In the November 2004 issue of Stereophile, Kalman Rubinson offers a downright ecstatic review of BMG’s recent release on SACD of remasterings of 20 original RCA Living Stereo albums:
I don’t have to tell you how prized and respected their recordings have been, from their first release on RSC vinyl half a century ago to their various incarnations on CD. . . . These recordings’ musical and audiophile significance are rivaled only by the contemporaneous Mercury Living Presence series, which themselves are due to be released soon as three-channel hybrid SACDs.
Originally recorded in three channels then mixed down to two for stereo release, the Living Stereo series can now be heard at home the way it was intended — thanks to multi-channel SACD and center channel speakers. And, man, does it sound good. I picked up four of the titles last night at Border’s (as far as I know, only the first ten are currently available):
Follow the links to see the full track listings. I’ve named only the first major piece on each recording, but, except for the Ravel (which is complete and runs nearly an hour) all include several other major works.
I don’t talk about this much on Long Pauses — mostly out of embarrassment — but I’m a lifelong audiophile. After watching me spend hours twiddling with my dad’s five-foot long, cabinet-style record player, my parents bought me my own turntable when I was eight or nine. I got my first job when I was fifteen and used most of my earnings to buy a Technics component system: receiver, dual-deck tape player, then, just before my 16th birthday in 1988, a CD player. I upgraded the receiver several times in college, went Dolby Pro Logic, bought a center channel speaker and some surrounds, a hi-fi VCR, and in January 1998 bought a Toshiba SD-2107, the 2nd generation DVD player that is now in our bedroom. When we bought this house in the spring, I upgraded again, adding DVD-Audio and SACD, 7.1 sound, and, um, a projector.
What can I say? Like I tell Joanna, I’m a man with few hobbies. I read, I watch movies, and I run. Oh, and I drive a 2000 Nissan Sentra. All things being equal, I’m a man of simple and inexpensive tastes. Except for the home theater stuff. Obviously.
As Rubinson mentions often in his “Music in the Round” column, the explosion of home theater has been good and bad for audiophiles. The rapid developments in hardware technology and sound processing algorithms has put mid-fi sound well within reach of most budgets. But as TV monitors and projection screens — the new focal point of most systems — have grown and grown, our front speakers have moved further and further apart. And that does bad things to the fidelity of good two-channel music.
That’s where the center channel speaker comes in. These new Living Stereo SACDs confirm what many have suspected for some time — that is, music sources recorded in three channels and played back on three matching, full-range speakers can sound very, very, very good.
I only had an hour or so to play with the SACDs last night, and I don’t in any way claim expertise in the field of classical recordings. But, listening to the two pieces with which I am most familiar, Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra and Debussy’s La Mer (included on the Saint-Saens disc), I actually laughed out loud. I don’t recall ever closing my eyes and being able to so clearly see an orchestra before me. When the muffled brass entered on Bartok’s Concerto — you know, the part that John Williams ripped off, like, a hundred times in Star Wars — I could point to the exact spot on the soundstage where they were standing. And because the recordings were made in the 1950s, they have life to them, they breathe. They aren’t the sterile, tightly compressed mixes that we get so often today.
And best of all, for only $11.99 (or less, I’m sure) you get a multi-channel SACD track, a 3:2 SACD mixdown, and a 16/44.1 two-channel track. What the hell does that mean? It means that these “hybrid” SACDs will play on any CD or DVD player. You don’t need SACD, though without it you will be getting a smaller, more compressed bit stream, and you also won’t get the center channel. But if you’re looking to buy recordings of the standard repertoire and you hope to get into SACD eventually, these discs are (to some extent, at least) future-proof. And I can’t recommend them highly enough.