Music and Music
I am a great lover of good music. I like many different things from Classic Rogers and Hammerstein Musicals to John Denver Ballads. A while back, someone gave me a copy of “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.” I was thrilled because it is one of my favorite musicals. It is Howard Keel at his prime along with a supporting cast and Jane Powell singing like a Nightingale.
I ripped off the outer wrappings and put it in my computer CD Drive, cranked up the volume and sat back to listen. Wait! What is wrong here? This sounds nothing like the DVD. What did they do to this CD???
I pulled out the little booklet that came with the CD and tried to find out where to send a letter, voicing my concerns about the quality of this product. Katy bar the door, I was going to get to the bottom of this mess.
Leafing through the little booklet I began reading an explanation to the quality of the CD. There was no master of the original audio recording for the movie. They had to strip away the audio from the DVD and re-engineer it and then try to remaster it back into a viable product. I sat there in disbelief, wondering who was stupid enough not to save such a wonderful master of some of the best sung R & H songs of all time.
Then I wondered, with all the modern audio technology, why was the end result so bad. The answer I came up with is because they went too deep. They should have kept things simple. About two years ago, I spent a month or so, copying old LP’s to my hard drive. I used a product called Polderbits Recorder to copy the LP’s. I let them sit on the machine for a while with all their pops and clicks and other impurities.
About a year ago, I received a copy of Sony Sound Forge 9.0. It has a feature that edits out the LP noises and various other filters if you want to be even more specific. I started running these various albums through the software and while it does NOT allow minute changes, it comes very close. I took albums that had been beaten to death and fixed them back to what I consider a reasonable quality.
It makes me wonder why someone could not take a DVD of “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers”, attach audio cords out of the DVD player and into a PC, record the audio with any one of a number of Audio Software packages, and then do a final recording like I did with the LP’s. It would HAVE to be far better quality than what I heard of this Production CD.
Now, I’m not advocating theft here. I am suggesting a solution to what was obviously engineering overkill at Rhino Movie Music. I do chastise at them proclaiming the disk the “Original Movie Soundtrack!” It is a pathetic rendition of the “Original Movie Soundtrack”.
Rhino is one of the few companies keeping the older music alive and on CD, but they desperately need to improve their production quality. I have had two of their disks that I have had to get replacements for because of “Out of the Box” skipping. Barnes and Noble replaced one and Rhino eventually replaced the other.
One of these days I’m going to get a DVD of “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers” and try my experiment. All I know is that the CD’s I made of the Albums sound terrific and I can’t imagine the audio from the DVD won’t sound great too.
As for Sony Sound Forge 9.0., it has some really cool features but is missing some obvious features too. Like a really simple well defined automatic tracking feature that works well. For other editing issues it works great once you understand how to use it.