Like Roger, I definitely prefer Kritzerland's sound to all previous Poltergeist II releases. It is crisp and clear beyond any previous version. Wow!
I have for many years championed the nature of keeping added reverb to a minimum when I felt it warranted because of my oft-mentioned preference to instrumental detail and clarity over wet or concert-hall listening experiences. Neither a right thing or a wrong thing, it is just my artistic and creative preference as a producer of this stuff.
Where I am having difficulty with Bruce Kimmel's discussion, if I am understanding it correctly: Bruce, you took such artistic liberty with your version - which as I said I prefer - over the decisions made by the original artists, in this case Jerry Goldsmith and Bruce Botnick, because you felt you made improvements on what you wanted to hear. It's a decision I am happy you have made for I love the results. But this is exactly the decision Intrada made with Dressed To Kill and you loudly slammed us for making that very same decision for those very same reasons.
To me, the room size (between A&R in New York and Sony in Culver City) becomes but a mere distraction as you yourself know that literally ALL recordings made for film soundtracks are initially made with as little reverb as possible - no matter the size of the room - to facilitate cutting into the dialog and sound effects as smoothly as possible. (We have worked with the greatest engineers in the industry over the last 28 years and they have always spoken of the need for this when cutting cues into a film.) So in our crazy world of taking film tracks and turning them into viable listening experiences to our audience, we exercise those same creative rights that you adhere to. I find the instrumental detail in Dressed To Kill, especially with regards to the flashy trombone writing in the action cues, to be all but lost in the overly wet mastering that was done with the old mix. My creative choice was to hear those incredible trombone glissandi as crisply as when they were actually performed and recorded on the 2" rolls, even if the wet, mushy sound of the old 1980 two-track mixes for the old CD was made by the very artists who wrote and recorded the music back then.
If there is one common thread I read in most of your publicity bulletins it is that you are "fixing" what went wrong with various earlier releases of any given score. Those fixes are often just creative choices, a crossfade here, a level there, a cue sequence here, whatever. I sincerely wish you could move from the position that only you are capable of making appropriate and valid creative choices as a producer, but I suppose that may be wishful thinking on my part. No matter, I guess. We will continue to make the best musical decisions we feel we can with this music and you will do the same. In cases like Poltergeist II, I will definitely take the artistic choice you made over that which Jerry Goldsmith and Bruce Botnick themselves chose. And I will also take the choice we made on Dressed To Kill over that which the artists chose back in 1980.
With regards to that terrific sound on Kritzerland's Poltergeist II, now that others are enjoying this crisp audio over the wetter experience, I hope we can all turn more attention to the other big audio mastering issue that stays on my mind: the normalizing (or brick-walling) of the signal to it's maximum possible level overall, clipping off the peaks so savagely that the results become almost unbearable. It may do wonders for those listening with earbuds as they drive through noisy traffic oblivious to any musical nuance but for those of us enjoying music in our living rooms, it is dreadful. I wanted very much to enjoy Battle: Los Angeles and The Expendables, both of which have exciting, well-recorded scores in their respective films but offer incredibly harsh, overly distorted listening experiences on CD. It is artificial and phony. Orchestras don't sound like this. I applaud Kritzerland's decision not to do this with their releases, a bitter anomaly which surprisingly, certain other soundtrack labels actually continue to do. Letting the musical dynamics and their nuances be a part of the listening enjoyment is another purely creative choice, but it is one that Kritzerland, like Intrada, continues to make - and as with the new sound on Poltergeist II - is the choice I prefer. --Doug
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