Pristine News: Friday 30th April, 2010

In this week's newsletter:

• New this week - One of the greatest pianists of his day - Hambourg's two concerto recordings
  
• New this week - Second of three volumes of Karajan's only New York Philharmonic concerts
  
• Guest Editorial - Peter Harrison on Faith in High Fidelity - Part 2
  
• Berkshire Review - Review and feature article from the influential journal
  
• PADA - Part One of The History of the Cello - an epic ten-part series
  
• Reviews - First review of our Krauss Ring Cycle production at MusicWeb International
  - "This remastering by Pristine will be instrumental in encouraging a new generation of “Ring” aficionados previously deterred by the primitive sound to become acquainted with a great Bayreuth monument. It will not replace Solti or Karajan for beauty of sound, but it is now the front-runner as a supplement."
  

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Guest Editorial - Peter Harrison: "Of Hi-Fi And Faith"

Prelude: In the first part I described how music and hi-fi came to play a very important part of my life. As a ‘musical engineer’ I believed that the hi-fi sound reproduction of the then ‘60s could and would evolve to be ever closer to ‘the original sound’, based on my faith that – as seemed obvious–technology, design,and engineering, led by , and occasionally leading, user demand and competition, would inevitably move it in this direction. The better products – and by that I meant the measurably better products – would succeed; the inferior products would fail.

Oh, silly me!



Part Two: The Attack On The Faith

As I was listening with care
I heard a sound that was not there.
It wasn’t there again today.
I’ll write about it, make it pay.

(Apologies to William Hughes Mearns)

During the 1970s, with a few notable exceptions, hi-fi technology advanced only slowly. In retrospect, it’s possible to see that it was being held back largely because of the recording media that were available to the consumer.  The Compact Cassette was by no means hi-fi; reel-to-reel tapes and cartridges never sold in quantity; the LP reigned supreme and inherently deficient. There was, of course, some superb playback equipment available.  My own configuration: Thorens deck, SME arm, Shure V15 pickup, was pretty good in that respect, but each time the stylus touched the vinyl there they were again – the rumbles, clicks, crackles, warps, the inevitable end-of-side distortions – and (where one could make it) a simple 1-1 comparison between the LP and the master showed how much had been lost in the cutting and pressing process.

Effort after effort was made to try to overcome the limitations of the LP disc: from the record companies there was Direct Metal Mastering (DMM); Direct-To-Disc recording; the ‘Direct Pressed’ disc; and so on.  (I shall not comment on the misbegotten Dynagroove process which might have sounded better if the record company hadn’t used almost-paper-thin vinyl to press their discs.)  From the hi-fi manufacturers, increasingly sophisticated ‘tweaks’ and some wild, way-out and wonderful designs (remember the superb Transcriptors turntables?) appeared.

Still, the number one accessory for any hi-fi enthusiast was . . . a record cleaning device.  There were little brushes that were dragged around the disc surface as it played; rollers with sticky pads (yeuch!); anti-static pistols; lotions; potions; velvet pads; I had ‘em all.
That was the ‘70s – we skip to the mid-‘80s and all is not well. Hi-fi is going through major changes (dare I write ‘revolutions’ without it sounding like a bad pun?), some of which could have been anticipated, others came as a shock.

The first revolution was with numbers, specifically zero, and one. Digital audio had arrived in the home.

The introduction of digital recording by the studios and then, in 1982, the launch of the Compact Disc, (in my opinion, the most significant improvement to recorded music since electrical recording superceded acoustical, c.1925) hit the hi-fi world like a loaded sock.  For the first time, the home music lover could buy a recording that was an accurate copy of the digital studio master.

The second major change can be summarized in one word: Japan. In the ‘60s, Japanese hi-fi was laughable, if it existed at all; by 1985 however, there were hundreds of Japanese hi-fi components that equaled or bettered their European or American equivalent.
This gave the hi-fi marketing community problems.

