Do these recordings sound lousy to you?
 

Just browsing around the internet and came across these recordings of Celtic tunes included in "The Blarney Pilgrim, Vol. 2". To my ears all rather muddy
sounding and ruined with too much reverb. Realize these are probably somewhat lower bitrate mp3s but still. Much better sounding recordings by many
people on this forum. Why do some recording studios do this sort of thing?

https://www.amazon.com/Celtic-Finger...=UTF8&qid=&sr=

Wow , Yes pretty bad
The Reverb does not bother me so much per se , but sure could be contributing to the mud ( must be directly on the audio track !!! sorry just teasing :D )

On my laptop and earbuds seems harsh.
On my studio system and Mixing HP's seems harsh and brittle at times in the high end, keeps distorting overall, and way boomy in the low end.

I agree most Show and Tell etc. here on AGF are nicer recordings

I had always found that overall most of the recordings (usually songs with vocals) I have heard coming out of Ireland, were really well done especially on handling acoustic guitar .

This is off one of favorite Celtic CD's "Putumayo Celtic Tides"
Reverb fairy heavy on the vocal but I thinks works in the context of the feeling

Mary Black "Both Sides The Tweed"

Yes, that's very nice. Pleasant to listen to.

Muddy and "fuzzy" are my subjective opinion but the songs are all at least well played.

Yes that makes it all the more unfortunate yet still frequent occurrence that I come across while online browsing the recordings of even the pro players.

I think you're partly hearing Amazon's streaming. I have this CD, and (mostly) the real tracks sound much better. Amazon's very fuzzy. But keep in mind, one, this is a pretty old CD. I think the state of the art and expectations for recording solo guitar has improved over time.

And two, this is a collection, these tunes weren't all recorded by the same engineer, or even in the same time frame. So it's not one recording studio that chose this sound. Bensusan's contributions are a good example - that CD these tunes came from has some really horrible tracks. Amazing playing, but with distortion, clipping, and just surprisingly non-hifi sounds on any number of the tracks.

Have not done any research on Amazon streaming quality though youtube has improve quit a bit over the last years.

There's worse out there.

Here's a sample of a sound track that goes with a Celtic book I recently purchased online. The audio files were not available to listen to until after purchased and downloaded. In spite of that I can hear what the tunes can be.

Maybe its not so much the recording quality but the guitar/pickup, etc that is like nails on a blackboard to my ears :D

I'll remove the sample track from my page by the weekend.

I'm a bit surprised, I guess I haven't listened to anything on Amazon. Spotify is noticeably degraded, tho acceptable - I know from hearing my own stuff after it's been released there, while Apple Music seems better. But Amazon seems to be significantly "fuzzy", at least with this CD. Also hard to know how these things were released, maybe Mel Bay uploaded low-res mp3s to them.

Barry, that sample sounds like artifacts from a quite low bit rate mp3. If that book came out several years ago that might explain it. No excuse for that in recent releases.

Yes, the mp3 files were created 2008 and the copyrights are 2008 and 1997 for the book.

You know, you can change the default playback bitrates on the Spotify app. I use YouTube Music, but they all let you do this. I set mine to high on WiFi and downloads, bit low on cell service streaming. I mostly listen to streaming in my car and it doesn't really matter over the road noise.

Also, reverb seems to sound particularly terrible with low bitrate mp3 compression. Instrumental recordings that are bathed in reverb tend to sound awful in low nitrate previews.

I had both volumes of these as CDs years ago and I remember them sounding a lot better than this. My guess is this is an old upload onto crappy streaming and it's sucking out some frequencies in a way that makes the reverb pop, in a bad way.

Hi Rick,
Just yesterday I downloaded a track of mine from Amazon because I am not confident that my iMac desktop player is willing to cooperate, but......

I was not expecting much, but was really surprised at how good it sounded. Reading your post I made a point of A-B'ing the download to the web site MP3 or whatever it is. While both are just fine, the download does sound more solid.

The link you provided sounds horrible on so many levels, and as has been said the playing is really good, so it's sad to think the site samples are what's being represented.

My guess is that the downloads or discs are much better quality.

Regards,
Howard Emerson