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The Official Bernard Herrmann Thread


Sharkissimo

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I love Gamba's Citizen Kane re-recording.

 

Now I skip just the aria, who was made as a joke in the movie and sung by a bad soprano. The last note is usually digitally altered in re-recordings... so... It's like the opera track in JW's Tintin... it works in the movie, less on an album!

 

Herrmann, B.: Film Music - Album by Bernard Herrmann, Rumon Gamba | Spotify

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I bought the Phase 4 set too, and I echo your sentiments @Holko 

I wish there were a few more pieces from North by Northwest - does anyone know if there was a remastered score for that film available anywhere?

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6 minutes ago, Arpy said:

I wish there were a few more pieces from North by Northwest - does anyone know if there was a remastered score for that film available anywhere?

 

Here you go:

https://www.soundtrackcollector.com/title/2191/North+By+Northwest

 

The Intrada is a significant remaster over the old Rhino (fixing the rather severe faults of the old release in all tracks containing the fandango).

 

There's also the McNeely rerecording, which I missed myself.

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The McNeely recording is available easily off eBay but the price tag is high but in the $60+ range. The Intrada issue is next to impossible. The really upgraded the sound and fixed the errors that were found in Rhino. 

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I managed to track down a sealed copy of McNeely's recording earlier this year for fair non-ridiculous price. I wouldn't bother tracking down Intrada because I am pretty sure a score of this stature will be reissued soon enough. 

 

Karol

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A playlist I just realized on Spotify, inspired by the famous "Composer of the week" BBC Radio Program.

 

Nice things to discover here!

 

 

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20 hours ago, Bespin said:

I love Gamba's Citizen Kane re-recording.

 

Now I skip just the aria, who was made as a joke in the movie and sung by a bad soprano. The last note is usually digitally altered in re-recordings... so... It's like the opera track in JW's Tintin... it works in the movie, less on an album!

 

Herrmann, B.: Film Music - Album by Bernard Herrmann, Rumon Gamba | Spotify

I own that recording as well. Still I have to say, I prefer listening to the two suites, the one on the Gerhardt album plus the one on the Herrmann album. Is in my opinion the better listening experience for Citizen Kane. But the Hangover Square score in combination with the piano concerto is nice of course. 

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Well the fun here, is that the cues of that version of Citizen Kane were arranged by Stephen Hogger, who returned to Herrmann's original manuscripts.

 

It's still Herrmann's orchestrations, but maybe before a bit of the meddling done to accomodate the movie.

 

It's just another option to listen to Citizen Kane, but I confess, the suites are pretty effective.

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  • 2 months later...
On 20/05/2021 at 11:23 AM, Marian Schedenig said:

It'll be interesting to see if the remasters are able to fix/compensate for the excessive overdrive of the versions I have.

 

Have you been able to do a comparison of the masterings?

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When the heirs of an artist play to raise the stakes, at the end they usually harm the fame of the artist they represent, and it's always sad.

 

I wonder who'll will be in charge after John Williams's passing?

 

It's sure that there will be few years without new expansions. We are very lucky now!

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5 hours ago, Jurassic Shark said:

 

I just got the box and will be able to compare some of the contents with the Australian Eloquence releases.

I have those too. They are definitely improved over those.’Stunning’ is the correct word here.

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On 07/11/2021 at 9:53 PM, Jurassic Shark said:

I just got the box and will be able to compare some of the contents with the Australian Eloquence releases.

 

Thanks to samples from @Holko, I've been able to compare Gulliver from the new box to my old version:

Screenshot_20211110_235139.png

 

Conclusion: The newer version (the upper one) has been considerable normalised, but otherwise they sound the same. The parts from 50s+ sound shrill, and the big bang at ~1:23 (which sounds like The Planets and Star Wars) sounds like it almost blew out the microphones in the new one just as much as in the old one. And since the old one is far from maxed out, I guess it's really the recording and not the mastering.

