The sound of Nat King Cole's The Magic of Christmas & The Christmas Song ALBUMS

For those who don't know who "Edith Bergdahl" is/was:

 

Isn't that accurate for the first issue of the The Christmas Song LP (as opposed to 1960's The Magic of Christmas, from which 13 of the 14 songs stemmed)?

Also, I found a 1960s label on Discogs.com:

How odd that it, like Bryan's 2014 label scan, shows no credit for "Bergdahl," yet the The Magic of Christmas labels include "Bergdahl" (1960-1962 pressings), and my old yellow-label (1973???) pressing had it, as does my 1970s UK pressing and 1980s USA LP pressing. Weird.

 

Interesting. 1963, then?

 

@bferr1 sent me a couple of clips from the newly released Capitol/Universal LP. Just playing it now, and this is definitely not the original stereo mix.

 

Still listening, and not positive yet, but I'm leaning toward a repeat of 2010's A Jolly Christmas. In other words, this appears to be the Norberg master cut to LP, but don't quote me on that just yet. AT BEST, it's a reverb-added new remix, but I'm pretty certain it's the Norberg remix (heavy NR, added reverb -- but less overload distortion and arguably superior tone quality) cut to vinyl.

 

Well, I am slower than most to totally condemn the Norberg mix on this album, not because the Norberg mix is all that great, but because the original stereo mix is pretty bad to start with, and the Norberg mix solves some of the inherent problems with the original mix, while adding some other, distinct problems of its own. Neither is "right," but the Norberg is, at least, very different -- and in places arguably better -- in mixing style.

21 seconds of Deck the Hall, in this order:

1. Original mix from 1986 CD. Note how dry (reverb-free) everything is, and how bright/overly-present the choral sound is.
2. New 2014 LP (clip from @bferr1). Wet vocal....wet everything, and a darker choral sound.
3. Norberg CD.

https://app.box.com/s/sbo3tvin04wna8usvc50

 

Norberg did nothing on the Reprise side of things, so even the EOTCs on Reprise are Norberg-free.

 

Not a new remix. Norberg's remix.

 

You know what all these Cole and Sinatra reissues remind me of? 30+ years ago, all over again. Think about how things were in, say, 1981. Sure, there was the occasional audiophile reissue, but most of the time, when we were buying this old crap at, say, Tower Records, it was just "product." It wasn't hyped as somehow being an accurate recreation of anything, it didn't recreate the original labels, it didn't recreate every detail of the original cover, it wasn't on 180 grams of "audiophile" vinyl. It was just another pressing of (insert title here). Some were really good and some were really bad, but the vast majority were just pretty much sorta okay, and nothing more or less, and anybody who expected anything more (and actually listened carefully to the sound coming out of the LPs) wound up disappointed and quickly learned that it was "just a product" and nothing special. (I would cite the MFSL and 1984/85 UK issues as, at least, attempts to do something sonically special, but they were the exceptions).

I feel like we've kind of come full circle. The above paragraph pretty well describes where we were as the LP era wound down, then CDs hit, and a lot of them sounded very good as the 80s moved into the 90s, then the people who knew what they were doing at Capitol (Pete Welding, Ron Furmanek, Larry Walsh, for instance) moved on to other things, and the Capitol releases lost their sheen and before we knew it, the CDs were back to being just "product." Once again, we got the occasional "audiophile intervention," i.e., DCC and later AP Cole titles, some Sinatra stuff from MFSL, and now we are, by and large, right back in 1981 again, getting peppered with LPs that can best be described as "product." (See paragraph one.) Only difference? It's being marketed as something that somehow recreates an item from the past in some superior way, when in reality, it's as bad or worse a crapshoot as it was "back in the day."

What was a typical SM-series Capitol re-issue LP going for in 1981? $5.98 or something? $5.98 in today's dollars = $16.14. How much can we get a digital download of THIS IS SINATRA for today?

...and you don't even get a physical product to hold in your hands. For an LP, it'll run you around $22-ish.

Note that the above photo even uses LP-reissue album art.

End of rant.

 

I've been out of the Sinatra threads for a while, but as the weather gets colder here in upstate NY, I find myself digging out the music of my DNA, Sinatra, Cole, Martin...

Matt, this is a fantastic post! I've been trying to keep up with all the "new" Sinatra releases, and this somewhat sums up what I was feeling.

To the rest of you, I've missed you guys!

 

@DLant -

Always great to have you around these parts! Glad to have you back.