and cassette, don’t forget cassette!
If you want to get closer to how they created it, ditch your speakers and get a pair of original Auratone 5C speakers. Then leave this forum forever.
The whole authenticity argument is fraught. Popular music was popular in its day on little plastic record players in mono with a three-inch driver and no sealed enclosure, because the music buyers were school kids. So if you want an authentic
listener experience, I’ll see you in the op shops.
And if you want an authentic
studio intention experience, firstly, take the musicians out of that intention because just too few cared about it — the Beatles, Fripp, Fagan? — it’s a small list. What I’ve seen from studio engineers suggests that the typical musician’s instructions are to make the sound what sells the most, and if a musician has strong opinions on the sound, it’s because he or she has a strong opinion on what sound sells the most.
IIRC Fripp, who originally blanked Steven Wilson’s requests to remix his early work into MCH, saying it would pervert his original creation, then grudgingly allowed Wilson to do just one song as a demo, did a complete Fripp-flip when he heard it and said “
that’s what I originally envisioned it to sound like,
that was my intent way back then”. Hence the project was born to remix his early work to MCH, and arguably the modern product is the truest to the artist’s intent. So maybe, speaking more broadly now, the originals are not so much true intent as tech-limited intent.
Which brings us to the
engineer’s intent. It’s the same deal about being a tech-limited compromise vs what they would have liked to do. If they had today’s tools back then, they would have made a much better sound (in their view). When they get a rare chance to remix their own older work and access to well-preserved original tapes, they take the opportunity to make it sound more like what they always wanted.
cheers
