Rudy Van Gelder, legendary audio engineer, has passed

[Rudy]

Read our brief posting here:

Rudy Van Gelder has passed »

 

[Bobberman]

A true legend has been lost Rest in peace Mr. Van Gelder.

 

[Harry]

Seems like every day now some other famous person is passing away. Sad to hear of the loss of Mr. Van Gelder.

Harry
...listening now to the rare STONEBONE by J & K...

 

[Rudy]

2016 has been a terrible year, death-wise.

 

[Michael Hagerty]

Sure sorry to read this. Rudy was a giant.

 

[natureaker]

2016 has been a terrible year, death-wise.

Very true, unfortunately. Mr. Van Gelder will be missed.

 

[Captain Bacardi]

He did engineer so many classic jazz recordings. Unfortunately, some of his remasters weren't all that great. I found some of them to be rather muddy sounding, which is why I usually go back to the original records. But you can't argue his contributions to jazz over the decades.

 

[Harry]

I found some of them to be rather muddy sounding

I've always thought that, being a person who likes crisp highs in recordings. I remember way back when - we were discussing WE AND THE SEA by Tamba 4. I was never able to find that LP, but like others, was surprised that it got a CD release in Japan back around 1998 or so. While I was thrilled to finally hear the album, it sounded a bit muddy to me.

Then, just a couple of years later, Verve By Request reissued it in the US. This one sounded much better to my ears.

 

[Rudy]

Many of those CTi recordings are muddy. I forget which frequency it was, but I used a parametric equalizer to notch out a small bit of the midbass and it really cleaned up the sound. It wasn't much--just a decibel or two--to clear it up. Some recent masterings reduce that murky sound, thankfully.