There is a wonderful thread listing whistle centric recordings. Of those, are there any that stand out from a recording standpoint? There is nothing worse than having great music that is ruined by mediocre to poor quality recordings. If you’ve ever heard Miles Davis on an audiophile setup, you know how wonderful a great recording is. If you’ve ever heard Jason Mraz on the same setup, you also know how an amazing singer can sound bad on a good setup. Are there any audiophiles on this forum?
For the week that’s in it, it’s a long standing tradition on the forum someone (are you there Mr Bliven?) will come around to recommend that recording in response to a question like this. But as I got there first, I’ll do the honours once more: John Coltrane : The Penny whistle tapes
I like this record a lot. I think Michael Burke sells it on his website. Astonishingly low view count https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCw0Oas54C52C2doCulbOYGA/videos
That looks interesting! Thanks.
I find the example of Miles Davis a little odd. He recorded a LOT of stuff in Rudy van Gelder’s basement. I think there almost wasn’t a better place to record small to moderate ensembles, but the raw character of the recordings is part of the charm. Jack Johnson, Birth of the Cool, again pretty raw sounding recordings. I’m not really familiar with anything after the late-70’s, but I don’t remember anything in that era having recording quality that knocked my socks off.
Have you heard the recent (within the last five years) release of Miles on tour with maybe an octet around the same time as Bitches Brew? The sound isn’t perfect, but I think it’s one of the coolest things I’ve heard in years.
I think there are types of music that really do sound better with perfect sound – Christopher Hogwood was one of the early adapters of DDD recording, which worked perfectly for small-ensemble recordings of baroque music. I think there’s no better example of audiophile recording than his (the Academy of Ancient Music) recording of the Brandenburgs.
I found that in a noisy old car, an old Rolling Stones recording copied to a bad cassette played on a reasonably cheap car cassette player sounds much better than a high-quality CD played on the expensive car stereo. On the former the essence came through in a way that couldn’t be replicated on the latter.
That depends on the speed of the car, and the number of adolescent males occupying it.
While I have not scoured the library for irish music, www.archive.org is an excellent source for quality live recordings. From soundboards to scratchy audience recordings, they have it all. They use a few different lossless digital audio formats (.flac .shn) as well as offering mp3 zip files for mass consumption.
Gumby—
My apologies for being derelict in my seasonal duties. I was away from electronic devices for a few days and am only now catching up by basking in the rays of my computer screen…
Best wishes—and apologies
Steve