Search - John Andrew Stevenson, Henry Geehl, Thurlow Weed Lieurance :: Love's Old Sweet Song: 25 Great Singers in Popular Ballads

Loves Old Sweet Song Leaves a Bitter Taste

Neil T. Corning | Peabody, Ma. United States | 04/26/2003

(2 out of 5 stars)

"While the performances on this CD are great the transfers from the original recordings are about the worst i have ever heard. No care whatever was spent in dubbing these records to Cd. The originals in my collection sound many times better than these. I bought this for convenience but find it too terrible to listen"

Remember-Mckinley was president when these tunes were new

Charles H. Levenson | new jersey | 03/09/2007

(4 out of 5 stars)

"In the 1890s and the early years of the 20th century sound recordings were very new and very fascinating to the population at large..Being able to hear a recording of a popular song,or listen to a piano roll transcription was,at the time,considered something of a miracle...Alas,since the technology was new the recording process was primitive...VERY primitive...often entire orchestras played into a recording horn,and the resulting sound reminds one of listening to something in a tunnel...very little could be done to make the sound pristine,and because of it the recordings from that period all have an antique and primitive atmosphere to them...recordings that old,and not saved upon tape,or disc,often poorly kept and poorly maintained,tend to deteriorate ,and,in many cases with regard to the items presented upon this album,the original"master"recording is lost,and only a copy remains,often a badly deteriorated,commercial copy..scratches,recording anaolomies,as well as warpage and general age have taken thier toll..Some would think,rather foolishly as it turns out,that such modern restorative processes such as"Cedar" might erase the imperfections,the scratches,the warpage,the cracks and hisses,but this is just not so...

For those of you old enough to have had long-playing records,45s,or 78s,just imagine that the ONLY copy of a particular album or song title is your old,scratched,worn disc...not some master tape or disc held in a vault somewhere,but your old beat up copy...Imagine further that you submit this old beat up copy for restoration...Sure,it may sound better afterwards than it did before,but,all in all,it still sounds pretty bad,at least by modern standards...

This is the sort of sound reproduction one gets on this album...Efforts were made to restore these sides(contrary to the opinion of another review found here about this album)but when one is dealing with recordings 100 or so years old,made when recording tecniques were primitive,and ,in some cases,having to attempt restoration on a used COPY sold to and played by someone like you and I way back when,restoration to a"perfect" sense is just not possible..Indeed,even if "perfection"could be achieved,the original sound of some of these old sides never was too good to begin with..

Be this as it may,the sides presented here are historic,to say the very least,and representative of what the public of the 1890s liked to hear...Listening to these sides,imperfections and all,gives one a sense of that time,a sense of the enormous technological gulf between these recordings and the ones available today,and,perhaps most importantly,gives us an overview of the sort of entertainment that drove our great great grandparents wild...

If you can get over the primitive sound of these recordings,or get yourself used to it,then give this album a try..."