Records & Recording: A Discography for the Audio Purist, Part 1 (Vol.1, No.6: Spring-Fall 1978)

Editor's Note: The latest installment of Max Wilcox's continuing series on recording technique arrived a bit too late to be included here. Watch for it in the next issue; meanwhile, here's the beginning of a new and different series that will run concurrently.

This is the beginning of what we hope will become a regular feature: brief analytical comments on the records we use for evaluating cartridges, arms, turntables and preamps. The point is that these are the records we actually listen to when we try to find out certain things, which doesn't necessarily make them the greatest audiophile spectaculars in the world. (We don't know what the latter are.) To be included in this discography, a record need not be an absolute masterpiece of audio engineering but it must possess some special quality that makes it desirable to the audio purist, even if it happens to be some what flawed in other respects. At the same time it mustn't be a total loss as sheer music.

We refuse to be musically debased or abused even for the cause of better audio.

Needless to say, we also listen to some rather poorly recorded discs, of Toscanini, Dinu Lipatti, Louis Armstrong, early Beatles and many other underprivileged musicians who never saw a Bruel & Kjaer or Schoeps micro phone. We certainly hope that you do, too. But the subject here is audio excellence, so that some of our favorite records will never be mentioned.

Deutsche Grammophon

Stravinsky: L'Histoire du Soldat (in English). John Gielgud, Tom Courtenay, Ron Moody, Boston Sym phony Chamber Players. Deutsche Grammophon 2530 609 (made in 1975).

Although this is a multimike job (by the renowned Gunter Hermanns), we don't know of a more cleanly delineated recording of instrumental timbres and fast transients. There are only seven performers in the musical sections, and they are right there, in front of you. The closely miked snare drum in the "Royal March" is our favorite cartridge and preamp killer, and the savagely bowed solo violin in a number of passages will put any tweeter to the acid test.

Through a system of reference quality all this should sound solid, sweet and crisp, with no audible crud of any kind.

The spoken parts were recorded separately (excellently acted, by the way), and the rather obvious use of echo plates on the voice channels provides another point of reference, since the more clearly you hear the mechanical artificiality of the effect, the higher the resolution of the system.

Musically the performance is super-slick and virtuosic; maybe Stravinsky's own recording from the early 1960's on Columbia gets closer to the essence of the music, but this is the recording for sonic delights.

London (Decca)

Prokofiev: Romeo and Juliet (complete ballet, 6 sides). The Cleveland Orchestra, Lorin Maazel. London CSA 2312 (made in 1973).

We must hasten to state at the outset that we use only the first two sides of this album in our equipment evaluations. The other four simply aren't as good; side 6, for example, has unbearably glassy string sound. Act 1, however, is the best recording known to us of a huge symphony orchestra with all choirs active. That doesn't mean it's a superb recording; the modern orchestra has never been captured on records to our complete satisfaction, but producer Michael Woolcock with engineers Colin Moorfoot and Gordon Parry at least had a bash at it, as they say in England, even if they had to go to Cleveland, Ohio, to do it.

Their technique is still multimike, with plenty of spotlighting, but the result has tremendous presence and impact, with a big dynamic range that you expect to run out of head room on the climaxes but doesn't. The bass drum is especially well captured (good sub woofer test) and the violins are right up front without being strident (on the first two sides, anyway). It's hi-fi with a vengeance, but the very best of the genre. And it really separates the big-league systems from the others.

Musically the album is wonderful; there's no better orchestra in the world than the Cleveland, and Maazel has a total mastery of this extroverted score, which is just modern enough in flavor to make the tovarich (comrade) in the street think he is enjoying something avant-garde.

Mark Levinson

The first five volumes of the Mark Levinson Acoustic Recording Series, any one of which makes excellent source material for equipment testing, were reviewed in Volume 1, Number 4. This is their sixth release.

Bach: Partita No. 3 in E Major. Scarlatti: Five Sonatas. Eliot Fisk, guitar (playing own transcriptions). Mark Levinson MAL 6, 45 RPM (made in 1978).

