Armstrong Complete RCA Set '97 vs. '01 edition.

[J.A.W.]

Whether RCA used No-Noise or Cedar is in itself not the determining factor on NR, it's the degree to which it is utilized. Back in the day when these things were trumpeted on cd packaging I think many made up their mind what "cedarized" transfers sounded like. The fact is that 99% of transfer engineers today use Cedar or a relative of it, but the better PR is to leave off mentioning this, because of the bad rap early over-use of the program caused. I've worked a bit with Cedar de-clicking (relatively hard to screw up) and de-noise (gotta be careful with this....sort of like trying to remove cream from coffee!), and if you stay clear of the threshold were artifacts are audible, then the tools have been useful and not harmful. Problem is putting this equipment in the hands of engineers that don't know what music and/or recordings should sound like.

IMHO, the French B/W series, at the time, sounded pretty good on the lp issues, not so hot on the cd versions, which seemed to have an additional layer of poor eq added to what were already somewhat filtered sounding transfers. Overly squashing the high end was the way many engineers of that era (before decent computer-based de-clicking and de=noising) covered up the noise underneath.

Sorry about the tech rant....yes it's about the music, but may as well get the sound right while we're at it, right?

I agree that the sound on the "Jazz Tribune" sets is far from perfect, on the contrary, but I prefer them to the Complete RCA Victor Recordings box, which has audible noise reduction artefacts.

I sold the box a long time ago; maybe I should buy it again and do some more comparisons

Edited February 14, 2010 by J.A.W.

[king ubu]

http://www.amazon.com/Complete-Victor-Recordings-Louis-Armstrong/dp/B00005O6KK/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1266269815&sr=1-3

you can see that only 9 tracks were remastered in 2001, the rest seem to be the same... just tried ordering a fairly cheap copy of the 1997 set, had no idea this was OOP and getting difficult to find...