Original Jazz Sound?

An un­scrupu­lous pro­duc­er mer­chant is selling on all on­line mu­sic plat­forms [1] a col­lec­tion en­ti­tled “Original Jazz Sound” reis­su­ing the jazz her­itage now out of copy­right, i.e. pri­or to 1961. If we com­pare the au­dio qual­i­ty of the­se re­leas­es with the orig­i­nal ones, even old, the au­dio qual­i­ty im­me­di­ate­ly ap­pears to be so down­grad­ed that it is in­audi­ble. [2]

• Listen to the really original audio from Prestige Records (recorded and mastered by Rudy Van Gelder in Hackensack on December 24^th, 1954. Yes, nineteen fifty four).

• Listen to the “Original” Jazz Sound audio (“remastered” by OJS in 2011. Yes, 2011).

Useful point: there is no re­ver­sal or mis­take here. The first link is the un­mod­i­fied 1954 au­dio, the sec­ond one is the 2011 “re­mas­tered” (sic) au­dio, both from the same mas­ter tape, same record­ing ses­sion. Furthermore, I checked about ten other OJS records: all are mas­sive­ly down­grad­ed com­pared with the orig­i­nal CD’s in my per­son­al mu­sic li­brary.

So, they are selling cheap (4 €) re­leas­es of out­stand­ing records, but wrecked to such an ex­tent that those who still have to dis­cov­er them will be dis­gust­ed. For on­ly 10 €, which is re­al­ly af­ford­able, you may buy au­then­tic and re­spect­ful re­leas­es. 57 years of tech­ni­cal im­prove­ments to come to this…

Not on­ly the goods are not what they were de­scribed to be, but the­se re­leas­es are a mis­deed and pure van­dal­ism. Difficult to un­der­stand the mo­ti­va­tion be­hind it, as there is no rea­son why the cost of this poor sound would be low­er than the orig­i­nal one. I’m won­der­ing on the weird tech­niques used to de­stroy the­se ex­cel­lent record­ings made half a cen­tu­ry ago. [3]

Original Jazz Sound re­leas­es come with a so-called “dig­i­tal PDF book­let” which is just an ad­ver­tise­ment for this la­bel, with­out any rel­e­vant in­for­ma­tion.