Offering

[Vinylalbumcovers]

With today's technology you can actually isolate and clean up individual instruments or sounds that were originally bounced onto one tape. Brian May did it with the 5.1 audio for Bohemian Rhapsody, and that multi-track tape had so many bounces it was worn thin to the point of transparency!

The Brian May story isn't really all it's cracked up to be. A bit of hyperbole there. Had the multitrack been worn to transparency when he says it was, it couldn't have been mixed down to two-track. Was it hurting? Oh, more than likely. Tapes don't become transparent, though it does make a fun story. Were the tape "transparent", there'd be no signal on it to speak of. Oxide can fall off (oh, the stories I could tell), and high frequency loss can occur. NOT fun. Even then, tape doesn't go transparent.

My point is that the tapes, while likely fragile, could be transferred into the digital domain for the work needed to render the "Night at the Opera" DVD-Audio disc some years ago. The isolation you speak of isn't particularly convincing. Izotope has some fun things and there are other plugins that can somewhat make the job possible but it's not simple by any means and the results aren't exactly incredible. The issue is that the human voice resides in the same frequencies as a lot of other things and you can't just pull the voice out without getting other things too. When it's done, the engineers then have to find ways to hide what got dragged over with the vocals. Richard would likely want an incredible result (which he got with "Philharmonic"), not a passable one. The good news is that Karen's vocals would be isolated from everything else and the backgrounds likely would be too so he could just build around it if he so chose.

Ed