DEMO QUALITY SOUND, if what you’re demonstrating is the three dimensional quality of Living Stereo recordings. Amazing depth and width can be heard on this record. And the music is sublime.
I confess I somewhat misjudged this title. Yes, the opening is compressed, which led me to think that the entire record was compressed, but that’s not true. In some ways it’s quite dynamic. The quiet portions are very quiet; in a couple of places there are just horns playing off in the deep distance, followed by some flutes, and they sound very natural, just as you would hear them in a concert hall.
This record has one quality that sets it apart, and that is a tremendous sense of depth and a wide soundstage. Because so much of the music is quiet, and seems to be coming from so far back in the hall, you really get drawn into it, and lose the sense of being in your own living room. There are a couple of exciting climaxes, but for the most part this is fairly quiet music the way Gould has orchestrated it. I find it enchanting.
This is not the Power of the Orchestra. These are the Colors of the Orchestra.
This 1S copy is the best I’ve heard. This record looks brand new and plays about as good as one would expect from the RCA vinyl of the day, which is slightly ticky. I’ve never heard a quieter copy.
This is an Older Classical/Orchestral Review
Most of these older reviews are for records that did not go through the shootout process, the revolutionary approach to finding the best sounding pressings we started developing in the early 2000s. We found the records you see in these listings by cleaning and playing a pressing or two of the album, which we then described in the listing and priced according to how good the sound and surfaces seemed to us at the time.
We were often wrong back in those days, something we have no reason to hide. Audio equipment and record cleaning technologies have come a long way since then.
Nowadays, 99% (or more!) of the records we sell are cleaned, then auditioned under rigorously controlled conditions along with a number of other pressings, awarded sonic grades, then carefully condition checked for surface noise.
As you may imagine, this approach requires a great deal of time, effort and skill, which is why we currently have a highly trained staff of about ten. No individual or business without such a committed group could possibly dig as deep into the sound of records as we have, and it is unlikely that anyone, besides us, would ever be able to do the kind of work we do.
Every record we offer is unique, and 100% guaranteed to satisfy or your money back.
Basic Concepts and Realities Explained
Important Lessons We Learned from Record Experiments