Records & Recordings--A Discography for the Audio Purist: Part III (Vol.2, No.2: 1979)

Records & Recordings--A Discography for the Audio Purist: Part III

Editor's Note: Max Wilcox, who has had this column as his bailiwick since our earliest issues, has been too busy recording, both in the United States and abroad, to have time left for writing us a new article. Don't worry, though, he'll be back. Meanwhile we continue to talk about the records we like to pull out when we want to check out a new system or new components.

A Discography for the Audio Purist: Part III

As you know from the two previous installments of this series and our original explanation of the ground rules, we don't publish 'record reviews' here in the conventional sense. That would mean, inevitably, a mixture of good and bad, approval and disapproval. We hope to introduce such reviews in future issues as The Audio Critic expands, but this discography includes only records we have found exceptionally interesting sonically, either for utter naturalness or for other characteristics useful in evaluating audio equipment. We run across some very fine records, musically and/or audio-wise, that we have no specific reason to mention here. So there's absolutely no stigma attached to non-inclusion of a particular label or disc. This is a very short list.

That said, we feel we must still come back once more to the almost universally adulated new digital recordings and restate, in anticipation of virtually certain protests, why we aren't ready yet to join the worshipers. As we explained, the present sampling rate of only 50,000 samples per second results in a somewhat degraded, electronic-sounding top end. In other words, at the present state of the art, we believe we can hear the digitizing process. The new brass quintet and trumpet recordings on the Delos label have given us our most recent proof of that belief. These were recorded with strictly purist techniques, using a pair of B&K microphones, very much like the Mark Levinson brass album we reviewed four issues ago (Vol. 1, No. 4). The main difference was the Soundstream digital system used by Delos as against 30-IPS analog recording used by Mark Levinson. Even though the Delos records are superior in many ways-signal-to-noise ratio, spatial presentation, general musicality of production, and the quality of brass playing-the Mark Levinson record yields the more natural and believable brass sound, at least to our ears.

At the same time, there's no doubt in our mind that with a sufficiently high sampling rate and a sufficient number of bits, digital recording can far surpass all analog systems. The day will come. At this point, however, the few records we're adding to our discography are all analog.

Desmar Schubert: Sonata in A Major, Opus Posthumous. Richard Goode, piano. Desmar SR-6001 (made in 1978).

Just because Max Wilcox is our Contributing Editor we still can't, out of sheer journalistic impartiality, ignore his recording work when it's this good. Yes, this is the sound of the 'new' Max Wilcox-two Schoeps omnis, 30-IPS, minimal console electronics. The piano sounds totally natural, rounded and beautiful, not too close and not too far away.

Max doesn't like that steely ping of the upper strings that you get with very close-miked piano recording; personally we would prefer just a touch more of it, but that's quibbling. The piano and the space are all there, completely audible in every detail, and that's what counts.

This is one of the great works of Schubert's 'late' period, if the word is at all applicable to a composer who died at 31. (We firmly believe that had penicillin existed in the early nineteenth century, Schubert would have lived to surpass Mozart and Beethoven in stature. He was getting there.) The music speaks in long, drawn-out sentences and paragraphs, but with incredible melodic and harmonic invention.

You don't want any of the movements to end; it's all too beautiful for interruption, even with something just as beautiful.

Richard Goode is a marvelous musician to whom this expansive idiom is as natural as speech. He maintains the long line without a moment of sagging, all the time delighting you with his exquisitely simple phrasing, superb voice leading, lovely tone, and unerring rightness of expression. A few lapses of taste, a bit of egocentric virtuosity, an occasional italicization of the wrong detail could make a shambles of this leisurely and subtle work. Richard Goode plays it like great chamber music, first things first, the forest before the trees.

If you think we've flipped our lid over this record, you're absolutely right. We could play it all day.

Deutsche Grammophon

Johann Strauss: Die Fledermaus (complete operetta, 4 sides). Hermann Prey, Julia Varady, Rene Kollo, Lucia Popp, Bavarian State Orchestra, Carlos Kleiber, conductor. Deutsche Grammophon 2707 088 (made in 1976).

This is a big multimike production, not without console shenanigans, but the very best of the genre, with a tremendously real stage that has genuine sonic breadth and depth.

Everything is three-dimensional. You can close your eyes and follow the singers around. What's more, the dynamic range is excellent and there's never any strain, not even on soprano high C's. A very stylish recording job, everything considered; it remains to be seen whether anyone can do this sort of thing better with fewer channels and fewer microphones.

