The delights of Telarc

Absolutely, when I can find them...

I was beginning to think it was just me...

Not sure if your part of Valhalla has a wormhole to the UK, Loki, but I can highly recommend Bath CDs and Broad Street Jazz for getting hold of Telarc discs (as well as many others) at pretty good prices. Apologies if this breaks forum rules.

Mark

Cheers! Yes the occasional foray across the rainbow bridge brings me within purchasing distance. LPs only for me, though.

Here's one in my collection that i purchased over 20 years ago : )

Debs

I've always enjoyed few the Telarc discs I have. for some reason, I thought there was bit a bit of audiophile snobbery, whereby it was fashionable to dismiss them as "trying too hard" or somesuch. I haven't seen much about them lately.

My first Telarc

Canon shots sort the moving coil cartridge men from the boys...................

My first Telarc too!

Did yours come with a wrap around warning label, with an enlarged photo of the grooves, and dire warnings re - what could happen to your bass units?

Nothing would track the canon shots, until I got my first Linn Klyde. Then, I had to watch the bass drivers.

Have you ever watched the surface if a musical instrument actually move during a performance.

Musical things don't appear to move in reality, Though some things that pretend to represent music are visible in their movement.

|I's a fake if you can see it move, in musical terms!

ATB from George

Yes.

At the time I think I had a Rega Planar 2 with a Shure cartridge and it tracked the record perfectly.

Then I changed to an LP12/Grace/Supex and............it wouldn't track the record. It jumped out of the groove ! I think it was the Troika/Ittok that was the first m/c that was able to track the record again !

But I never felt that my speakers were at risk.

I had Rega Planer 3 at the time, with Ortofon MC 10. Telarc 1812 had the cartridge jumping all over the place.

Similar problem when I upgraded to LP12/LVX/K18. No ammount of tweeking would make it track the awesome blasts.

Totally destroyed the bass drivers in my beloved Mission 770's with this LP.

Have you ever watched the surface if a musical instrument actually move during a performance.

Musical things don't appear to move in reality, Though some things that pretend to represent music are visible in their movement.

|I's a fake if you can see it move, in musical terms!

Yes, you can see the skin on a kick drum, and on orchestral Tympani move, especially, when concert lighting is reflected from them.

If the skin on a 22" kick, only moves a few milimeters, a six or eight inch bass driver, will have to move a lot further to move the same volume of air. Any musical mathematicians out there, want to tell us how far the cones will need to move?

My first TELARC LP (1812 came second). For some reason I found the recording's dynamics quite fatiguing, sounding like a typical demo disc. 

In my view, MA Recordings have an unsurpassed sound quality though their catalog is rather small.

So the speaker have to exagerate to produce a similar volume of sound.

Firstly in a room that could accommodate a handful of people compared to thousands then this volume is entirely not necessary. but if you must try to make the sound of a bass drum in your listening space then at least get a large enough suface area of driver to do so without distorting greater movement than the original instrument.

ESLs of one sort of an other spring to mind.

No cone speaker can make a musical sound with visibly moving drivers. And no truly musical instrument can be seen vibrating in the first place.

ATB from George

That was probably my SECOND Telarc.

So the speaker have to exagerate to produce a similar volume of sound.

 

Firstly in a room that could accommodate a handful of people compared to thousands then this volume is entirely not necessary. but if you must try to make the sound of a bass drum in your listening space then at least get a large enough suface area of driver to do so without distorting greater movement than the original instrument.

 

ESLs of one sort of an other spring to mind.

 

No cone speaker can make a musical sound with visibly moving drivers. And no truly musical instrument can be seen vibrating in the first place.

 

ATB from George

I think you have a good  point there George. I would love to have Quads atop huge subwoofers of course! Unfortuanately, my room is not large enough.

Piano strings vibrate visibly, even when played fairly softly.

I'm quizzical about the claim that the visibility (or otherwise) of vibrations has any bearing - positive or negative - on quality. It strikes me as a rather arbitrary measurement. All musical instruments cause vibrations, and so do loudspeakers. Louder sounds are produced by greater amplitude vibrations, in musical instruments just as much as in loudspeakers. What's human visual acuity got to do with any of this?

George's first sentence quoted above seems to imply that if you turn the volume down to the point where the speaker cones' vibrations just cease to be visible, then the sound quality will improve. Such a claim simply bewilders me.