Take two CD players: A is from an esoteric and well-respected hi-fi company; B is from the Paramoony Company of Japan.  Now, if two CD players are doing their job properly then by definition their analogue outputs will be the same.  Although this certainly wasn’t the case at CD launch in ’82, a few years later, technology having galloped on, it was so close to being true that in normal listening at normal volumes you couldn’t tell the two players apart. And to within a whisker player A and player B measure the same. Unfortunately (you may think) player A costs four times as much as player B. What’s a reviewer to do?  What can your local hi-fi shop salesman say to induce you to buy A rather than B (four times the profit)?

One answer, increasingly adopted by the hi-fi press, was Subjective Reviewing. A subjective review includes few specifications and even fewer, if any, measurements. Instead we have paragraph after paragraph on what the reviewer feels about the sound from the equipment.

Here we go (actual example from highly respected hi-fi magazine): “Sounding ‘cold’ and lifeless from cold, [the CD player] thankfully became more interesting after half an hour of playing, . . .and began to get into the swing of things after a few hours’ warm-up.”  Really?  This is supposed to be a serious review about a boxful of electronics?  (Try replacing [the CD player] with [Suzy the blonde] for a much more interesting sentence.)

Now that we’ve got our customers accustomed to a large portion of baloney in our reviews, let’s go one stage further and find some super-baloneous abstract nouns that we can scatter throughout the text.  Another example: “The midband in particular is a stress-free zone, dynamic and lucid, yet possessing texture and warmth. . . moreover it has dimensional credibility with transparency and detail. . .” Forgive my French, but what the Hell is this supposed to mean?  Baloney Baffles Brains.

Nor was this a transient abberation.  Try this, from a 2008 review

But the real centerpiece of the [product’s] performance was its musical and sonic success with CDs. I was so inspired by the notion of a truly high-quality $999 music center that my listening notes morphed into a music guide for the college-bound buyer:

First: Get someone to buy you a copy of any of the better, more accessible interpretations of Mahler's Symphony 2: Bruno Walter's (Sony 64447 et al), Leonard Bernstein's earliest (Sony 89499 et al), or either of Gilbert Kaplan's (MCA Classics MCAD-2 11011, Deutsche Grammophon 000141436). Save Scherchen and Fried and even Tilson Thomas for later: You might not appreciate them quite yet.

Now, here's the listening test: Do you get it? Do you understand why the disturbing first movement is followed by such quaint drawing-room music in the second, then a grotesquerie in the third? Does the beginning of the fifth movement scare the crap out of you, and does the ending make you cry (and not just a little)?

The [product], even though it got in over its head during the loudest, scariest bits, and sounded light and fussy when the opposite should have been true, did indeed get it. Playing my favorite Mahler Seconds on the [product], I could and did respond emotionally to them. No small feat.

Sorry about the length of that, but be thankful because I could have quoted more, much much more, from the same review in similar vein.  What does it all mean? I’m not even sure, from the last paragraph, whether the reviewer is for or against the product!  And two little points, just to jump on any possible validity that the review might have had.  First, this $999 music centre is being reviewed while driving speakers costing $7225 (stands optional).  Realistic scenario, non?  Non.  Second, here’s a graph that shows the amplifier’s power output vs. its total harmonic distortion and it is disgusting.

Dear reader, if I had, even at the tender age of 16, built an amplifier that had that sort of performance, I would have been ashamed.  And yet this... this… horrible heap got a glowing review in a so-called high-end hi-fi magazine, just two years ago!

A visit to the local hi-fi shop, mid-‘90s, showed how the sales people had understood this technique only too well.  I’m thinking of buying a player B: I see you have one. Ah yes, sir, player B is a very fine device, but I do think you owe it to yourself to hear player A as well.  I’ll just plug it in (thinks: and make it a teeny bit louder than B) and I’m sure you’ll agree with the reviewers that it has better resolution, and a more defined centre-stage. In other words, the sales person says: I’ll tell you what you’ll hear. (And if you can’t, that’s because you have cloth ears.)

