More of the music of Emmanual Chabrier (1841-1894)
Reviews and Commentaries for Chabrier’s Orchestral Music
On many copies the strings are somewhat dry, lacking some of the Tubey Magic heard on the better copies.
This is decidedly not our sound, although it can easily be heard on many London pressings, the kind we’ve played by the hundreds over the years.
If you have a rich sounding cartridge, perhaps with that little dip in the upper midrange that so many moving coils have these days, you will not notice this tonality issue nearly as much as we do.
Our 17Dx is ruler flat and quite unforgiving in this regard.
It makes our shootouts much easier, but brings out the flaws in even the best pressings, exactly the job we require it to do.
We discussed the issue in a commentary entitled Hi-Fi Beats My-Fi If You Are At All Serious about Audio.
Here are some of the other records we’ve discovered that are good for testing string tone and texture.
Can we really be hearing all these things that nobody else seems to be hearing? Things like:
- The Opacity of Londons from the Seventies
- Smear on Violin Concerto Records
- Acoustic Guitars with a Bit Too Much Sparkle
- Boosted, Sloppy Bass on Half-Speeds and Modern Heavy Vinyl LPs
- Shrillness on EMI Recordings from the ’70s
- Records that Have No Business Being on the TAS List
- Bad Sounding Shaded Dogs
- Bad Sounding Londons and Deccas
If audiophiles and audiophile reviewers are noticing these things on the records they review, whether it be in magazines, websites or audiophile forums, why aren’t they discussing them?
You, dear reader, know the answer to that one, since you are reading the only writer that has been criticizing these know-nothings going on three decades.
The frequency response of the 17DX is shown below. Hard to draw a line much flatter than that.
Some cartridges are known to have ridiculous response curves. Here’s one, and there are lots more like it.