More Classical and Orchestral Music
Best Orchestral Performances with Top Quality Sound
Classical music is unquestionably the ultimate test for proper turntable/arm/cartridge setup.
The Liszt Piano Concerto record you see pictured is a superb choice for making small adjustments to your setup in order to improve the playback of these very difficult to reproduce orchestral recordings.
Here are some other reviews and commentaries touching on these areas of turntable setup.
- Tracking weight,
- VTA,
- Azimuth, and
- Anti-skate
One of the reasons $10,000+ front ends exist is to play large scale, complex, difficult-to-reproduce music such as Liszt’s two piano concertos. You don’t need to spend that kind of money to play this record, but if you choose to, it would surely be the kind of record that could help you see the sound quality your tens of thousands of dollars has bought you.
It has been my experience that cheap tables more often than not collapse completely under the weight of a mighty record such as this.
As for the music, I don’t know of a piano concerto record that more correctly captures the relationship between the piano and the orchestra. The piano here is huge and powerful, yet at the same time, the percussive and lighter qualities are clearly expressed in relation to the entire orchestra. In addition, there are places on this album where the brass is as powerful and dynamic as I’ve ever heard on record.
Many of these would make great test discs.
Lately we have been writing quite a bit about how pianos are good for testing your system, room, tweaks, electricity and all the rest, not to mention turntable setup and adjustment.
- We like our pianos to sound natural (however one chooses to define the term).
- We like them to be solidly weighted.
- We like them to be free of smear, a quality that is rarely mentioned in the audiophile record reviews we read but is easily audible on the smear-free equipment we use.
Skip the Mercury
The title originally came out as a Mercury, the work of Robert Fine and Wilma Cozart, mastered by George Piros, the legendary Mercury team of renown. It is instructive to note that this Philips mastering is clearly superior to the mediocre Mercury mastering, which may be counterintuitive, but is demonstrably true nonetheless.
Which is why we actually listen to the records we sell here at Better Records, because you can’t judge a record by its credentials — you must play it.