[bigshot]

You might see why historical recordings are valuable! There is nothing today like the Handel Concerto Grosso 5 or the Walkure Act 1. And the Sibelius and Mahler are completely from a specific time and place. The Reformation Symphony is an FFRR recording. One of the last before hifi LPs. That will give you the end of the range. I think these are all tagged, but if not and you want to know dates and performers let me know.

 

[71 dB]

You might see why historical recordings are valuable! There is nothing today like the Handel Concerto Grosso 5 or the Walkure Act 1. And the Sibelius and Mahler are completely from a specific time and place. The Reformation Symphony is an FFRR recording. One of the last before hifi LPs. That will give you the end of the range. I think these are all tagged, but if not and you want to know dates and performers let me know.

So far I have only downloaded and processed the Handel "CG5". First I tried "Orchestral music" mode, but it felt too heavy so I tried again using "Chamber music" mode and that worked nicely! Since this plugin is designed to improve spatiality on mono recordings with headphones, I didn't have high hope for speaker listening, but the processing seems to have some (altho lesser) improvements even with speakers. DTS Neo:6 Music listening mode seems to work nicely with this "less mono" processing and where pure mono signal keeps the rear channels silent (because there is not channel differences), the processed file has content for rear channels making the sound more multichannel.

As for the value of historical recordings I never said there is no value. I just haven't been much into historical recordings due to the sound quality issues. This new plugin of mine changes the situation for me. It doesn't make the sound quality of historical recordings as good as with modern recordings, not even close, but it can improve the perceived pleasantness so that the shortcomings are less distracting. The music becomes more immersive and engaging.

The Handel was beautifully tagged, thank you! On to the next one...

 

[bigshot]

The performance in that Handel is entirely different than anything today. Modern recordings have their own performance practice. It’s more conservative and technical. Less heart on the sleeve. If you have a modern recording of Op 6, listen and compare. You’ll see how different it is. That’s why a modern recording of the same work can’t replace a historical performance, especially one with as much emotion and color as this one.

 

[71 dB]

The performance in that Handel is entirely different than anything today. Modern recordings have their own performance practice. It’s more conservative and technical. Less heart on the sleeve. If you have a modern recording of Op 6, listen and compare. You’ll see how different it is. That’s why a modern recording of the same work can’t replace a historical performance, especially one with as much emotion and color as this one.

I have the Harmonia Mundi twofer of Op. 6 recorded in 1997 (The Academy of Ancient Music/Andrew Manze).
I'll do some comparing.

 

[71 dB]

I have been perfecting the plugin and I added one more mode: "Default room" which is between "Small room" and "Larger room" and is kind of the default mode. Also around 400 Hz I add 1 dB dip because that frequency range felt too hot. The compression of the side channel is fine-tuned (knee point, compression ratio, attack and release). The older historical recordings don't have music information above 10 kHz so I export them as 22.05 kHz mp3 and get even smaller file size: Elgar's Symphony No. 1 (46:28) gave 35,1 MB mp3 file.

 

[71 dB]

https://animationresources.org/xfers/mahler9walter1938.mp3

Testing this one. Since it is almost 70 minutes, my plugin wasn't able to process all of it in one go (not enough memory I guess), but I processed it in two parts. This is a rather "muffled" recording, but on the other hand the background noise is somewhat low. No surprises with the plugin: Works as expected.

 

[bigshot]

That is the last performance of the Vienna Philharmonic before the Nazis invaded Austria and all of the Jews in the orchestra fled, including the conductor, Bruno Walter. When they made this recording, they knew it was the end of an era for Mahler's orchestra.