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Many of Allen Sides‘ recordings suffer from a lack of ambience. The musicians do not seem to have much room around them. In audiophile parlance, his recordings often lack “air.” I can’t say all his recordings are made in a dead studio, but some of them sure are.
Many audiophile recordings, especially direct-to-disc recordings from the ’70s, are insufferable in this respect, with too much multi-miking and not enough studio space.
This Bach recording on Crystal Clear is a good example of the sound some audiophile labels were going for. Back in the 70s, audiophile producers and engineers were using state-of-the-art high-tech recording equipment, but they seemed to lack experience as well as knowledge of the recordings of the past. They regularly ended up producing records that are not remotely the equal of those that were commonly made only twenty years before.
For Duke is the poster boy for that sound. The instruments are dynamic as all get out, but no one ever imagined that the ideal approach to recording Ellington’s music would be to cram a big group of players into the equivalent of a heavily carpeted and draped livingroom.
Miller and Kreisel created a completely new, strange and inappropriate sound for Duke’s music, and it has been rubbing me the wrong way since I first heard it demoed in the audio showrooms I frequented back in the 70s.