Mark

I wonder if it would be apropriate, for one of the mods, to make the last part of this thread, appear as a discussion topic in the hi-fi section.

It could be the start of a cracking debate there!

Dear Mark,

When you strike a piano key the strings hit by the hammer will vibrate visibly, but it is not the string that you hear vibrating, but the sound board which is joined to the string via the bridge at the far end of the string form the hammer end. Equally you see the strings on a double bass move. Again it the belly of the instrument that converts this vibrating string into an audible sound. The sound-board and the belly of a double bass are amplification devices based on the transfer of vibration of a tuned string into a sounding system that will vibrate happy over a wide frequency of audible sounds.

You may care to pluck a solid bodied bass-guitar and see how much you can hear if it is not plugged into an amplifier, even if you can see the string vibrate.

As for the suggestion of turning a coned speaker down till you can perceive no visible motion in the driver, to improve the quality, I can definitely say that this is a false assumption of what I meant. Therefore you do not need to feel bewildered but what would be a distinctly odd idea, if that really had been my meaning ...

ATB from George

Thank you for taking the time to clarify your thoughts, George, but the point I made in the main paragraph of the post you responded to still stands: that human visual acuity is an arbitrary marker by which to judge a) the size of vibrations and b) the quality of sound made by such vibrations.

But before I get accused of crapping on my own thread (or perhaps encouraging crapping on a thread I started), I read recently something that I'd read earlier about Telarc; that they built on the work of the legendary Mercury Living Presence recording team(s) by using small numbers of microphones rather than the huge arrays favoured by many other engineers. Would anyone who knows the Mercury recordings better than I do - I've listened to one or two and liked what I've heard but no more - care to comment? If there is a similarity, it would make me wonder why Mercury are (relatively) famous in audiophile circles, yet Telarc don't seem to be to the same extent.

To finish with, another of their discs which puts a big smile on my face:

Dear Mark,

I used to have the Telarc recordings of the Beethoven Piano Concertos with Rudolf Serkin and the Boston symphony Orchestra under Ozawa.

It was an impressive recording set in many ways, but also poorly balanced in parts. This might have been the actual performance or the recordings, but the piano could cover the bassoon in particular, and this is wrong as the two instruments should both be heard. Probably longer should have been given to refining the performance or the recording microphone set-up.

Some of the those Atlanta Shaw choral performances have a certain fame as very good recordings, but it is no surprise that Shaw is not the equal of several of the great conductors of the 20th Century in musical terms. He was Toscanini's Chhorus master on various occasions, I believe.

In the Mercury recordings I have the Respighi Fountains of Rome and the Ancient Airs and Dances recording. These recordings are full and clear and quite amazing for their dates. In those cases, I got them because Antal Dorati was a particular expert at the repertoire, so I'd have got the recordings, even if they had been made by Decca or EMI.

____

On the issue of seeing a speaker driver actual moving, which the sounding parts of musical instruments do not visibly do. Being able to see a speaker move implies a significant amount of motion. And these cones have a significant weight. This implies that there is a significant momentum to this motion, which itself leads to distortions from failure to precisely control the significant inertia involved.

A speaker driver that is large enough in area [such an electrostatic panel] to make a similar air movement without visible movement [i.e far less movement, far less mass and therefore very much less inertia and momentum] will be very much more accurately controlled by the amplifier.

All that I am saying is that if you can see movement then the test of an amplifiers ability to accurately control the trace of a speakers drivers movement will be very much larger than if the movement displacement is too small to be visible.

ATTB from George

That was my third and last vinyl acquisition of TELARC. Again, sound dynamics big enough to knock down walls or start a war.

I have that one on CD. Nice powerful recording, but not my favourite piece of music.

Ah yes, the Pictures of a Bald Exhibition disc - another one which I believe was quite well-known in its day.

Going back to the 1812 cannons mentioned above, Telarc released a sampler disc (number 5, still fairly easy to get second hand) which had the raw cannon recordings included as extra tracks. One of the few examples I've found of sounds on disc which have something like the visceral impact of the real thing. Incredible that they were recorded in August 1978 on what must have been a very experimental digital recorder.

Their famous recording of the Holst military band suites with Fred Fennell is one I haven't got - is it worth tracking down?

Mark

MA recordings are indeed very good  and RR (Reference recordings) are generally absolutely wonderful.  I was listening to their Copland disc tonight and it's a delight musically and sonically.Highly  recommended.