My favorite YouTube channel is the RS3D Archive — specialists in magically lucid digital restorations of 50-75 year old recordings of orchestral music. They add nothing to the original, just poke around and clarify and improve the signal-to-noise ratio. Everyone should subscribe, just to get a sense of how Fürtwangler’s Berlin Philharmonic 1942, Toscanini’s NBC Orchestra 1950, or Bruno Walter’s Vienna Philharmonic 1938 would have sounded to their live audiences. Somehow they arrive at a spacious stereo-like effect without any fakery, so it all sounds extra-vivid in earphones.
Almost every morning my computer screen includes a little box telling which concertos, sonatas, cantatas or symphonies the RS3D has made available during the night. Today this is what showed up!
Enjoy.
update: SORRY! SEE UPDATE(S) BELOW...
From the RS3D Archive YouTube channel:
Published on Jul 25, 2018
Want to hear every word? Here it is.
WHAT WE DID:
The tape was compressed by 6 db to match voice levels.
Rumble and noise was removed.
Mic handling noise was reduced.
That's all.
We added nothing.
I love that “Category: Music” tagline.
(update: That quoted note is deleted now also.)
Since the world again seems to be careening towards doom at a dizzying rate, here’s an appropriate (and awesome) sample of the RS3D Archive’s musical offerings, a restoration of a performance recorded in 1938, about a week before the Nazis marched into Austria. The Jewish Bruno Walter conducts the Vienna Philharmonic in the Ninth Symphony composed by Walter’s friend and mentor, the Jewish Gustav Mahler (1860-1911), as Mahler was struggling to come to terms with his own approaching death. Every note resonates, haunted by several million ghosts-to-be. Walter and his orchestra had no illusions about what the Anschluss would portend.
Please visit the RS3D Archive YouTube page and complement them on their fine work. I think you’ll agree they deserve it.
UPDATE: Thanks to the reader who alerted us to the deletion. That was quick! I left a message to the RS3D Archive folks via YouTube but am not sure if or when there might a reply or an announcement from them. I thought “embedded media” here would be deletion-proof, but apparently not. Perhaps the enhancement was a violation of copyright owned by Cohen or CNN? But can a leaked clandestine recording be copyrighted? Stay tuned. If I find out more, I’ll post another update. Meanwhile, readers are urged to pass any info. Thanks!
UPDATE 2: No new info to add, but just a quick PS to say the deletion of this very audible version of the famous tape is itself perhaps as newsworthy and significant as anything in its clarified soundtrack. So I’m not deleting this diary, at least not until I find out what the story is!
UPDATE 3: It’s now 1:35 pm, Queensland time. Again, nothing new to report. Still no response to the message (quotebox below) which I left 3 hours ago in the RS3D channel page’s comment section—I made a screen shot of the message but weirdly it wouldn’t reproduce on DK image system, although it was the correct format. (More likely an innocent technical glitch of some kind than another layer of plot-thickening.)
I shared the Trump-Cohen enhancement on YouTube and DailyKos about an hour or two ago. (Already people were thanking me for the info about your primary mission and subscribing for the great music.) But now— "unavailable" !!! ¿¿¿Que pasa??? Were you threatened by thugs? Are you going underground? Can we help?
This is what shows in my YouTube notifications:
So I guess this is the end of the updates unless something shows up.
Unfortunately, if there is a real smoking-gun story somewhere in this little episode, it would require a side-by-side listen to the now-vanished enhanced soundtrack from RS3D, along with the murky original we can presumably find on many internet sites (as well as CNN). I recall the TV news panel (on CBS or CNN) saying there were one or more key words that were impossible to decipher on the recording they’d just played on air.
If we hear more about the question of what those murky words were saying, this RS3D enhancement (and its quick disappearance) may start to look very significant. I might try to cycle this through the recent diaries line-up again if it seems justified.
But that’s it for now.