordings!

lol. some things never change.

this is an interesting project

thought I would hate it but to me it's ultimately more like Peter Jackson's They Shall Not Grow Old than George Lucas' special editions

Those samples sound pretty awful, the noise swells and shapes with the vocal so I feel like I've got sand in my ear and someone's riding the fader to mute the background.