Intrada Soundtrack Forum

Doug & bruce, you guys are really fun.... good to see even you still are "fanboys" after all, some kind...

about freedom of speech... I'm not sure bout this anymore in the last years.

All I can think of, as nothing more than a consumer, albeit a passionate consumer, is how fortunate we are that people like Douglass Fake and Bruce Kimmel, among others, are the producers behind the releases of this music we few people care about. Because they obviously care too. Passionately, and it shows.

On a related but separate note ...

What were the circumstances between both Intrada and Varese Sarabande both releasing the original Poltergeist II CD back in 1986?

And were they the same mix?

I know nobody would have chosen to create a 30-minute program of Poltergeist II apart from the AFM fees, but I can tell you I was actually fond of that 30-minute program.

I had not seen the film. (Still haven't, actually), but the LP was the first one I bought when I moved into University dorms, age 18. I was in a doleful mood and I remember sitting down to play the LP. The music was immediately in-synch with that doleful mood and started to lift me. As a program, I thought it played very well.

I missed the Intrada expanded edition because that came out when I was in the poor house and was having to be visciously selective about what I bought, but when the Varese edition came out, I didn't love it as much. I could see how all this music I'd never heard would be desirable, but of course it was much more all over the place as a listen, compared with the original 30-minute program that had been devised.

Of course, this is a score that deserves to be expanded, but I'm just sharing a story of how one can become fond of a program even if it was never really what everyone wanted to do.

Whoever devised that 30-minute program, knew how to create a great, flowing listening experience, even if it was so incomplete.

Cheers

I've never liked the way this program ended so abruptly without the End Titles ! I had bought it in my local store in the mid 90's and then the Intrada's limited edition was already out of reach. I wasn't aware that on the expanded edition it ended softly with that Carol Anne's Theme instead of mine closing the listening experience to a very simple and frustrating bom-bom-bom-bom-bom. End.
I just discovered a new great listening experience when the Varèse was released, thanks to them !

I've had a chance to play the new POLTERGEIST II. Here are my thoughts. It's definitely a different mix, just check out the pizzicato strings in "It's No Use." They are much more in your face than on the previous versions. I like in your face, and any recording like this that gives me a bloody nose is my preference. It definitely has a dryer sound as well. I do find it odd that Bruce gave us crap about Dressed to Kill being too dry because Donaggio prefers a wet sound (although I have plenty of dry Donaggio recordings, so not sure the basis for that hypothesis), only to "dry out" Poltergeist II when the reverb from the earlier releases was the sound Goldsmith and Botnik wanted. Nonetheless, *I* prefer a dryer sound so the Kritzerland release is preferable to me. And -- warning -- this is my preference and you can't disagree with a preference -- you can have your own, different preference though -- I prefer the Intrada expanded program best, so I will probably whittle this down to that program again, since it has the most impact to me.

I do take exception to a factual error in the liner notes -- the first LP and CD releases came on Intrada at the time the film was released, not Varese. Ordinarily it wouldn't be that big a deal, but Intrada paid all the new use (100% fee back then), including the choral stuff. And then in one of the scummiest moves I've ever seen in this business, MGM only gave Intrada US rights and gave (as in "for free") international rights to Varese, hence the foreign version that came out on CD shortly thereafter. That was only Intrada's second album and being new to the business, easy to take advantage of. I shudder when I think of that deal.

Overall, a fine release and I'm glad to have it.

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