Perfecting your cd collection

Never stopped refining what I have, but only for purely musical performance reason.

I have ever only have three recordings out of over a thousand that were intollerable from the perspective of the recording. Fortunately the loss of these was not so great as in each case the performances were musically dispensible for me as well.

I do own some fairly badly recorded performances, but if the music making is compelling then I remain grateful that we have something of a momento!

ATB from George

quote:

Originally posted by GFFJ:
Never stopped refining what I have, but only for purely musical performance reason.

ATB from George

i guess i've developed an appetite for hearing things played without mistake. many times in lessons, i would hear whole etudes played perfectly. in some lessons, my teacher would play the etude, then i would. and then again. this had a wonderful effect on the quality of what i played. and i remember what my teacher sounded like to this day.

i enjoy recordings that sound like that. and, funny thing, played without mistake, it changes the meaning of the music.

but if you don't hear all the harmonics, and the dynamics have been altered in some way, then 40% of perfect is missing.

harmonics add color and shading, and dynamics - small changes - provide lift and altitude to the shape of a phrase.

a lot of music lives in the harmonics and dynamics.

remove them, and what sort of creature is left?

Dear Mike,

I am not arguing that your premise is off, but rather that in replay we all listen in a different way.

I remember listening, transfixed, to my bass teacher playing say the bass-line of the development section of the first movement of Mozart's Fourtieth [still some of the most taxing notes ever written for the double bass], and coming away with an altered perspective of the whole symphony.

No concert hall performance or recording can let you hear clearly exactly what is going on. This is where playing or a study of the score comes in handy, and there is no substitute for that, as you have suggested elsewhere, and I agree with.

I suppose I accept that even the finest replay is significantly flawed, and some recordings are flawed to a degree where many would find them less listenable than me.

It is a funny one when people interested in hifi come to my place. I have almost no recordings of sufficient quality to exactly show how fine my replay set actually is!

ATB from George

the disks that hum at a=443 or something equally obnoxious and are audible in quiet passages have to go!

i can't not listen to that :-)

Dear Mike,

A funny story about a hum.

Sir Adrian Boult was to conduct the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in Worcester Cathedral in summer of 1977 - a progamme including Schumann's Fourth [?] Symphony and Elgar's Cello Concerto with Paul Tortelier.

He stayed in what was the premiere hotel in the town at the time - The Giffard, which is a horrible rectilinear concrete construction a mere stone's throw from the Cathedral, and is now a cheap Travelodge!

In this Hotel was a large air-conditioning tower right over the landing outside Boult's room and it emitted a constant 50 Hertz hum in the hot nights of the summer.

At about 2 am the ninety year old conductor finally snapped and rang to reception, complaining of the, "Steady bass A flat that is preventing me sleeping."

Apparently he was trenchant enough that the whole of the hotel air-conditioning was turned off that night!

Yes a hum can be very irritating!

ATB from George

quote:

Originally posted by GFFJ:

Yes a hum can be very irritating!

ATB from George

:-)

I have sometimes been caught in the trap of wanting something perfect. I usually get tantalised by the idea that something is missing from the recording I am listening to. Recently I wanted a perfect Mozart 40th and you both made recomendations which I bought and enjoyed [thanks]. Along with 3 others, so now I have six. Non perfect but the search itself was enjoyable but for a time I was listening to the sound and not the music - I think
all the best
SJ

quote:

Originally posted by stephenjohn:
but for a time I was listening to the sound and not the music - I think
all the best
SJ

i just want to eliminate noise that competes with the notes.

me too, I hate it when it sounds like listening through cotton wool
atb
SJ

quote:

Originally posted by mikeeschman:

quote:

Originally posted by stephenjohn:
but for a time I was listening to the sound and not the music - I think
all the best
SJ

i just want to eliminate noise that competes with the notes.

In most cases I don't mind the noise at all - far better than the alternative, artificial noise reduction that severly impacts the dynamic range.

buy more vinyl...simple.

quote:

Originally posted by scottyhammer:
buy more vinyl...simple.

if everything on cd was also on vinyl, i probably wouldn't own any cds. but new classical releases on vinyl are thin on the ground, and generally don't involve the performers i want to hear.

point taken

I have a live recording of Schostakovich 5 conducted by Mvrinski [?sp]. You can hear lots of coughing, shuffling etc from the audience, the music sounds wonderful - it is possible to hear more instruments than on the other three recordings I own. This conversation is helping clarify something for me, a bit of extra noise isn't the problem for me - it's missing something that I wish to avoid
atb
SJ

Dear Stevenjohn,

In my experience "live recordings" quite often show a better musical balance of lines than even the most spectacular studio efforts, notwithstanding audience noises, which observation might seem surprising.

And the music making often has a natural drive, flow, and relaxation which can only occur in a performance that is made in real time, rather than stitched together from takes made over a much longer time.

I know some hate the "noises off," found live recordings, but I find them easy to ignore, if the performance is a great one!

ATB from George

quote:

Originally posted by stephenjohn:
I have a live recording of Schostakovich 5 conducted by Mvrinski [?sp]. You can hear lots of coughing, shuffling etc from the audience, the music sounds wonderful - it is possible to hear more instruments than on the other three recordings I own. This conversation is helping clarify something for me, a bit of extra noise isn't the problem for me - it's missing something that I wish to avoid
atb
SJ

audience noise really doesn't bother me. but i have some cds that emit a constant pitch, usually in the middle c octave, that is mechanical vibration.

try this - go out and buy a pitch box that sounds an a=440. go home, and set the pitch box right in between your speakers. turn it on, then play a cd. be sure that you can hear the pitch box when the cd has quiet passages.

do you find that distracting?

similarly, hearing all the action noise in a piano, as if you had stuck your hear under the lid, doesn't improve the musical experience.

i'm not talking about the normal noise in a live performance, i'm talking about the fellow next to you snores through every note of the entire performance. that's what the cds' mechanical noise and the piano action noise are like - but worse, because the offending pitches are in the same pitch range as what you are trying to listen to, or the mechanical noise is in the same rhythm as what you're trying to listen to.

that reads like it sounds unarguably unpleasant
atb
SJ

for the record, my bad cds are 18 out of 700 or so, the offending cds have all been DGG 4D recordings purchased between 1996 and 1999 - with one exception, a sony disk of berstein/shostakovitch symphony no. 1.

only two piano disks have issues. a dgg pollini/beethoven and a phillips arrau/listz.

I've got some DG 4D. I'll see if it happens to me
atb
SJ