Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Georges Bizet Available Now
UPDATE 2025:
I’ve added some tubes-versus-transistors commentary at the bottom of this posting.
This Angel Melodiya pressing of Bizet’s Carmen, rearranged by Soviet composer Rodion Shchedrin for strings and 47 percussion instruments, has two incredible sides. Demo Quality Sound barely begins to do it justice. If you have the system to play it, this copy is a KNOCKOUT.
But boy is it a difficult record to reproduce. You better have everything working right when you play this one — it’s guaranteed to bring practically any audiophile system to its knees.
Speed, resolving power and freedom from distortion are what this record needs to sound its best.
Is your system up to it? There’s only one way to find out.
And if you have any peaky audiophile wire in your system, the kind that is full of detail but calls attention to itself, you are in big trouble with a record like this.
More than anything, this is a record that rewards your system’s neutrality.
Testing
This is a superb Demonstration Disc, but it is also an excellent Test Disc. The sound of the best copies is rich, full-bodied, incredibly spacious, and exceptionally extended up top. There is a prodigious amount of musical information spread across the soundstage, much of it difficult to reproduce.
Musicians are banging on so many different percussion instruments (often at the far back of the stage, or, even better, far back and left or right) that getting each one’s sonic character to clearly come through is a challenge — and when you’ve met it, a thrill. If you’ve done your homework, this is the kind of record that can show you what you’ve accomplished.
On the best copies the strings have wonderful texture and sheen. If your system isn’t up to it (or you have a copy with a problem in this area), the strings might sound a little shrill and possibly gritty as well, but I’m here to tell you that the sound on the best copies is just fine with respect to string tone and timbre. You will need to look elsewhere for the problem.
Famous in its Day
The Carmen Ballet Suite was deservedly famous in audiophile circles back in the 70s. Even with the dubious equipment that a high-end stereo store might be running, this record might still sound shockingly good.
It has so much “life” to it, so many interesting colors, and above all such three-dimensional spaciousness, it can make even bad transistor equipment, which is pretty much all there was back then, sound good.
The store I frequented carried the classic tube Audio Research electronics — that’s where I bought mine — but most stores were all transistor, and high-power transistors at that, not a sound I care to revisit. (Would love to hear my SP3-A-1 again though!)
In fact, this very same store sold me my first audiophile separates, the Crown DC-300a amp and the IC-150 preamp that mated to it.
When I took home the SP3-A-1 preamp I mention above, I was absolutely gobsmacked by the difference in the sound.
My neophyte audiophile mind had been blown in this same stereo store (they were not salons yet, regular people could still afford the best equipment) by Audio Research tubes playing a live recording of Frank Sinatra fronting a big band orchestra in 1966.
I thought the Crown electronics could give me some of those same thrills that caused the hairs to stand up on my arms while Frank sang, but I could not have been more wrong. I jumped on the tube bandwagon and rode around in it for the next thirty years until I found, almost by accident, something even better.
Further Reading
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