Even the rock-pop generation that avoids unamplified live music like the plague has a good idea what a live acoustic guitar sounds like. That's the chief audio-testing value of this record; with this kind of program material the equipment has no place to hide. There's just a solo guitar smack in the center with a fairly live space behind it; a pair of Bruel & Kjaer 4133's are responsible for the basic sound of the recording, which was made without a con sole. What could be simpler or purer? What's more, the 45-RPM cut loses very little in the transfer from the 30-IPS master tape. With nothing phony going in, anything phony coming out is very, very obvious.

All we can say about the sonic quality of this record is that it sounds like an acoustic guitar. Period. If it sounds like a pleasant electric recording of an acoustic guitar, there's something wrong with the playback system.

It's as simple as that.

In addition, these are superior performances musically. One of the shortcomings of the tiny Mark Levinson catalog has been the use of competent rather than exciting musicians.

Eliot Fisk is of another category. He sounds like a major artist to our ears, quite in a class with the better classical guitarists of our time.

With this kind of talent and this kind of re cording, the MLAR company is rapidly coming of age.

Philips 16th Century French Dance Music. Musica Reservata; Michael Morrow, musical director; John Beckett, conductor. Philips 6500 293 (made in 1972).

The music is rather delightful and completely unimportant; the recording is very closely miked and detailed. We think we can hear some slightly peaky Neumanns in there, but we don't care. With this kind of front row definition we can nail some very elusive performance characteristics in components under test.

For example, on the first side, exactly where a perfectly aligned offset arm goes through its first zero-tracking-error position, there's "Belle, qui tiens ma vie" for two mezzo-sopranos, tenor and bass, a cappella. It's nothing short of amazing how this combination reveals the subtlest intermodulation products thrown off by the equipment. The fact that the piece is rather amateurishly sung detracts nothing from its potency as a tool for testing. The dance suite that follows is equally useful, thanks to marvelous ancient instrumental timbres that were originally conceived for short-distance, intimate listening, such as the phonograph again provides in modern times. The bridge sound of the viols, for example, is a perfect time-domain monitor and an absolute joy when all components are optimized.

By the way, Philips is just about our favorite among the big commercial labels; in our opinion only a handful of small, specialized record companies are doing a better job audio wise.

Proprius

This little-known Swedish label has been one of our happiest discoveries in our search for exceptional records. Their productions seem to be consistently natural in sound and flawlessly processed. Furthermore, they maintain a surprisingly high standard of musicianship for a small record company. The album reviewed below happens to be our personal favorite in the Proprius catalog, but we suggest that you also look into Barock (PROP 7761) and Kor (PROP 7770) or just about anything else on their list for that matter. You won't be disappointed. The distributor in the United States is Audio Source, 1185 Chess Drive, Foster City, CA 94404.

Cantate Domino (assorted works for chorus, soprano, organ, trumpets and bassoons). Oscars Motet Choir, Torsten Nilsson, choral director; Alf Linder, organ; Marianne Mellnas, soprano. Proprius PROP 7762 (made in 1976).

Truly admirable microphoning characterizes this complex pickup of massed and solo voices with organ and instrumental textures in a reverberant church. Everything is completely natural and in focus; the organ descends to subterranean depths and the soprano soars heavenward; the dynamic range is stupendous and yet there isn't even a suggestion of hi-fi for hi-fi's sake on either side.

The recording channels weren't really of Levinsonian cleanliness (we're told that the tape recorder was a mere Revox A77, reworked to be sure); tape hiss and modulation noise are discernible here and there; the basic perspective, however, is so right (a pair of Bruel & Kjaer 4133's again) and everything remains so clear that the listener is totally disarmed. The slightest differences in the smearing and masking characteristics of various playback systems be come instantly obvious on this record.

The music on the first side spans four centuries of fairly lightweight but quite beautiful religious music; the second side is all Christmas and all very nice, except for an unbelievably corny arrangement of "White Christmas," with a totally out-of-character organ obbligato by the renowned Alf Linder.

Linder, incidentally, is the most professional participant in these performances; the chorus is very musical and persuasive but occasionally insecure in pitch; the soprano is a good one. All in all, one hell of a record. As our favorite wine merchant, a friend of twenty-five years' standing, is wont to say when we hesitate about one of his recommendations, "Shut up and buy it!"

-Ed.

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[adapted from TAC]

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Also see:

Records & Recording: Less Is More, By Max Wilcox

Various audio and high-fidelity magazines