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Posts: 1809
Joined: Nov. 8 2010
From: London (living in the Bay Area)
Sabicas on MP3
You may have noticed that, after a couple of decades of neglect, Sabas’s albums have started to appear on MP3; several being available in that form but not yet on CD.
Two such are Gypsy Flamenco and Flamenco Virtuoso, are the subjects of my post, with which I should like to request your help.
I have the original LPs, and both are stereo with good separation. However, the music samples on Amazon appear to be mono. I’m pretty sure the problem isn’t my computer system, because the samples for The Art of the Guitar come out properly in stereo.
Of course, it’s possible that the samples have been mixed down to mono, but the actual MP3s are stereo. So I wrote to Amazon to ask. This was this response:
“Our technical department has reviewed both of the albums, Flamenco virtuoso and Gypsy Flamenco. They have confirmed that the samples and tracks for these albums are in stereo.”
So, before I accuse Amazon of lying:
a) Has anyone actually bought either of these albums or tracks therefrom? And b) Does anyone think the samples are stereo?
Are these records mostly solo guitar? I know that sometimes Sabicas would dub over, and in essence play a duet with himself. Occasionally he had a second guitarist, sometimes his brother. And sometimes there might be palmas, etc.
For things like that you want stereo. But most flamenco guitar tracks are just a solo guitar, and there is no point to recording or playing back in stereo. So whether or not you need stereo depends on what's on the records.
They are not solo guitar. I agree that for those recordings (e.g. El Rey del Flamenco) it doesn’t make much difference.
But Gypsy Flamenco has Sabas’s brother Diego, Enrique Montoya, Mario Escudero and Anita Ramos. In particular, it has a lovely version of Pena penitas with one guitar out of each speaker.
Third possibility is that the recording IS stereo (they see on the computer two separate tracks of audio, L and R) but the hard panning got messed up when they transferred to digital. Perhaps the engineer did not like the hard panning and put the guitars more in the middle or something. Modern recordings tend to avoid hard panning like in the old days because it thins out the overall sound, especially nowadays everyone uses headphones with an ipod. It is a shame cuz it might as well be mono, but truth is you still have left and right as separate tracks.
The experiment I did was listen through headphones then flip em around. Indeed I notice a difference, but could be one of my speakers is weaker then the other or something.
Thanks Ricardo, that possibility hadn’t occurred to me. Flamenco Virtuoso does in fact say "Digitally remastered".
If so, that sucks. One of the great things about those double-tracked Sabas albums (and early Paco/Ramón albums, for that matter) is that they’re easy to transcribe because the stereo separation is almost total. But I far prefer that for listening, as well. As you say: What's the point of stereo if it’s going to be indistinguishable from mono?
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