Badly engineered/recorded performances

[Que]

Que, this CD says Nimbus ain't all bad - a terrific recording (and performance):

Maybe their previous, insane, recording engineer has been safely institutionalised! 

Q

[71 dB]

Nominating old Naxos discs is like shooting fish in a barrel. Whatever they were doing from 1988 - 1998 (and in a few cases, since then), it was seriously bad.

Many Naxos CDs from early 90s are very good. It's the first 5 years 1988-1993 that was miss and hits.

[Brian]

Many Naxos CDs from early 90s are very good. It's the first 5 years 1988-1993 that was miss and hits.

That's true actually. Some (like the Suk Serenade disc) sound fantastic - but most is rather rotten. (On the old GMG I received a PM asserting that the Slovak State Philharmonic was not, as I had claimed, the worst orchestra ever. If this is true, they have just been captured by well - I hesitate to even call them engineers.)

Recent Naxos discs have frustrated me too. For instance, what is wrong with Havard Gimse's piano in the Grieg concerto? (Incidentally, the latest Grieg disc, Vol. 3, has possibly the best sound I've heard on a Naxos orchestral disc.)

[Mark]

Recent Naxos discs have frustrated me too. For instance, what is wrong with Havard Gimse's piano in the Grieg concerto?

Er ... what is wrong with it? Try it in the DVD-A version, DTS setting. That'll change your mind, I'm sure.

[Don]

Naxos sure has a bad rep. on sound quality, but I've never thought it poor.  Actually, some that I have possess outstanding and clear sound.  At any rate, I never reject a Nimbus on the basis of expectations of inadequate sonics.

The worst moder-era piano sonics I've ever heard come from Decca/Ashkenazy.  What were they thinking?

[MishaK]

In the recordings I know of them (not too many - I avoid Nimbus like the plague) the amount of reverb defies any description. Sounds like the recording studio was/is in an empty swimming pool.

Maybe they should even out their record by making a few alternative recordings inside that felt sock that was the NBC studio where Toscanini recorded most of his stuff.

[Mark]

Maybe they should even out their record by making a few alternative recordings inside that felt sock that was the NBC studio where Toscanini recorded most of his stuff.

Oh, man. That made me laugh so hard. Especially the 'felt sock' part.

[jochanaan]

There was a label called Everest in the days of LP that tended to produce positively awful recordings.  I had a Tchaikovsky symphonic cycle that was so bad I sold it to a used record shop for 50 cents a copy, and what was worse was that there were some great performers on it, including conductor Hans Swarowsky (a Vienna Conservatory professor whose pupils included Zubin Mehta and Claudio Abbado), the London Symphony Orchestra, and composer-conductor Eugene Goossens.  The bad sound, and several big cuts, were especially regrettable on the Goossens/LSO reading of the Manfred Symphony; the Londoners played flawlessly and excitingly and the interpretation was simply perfect, but the sound spoiled everything.

RCA is known for great inconsistency in its recordings.  I've got an Ormandy/Philadelphia reading of Scriabin's Poem of Ecstasy and Prometheus on LP (the notorious Dynagroove) that is almost unlistenable despite the performance's beauty and perfection.  More recently, I was very dissatisfied with a Günter Wand/NDR-Sinfonieorchester Bruckner 3rd on RCA; shallow, tinny sound, especially regrettable for Wand's Bruckner.