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6 minutes ago, Bespin said:

So they just raised the volume a bit, like Decca did with their reissue of The Planets conducted by Williams.

 

That fair.

 

No, they did not just raise the volume. They raised the volume and normalized.

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29 minutes ago, Jurassic Shark said:

No, they did not just raise the volume. They raised the volume and normalized.

 

Isn't that the same? I've been using the terms interchangeably.

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57 minutes ago, Jurassic Shark said:

No, they did not just raise the volume. They raised the volume and normalized.

Normalizing is raising the volume and has nothing to do with compression. You can literally just revert that effect and have the old version if nothing else was done to the new version.

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I always thought normalising is scaling the waveform to the maximum? I.e. using the maximum available resolution, which actually increases the dynamic range (albeit artificially).

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11 hours ago, Bespin said:

Anyway, I'll not buy this new Herrmann set, as I can do the compressor trick by myself in Audacity, using my old CDs.

 

The new versions may have a slightly higher bit resolution if the analogue sources where scanned in hires and normalised there before downsampling to 44.1/16. Your trick would take an already downsampled 44.1/16 signal and digitally stretch it, you wouldn't re-gain any analogue data that was already lost during the downsampling process.

 

But yes, I don't think I need the new versions either.

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21 hours ago, Marian Schedenig said:

I always thought normalising is scaling the waveform to the maximum? I.e. using the maximum available resolution, which actually increases the dynamic range (albeit artificially).

Nope, it sets the maximum amplitude of the audio file to the peak (0dB), which means just a tiny step below overmodulation. Everything else gets proportionally adapted to that. The difference between the loudest and the quietest point is not streched. It's a simple process only affecting the volume of the audio file itself.

 

14 hours ago, Jurassic Shark said:

You're right of course.

And that is wrong.

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21 minutes ago, Brundlefly said:

And that is wrong.

 

It takes one to know one.

 

22 hours ago, Brundlefly said:

Normalizing is raising the volume

 

 

 

21 minutes ago, Brundlefly said:

Nope, it sets the maximum amplitude of the audio file to the peak (0dB), which means just a tiny step below overmodulation. Everything else gets proportionally adapted to that. The difference between the loudest and the quietest point is not streched. It's a simple process only affecting the volume of the audio file itself.

 

You're wrong, of course. Normalization does not necessarily mean that you make the maximum amplitude as loud as possible.

 

According to Wikipedia:

 

Audio normalization is the application of a constant amount of gain to an audio recording to bring the amplitude to a target level (the norm).

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_normalization

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2 hours ago, Jurassic Shark said:

You're wrong, of course. Normalization does not necessarily mean that you make the maximum amplitude as loud as possible.

 

According to Wikipedia:

 

Audio normalization is the application of a constant amount of gain to an audio recording to bring the amplitude to a target level (the norm).

Wikipedia is right and I'm not wrong. No need to nitpick here, the target level is usually -0dB if nothing else is applied. I don't know, why you're so zealously trying to make my statements come across as wrong, when I'm just trying to describe the usual scenario, but again: Raising the volume has nothing to do with compression. There are many people here who think the latter always goes along with the former, but that's a false assumption. If your audio track is normalized, for example, and you consider it too loud - just turn the volume of your speakers down, that's it. Many new masters have a higher volume than their predecessors to keep up with the rest of the current releases. But no loudness war is involved.

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7 hours ago, Brundlefly said:

Wikipedia is right and I'm not wrong. No need to nitpick here, the target level is usually -0dB if nothing else is applied. I don't know, why you're so zealously trying to make my statements come across as wrong, when I'm just trying to describe the usual scenario, but again: Raising the volume has nothing to do with compression. There are many people here who think the latter always goes along with the former, but that's a false assumption. If your audio track is normalized, for example, and you consider it too loud - just turn the volume of your speakers down, that's it. Many new masters have a higher volume than their predecessors to keep up with the rest of the current releases. But no loudness war is involved.

