Walter Gieseking's legendary 1953/54 recordings of Debussy's complete piano works have always suffered from poor sound quality, partly due to EMI's inferior recording equipment at the time. Recently, a large CD box set of Gieseking's complete Warner recordings has been released with new remasterings (you need this box set, buy it). Most of these remasterings have been quite successful, but not for the 1953/54 Debussy recordings. Gieseking's elegant piano sounds quite unnatural, much too boomy and bass-heavy, totally unlike a real piano.
For this attempt on achieving better sound I used older remasterings and tried what modern tools and careful listening could achieve. Quite succesful to my ears.
https://mega.nz/file/kY1yzCiK#v-VFQ838D2NbVf0rhBZIAR7-b7eh1aMQn0KBUMZOz1c
ReplyDeleteInteresting.Which source did you use? The dynamic ist very good (Pour le pinao III). Have you changed anything there? However, the strong noise bothers me a little - I find the last EMI remastering better in this respect
ReplyDeleteSince I didn't like the sound of the new remastering in the Warner "Complete Columbia" box, I used the EMI release shown in the picture above. I used Izotope Ozone to control the dynamics. Usually I does a good job indeed. The main step is the equalization, which I did with Har-Bal. And yes, the noise is always a critical issue. With modern tools, it's very easy to reduce the noise to a minimum, with much better results than what was possible 10 years ago. That's what they did for the Warner release. Of course I tried it too. However, when reducing the noise, I often find that the sparkle that resides in the high frequencies is gone with the noise. Maybe it's just our brain which reconstructs missing frequencies "buried in the noise". I find that my ears quickly adapt to the noise so I decided not to remove too much. Maybe I'll produce an updated version at some point with more noise removed. If it sounds good to my ears, I'll post it here. So stay tuned to the site.
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