It's nice to report some good mastering work for a change...

Bought an album a while ago called "Putumayo presents... French Cafe". Here is a link on amazon.

It's a compilation of simple french music - well, you can read about it on Amazon - recorded between 1955 and the early 2000s. Now you'd expect - at least I certainly expected - an audio hodge-podge of some modern tracks and some thin and nasty-sounding things and all sorts in between. Not so. It's actually very consistent and very lovely. The mastering engineer has clearly (a) had access to some decent tapes of the early stuff, not a C90 from a boot-sale; and (b) taken huge pains to remix and rebalance everything so it all matches. So we have George Brassens ('50s), Brigitte Bardot and Barbara ('60s), Jane Birkin (timelessly gorgeous :-)) and some modern groups all sat next to each other and all flowing one to the next with no leaps of audio faith required. You could use this as an audiophile test disk, it's that good.

Producer is credited as Dan Storper, mastered at The Lodge by Emily Lazar. Hats off to Ms Lazar for doing a wonderful job, and to Mr Storper for (presumably) caring enough to give her the time and support and budget to do it!

I bought it on Pete_w's recommendation, and I'm happy that I did. It is surprisingly good, and very consistent as he says.

Phil