 

Dude, you'd come across as more agreeable if you owned up to your own mistakes while correcting others. :)

 

It's probably true that nowadays normalization usually raises the volume such that the maximum peak is close to the highest possible, but that was not the norm a few decades ago.

 

7 hours ago, Brundlefly said:

Raising the volume has nothing to do with compression.

 

...and nobody is claiming that anymore. :)

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14 hours ago, Brundlefly said:

Nope, it sets the maximum amplitude of the audio file to the peak (0dB), which means just a tiny step below overmodulation. Everything else gets proportionally adapted to that. The difference between the loudest and the quietest point is not streched. It's a simple process only affecting the volume of the audio file itself.

 

I guess we're both right, although I'm less right than what is practically relevant. Mathematically, stretching the waveform increases the dynamic range, because the difference between the volumes increases. But if you compensate by increasing your amp's volume for the non-normalised version, you effectively do the same (although possibly in an analogue way), so technically, increasing the volume (without additional compression) always increases the dynamic range, but only in an absolute sense. The relative range remains the same, obviously, in both cases.

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18 minutes ago, Marian Schedenig said:

so technically, increasing the volume (without additional compression) always increases the dynamic range, but only in an absolute sense. The relative range remains the same, obviously, in both cases.

 

Since range is a relative term, I'm not sure it makes sense to talk about absolute range here.

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54 minutes ago, Jurassic Shark said:

Since range is a relative term, I'm not sure it makes sense to talk about absolute range here.

 

In a way, I was talking about the range relative to the 8-bit spectrum (i.e. the distance between the low and high values from 0 to 255). Anyway… yes, the effective dynamic range remains the same.

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In other, non-sound tech-related news, what is everyone's take on the recent two re-recordings of THE BRIDE WORE BLACK and ENDLESS NIGHT? I feel like there was a lot of discussion about them up to the release, and immediately after, but very little since. It kinda died out. I love them, although they're a tad on the long side (need a few minutes' worth of whittling).

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1 hour ago, Marian Schedenig said:

 

In a way, I was talking about the range relative to the 8-bit spectrum (i.e. the distance between the low and high values from 0 to 255). Anyway… yes, the effective dynamic range remains the same.

 

Ah yes. That's the linear vs. decibel difference.

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Normalizing is raising the volume of an entire track or album by the same amount. 

 

Dynamic Range Compression is raising the volume of the quieter parts to have less of a difference from them to the louder parts. 

 

Bespin was wrong above when he said normalization and compression were the same thing. I think everyone else knew the difference, but argued about semantics anyway. 

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in any case the new set sounds greatly improved and stunning. And if you have a good Hi Fi system then the results will be even better (warts and all)

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On 12/11/2021 at 3:01 PM, Thor said:

In other, non-sound tech-related news, what is everyone's take on the recent two re-recordings of THE BRIDE WORE BLACK and ENDLESS NIGHT? I feel like there was a lot of discussion about them up to the release, and immediately after, but very little since. It kinda died out. I love them, although they're a tad on the long side (need a few minutes' worth of whittling).

I used to listen to ENDLESS NIGHT really a lot. I wrote something in the "Last older score you listened to" thread about it. At first I was irritated by that weird synthesizer sound, which is in a way its actual purpose. But it is a great mixture of beauty, drama and tension. The vocalize version of the song sums it up perfectly at the end.

THE BRIDE WORE BLACK is not that accessible to me. First of all, I had an issue with the CD. It was heavily damaged from the very beginning, so it was impossible to listen to the first seven tracks. I got my money back, but the rest did not actually motivate me to re-order the disc.

I am listening to it right now. I remember, that for my taste there was too much wedding march in it. But I don't hear that now. Oh, now I hear it. I cannot pay that much attention now anyway. But I will probably give it a few more listens, I think.

Thanks for the reminder.

 

 

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