On Sep 7, 2010, at 12:59 PM, Narada wrote: > I recently purchased this CD.
..but didn't read Paul's insert notes? > The sound quality is awful, it is completely > washed out with 'Hall Reverb' The individual notes can hardly be seperated > in some of the faster passages. This recording needs remastering and the > level of reverb reduced massively. If anything the reverb should only add a > little 'wetness' to the sound, not drowned it. You seem to think reverb was added. It wasn't. The CD was recorded in a room in a castle in Capestrano, near Aquila (a last-minute arrangement because the intended venue in Aquila had been damaged in an earthquake), and the sound is very likely what you would have heard 15 feet from the lute (or what one of Marco's contemporaries would have heard him playing from down the banquet table). This is an effect I've experienced in larger resonant rooms as well, particularly with lower frequencies: the cello's 16th-notes in a Vivaldi concerto are perfectly distinct close up, but from ten steps back they're a vague shimmering wash. You can choose to regard this as a problem, or you can conclude (as Nicolaus Harnoncourt has in a published essay) that Vivaldi intended the shimmering effect, or at least expected it and didn't mind it. Since I'm writing a review of the recording for LSA Quarterly even as we speak, I've listened to it enough to get over the strangeness of the sound, and find that I rather like it, and have no trouble making out the lines. To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