Many people don't realize just how great this music is.

Melodically, of course, it's the apotheosis of Viennese three quarter time, but that alone would make it merely delightful, not great. The ensemble writing, however, has an almost Mozartian perfection and the orchestration is superb. There just isn't any better light music than this.

The performance could be described as near great, lacking only the ultimate degree of rip-roaring, uninhibited exuberance, such as we remember from some classic predecessors. Instead, it's lilting, elegantly effervescent, thoroughly idiomatic, very precisely controlled. Carlos Kleiber conducts it as if it were great music, not just fluff, and the singing is mostly wonderful. One of our favorites.

M & K RealTime

The Magnificent Basso (assorted works by Carl Loewe, Mozart and Verdi). Michael Li-Paz, basso, with Zoltan Rozsnyai, piano. M & K RealTime RT-102 (made in 1978).

Direct to disc and miked without any room sound whatsoever, this rather perverse production is useful to the audio equipment reviewer because of its very perversity.

This kind of recording is totally chameleon-like; the sound of the basso's voice changes in direct proportion to the colorations inherent in the equipment under test, and his apparent position is entirely dependent on the radiation characteristics of the speakers. This would not be as clear-cut were the voice more spaciously and luscious-beautifully recorded. It also helps that the disc is superbly quiet and has great dynamic range. Quite a tool.

It's almost an irrelevance to state after this that Michael Li-Paz is a good basso who understands the music he sings.

For musical enjoyment, he should have been recorded by Deutsche Grammophon.

“Fatha''-Earl ''Fatha'' Hines Plays Hits He Missed. Earl Hines, piano; Red Callender, bass; Bill Douglass, drums. M & K Real Time RT-105 (made in 1978).

Much more natural than the above, although lacking the uncannily lifelike spatial characteristics of the Proprius Jazz at the Pawnshop (reviewed in the last issue). Despite the minimal amount of ambience information, the musicians sound thoroughly present and palpable, with superbly etched instrumental detail and great impact. The sound is absolutely clean, top to bottom, with no strain at any level and not a trace of background noise. This is realism. Direct-to-disc certainly has its points.

Earl Hines needs no recommendation to anyone who, like us, believes that Louis Armstrong was and remains the greatest. ''Fatha'' goes right back to the early days of Louis and all those old-time good ‘uns, the very roots of jazz. Here he plays more modern stuff, but the style is still entirely his own and it never fails to swing. Highly recommended.

Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab

This company borrows existing original master tapes, mostly of big hits in the rock-pop idiom, and manufactures new discs from them with immense care: new lacquer masters cut at half speed, the best vinyl money can buy, super pressings, highly protective packaging, etc. That means they have a presold market, since every Fleetwood Mac enthusiast with an expensive stereo system is a potential customer; from our point of view, however, most of this music is unrelated to high fidelity, having been made on a zillion tracks with every electronic production trick in the book, more processed than Kraft cheese. There are a few exceptions, however. What's more, the Mobile Fidelity treatment has revitalized a number of worthwhile pop classics. For example, the Beatles' Abbey Road, their last and undoubtedly one of their two or three best albums, sounds almost as if it had been recorded with present-day techniques and is in every way a new experience on the latest Mobile Fidelity release, received just before we went to press. Still, it isn't an audio tester's kind of record. The one below is.

Pink Floyd: The Dark Side of the Moon (originally recorded in 1972 and 1973). Mobile Fidelity Sound Labs MFSL 1-017 (made in 1979).

This record has always been our favorite exception to the rule that you can't judge audio equipment on rock music. The multimike/multitrack/multiprocessor technique is applied with tremendous sophistication by these people, with an end result that may be far removed from real-world sounds but is just as cleanly etched and impactful, free from anything that resembles ordinary distortion, in addition to being considerably larger than life. The opening ''heartbeat'' passage has become the standard bass test of the audio salons. On top of it, this is very listenable, musical rock despite the deliberate touches of weirdness-at least to our ears, which we must admit go into their protective shutdown mode after the first two bars of typical heavy metal.

We're able to hear details and subtleties in the Mobile Fidelity version that we weren't aware of even on the original EMI pressing, let alone the USA copies. For the first time, we can clearly make out every dirty word as well as all sorts of instrumental textures. Great fun and proof positive that the 'Original Master Recordings' concept of this company isn't just a hype.

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[adapted from TAC]

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Also see:

Why We're So Mean, Vindictive, Arrogant, Negative--and Truthful

Various audio and high-fidelity magazines