Question on Roy Orbison Greatest Hits LP

[lpcd2001]

I really like this LP but I found Roy's voice was very colored in comparison with Nat King Cole's The Very Thought of You. Was it me or do you guys hear the same?

[Angel]

Well, let's see:

"The Very Thought Of You" DCC Gold CD was mastered by Steve Hoffman from the Capitol Three-tracks, the Orbison was mastered from two-track mixes.

Other than that, different voices, different engineers, different studios do make a difference.

The Orbison engineer Bill Porter got a rich warm sound and enhanced it with the use (some say overuse) of old 1930's RCA Optical Compressors, cranked up to 10 (I think 11). It's a bit too much for me, but it's the "sound" of the RCA "Nashville Sound" Studio and as Steve always says, "You can't change history".

:)

[Chip Stylus]

I have this cd on the regular CBS version (have only seen
Steve's version once and the price was astronomical)
and I have the lp's on Monument (brown label) and
Monument (silver label).

I also have a single-lp on Monument, mono pressing.
The mixes were not appreciably different to these ears,
most of the diff. seemed to be in the amount of
compression used in the mastering.

The wooliness of the voice varies from pressing to pressing.

I have some other Roy work, non-Bill Porter stuff, and I felt that
the Monument material was the only work that brought out what his
voice was capable of.

Later, he sounded kind of thin and sibilant (funky dental work, perhaps?)
and I wished that everyone had recorded him like Porter did.

What I'm saying is that the voice processing was likely a conscious decision
to make the singer "pop" out of the mix.