Let’s just pause for breath and to let the blood pressure return to normal.  What I’ve demonstrated (I hope) is not simply how hi-fi magazine equipment reviews devalued themselves, but by doing so launched an attack on ‘the faith’.  No longer would technical specification, measured performance, come first: the main criterion for evaluating equipment would be:  if the reviewer thinks it sounds good, then it is good.

Once you’ve gone down this subjectivist path, anything goes. Remember the infamous Green Pen? (You used it to paint the edge of your CD green, thus preventing internal reflections within the CD and reducing the error rate during playback.)  Pure 100% snake oil.  You couldn’t measure its effectiveness, but that wasn’t necessary because you could hear that the CD sounded better.  Dozens of bizarre products have been marketed on this presumption.

In the next part I’ll describe two recent events that provoked this diatribe, explore two Great Failures, and then conclude with some thoughts on how to avoid the hand-wavers, snake oil salesmen, and subjectivists, and return to some form of rationality.

Peter Harrison, disk2disc, UK

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Further notes - a correction regarding the source of our Mengelberg release last week

I made a mistake regarding the recording system used to make those remarkably hi-fi Mengelberg recordings in last week's releases, which has resulted in a re-write of our online notes and CD covers. Mark Obert-Thorn writes:

"...the only one which was issued on LP by Philips from a Philips-Miller recording was the St. Matthew Passion, which I transferred from Philips LPs for Naxos.  All of the other live Mengelberg material that Philips issued on LP (including the Beethoven and Brahms symphonies) came from glass-based acetates, which, like the Philips-Miller recordings, did have a wider frequency range than commercial recordings of the time.  That's why one can hear clicks and crackle in them and not in the SMP, which has it's own unique kinds of flaws."


I've had queries regarding boxing together the Krauss Ring Cycle - right now we're sticking to the original releases as we don't have the facility to produce physical box sets. We're also augmenting the Ring with the performance of Wagner's Parsifal recorded at the same Bayreuth Festival in 1953, which is currently pencilled in for release next week, though at the time of writing it's not quite finished. I may look into the feasibility of creating a "box set" (real or virtual) which brings all of these discs - it'll be 17 in total - together in some form at some stage, but this is certainly not imminent.
 

Andrew Rose, Pristine Audio

Mark Hambourg, piano
Royal Albert Hall Orchestra
conducted by Landon Ronald
London Symphony Orchestra
conducted by Malcolm Sargent 
Recorded in 1926 and 1929

Producer and Audio Restoration Engineer: Mark Obert-Thorn
Cover artwork based on a photograph of Mark Hambourg

Total duration: 63:28 
©2010 Pristine Audio

For more download and CD options, see our website

The downloads:

New release today:

KARAJAN in New York, Volume Two
Pristine Audio PASC 224

New York Philharmonic Orchestra
conducted by Herbert von Karajan
Recorded live in 1958, New York

Concert broadcasts from Carnegie Hall, 15th & 22nd November, 1958
Originally broadcast by CBS Radio, announcer Jim Fassett
Recording designated "Special Interest" due to limited frequency range indicative of AM broadcast
XR remastering by Andrew Rose at Pristine Audio, April 2010
Cover artwork based on a photograph of Herbert von Karajan

Total duration: 63:06 
©2010 Pristine Audio.

For more download and CD options, see our website

The FLAC downloads:

Herbert von Karajan conducts the New York Philharmonic!

Second of three volumes chronicling his only appearances with the orchestra

 

• WEBERN Five Pieces, Op. 5 [notes / score]
  Concert broadcast from Carnegie Hall, 15th November, 1958
  
  
• MOZART Symphony No 41 ‘Jupiter' in C, K.551 [notes / score]
  Concert broadcast from Carnegie Hall, 15th November, 1958
  
  
• BEETHOVEN Symphony No 1 in c, Op. 21 [notes / score]
  Concert broadcast from Carnegie Hall, 22nd November, 1958
  
  Played by New York Philharmonic Orchestra
  conductor Herbert von Karajan
  

Recorded live at Carnegie Hall, New York City

 

"Herbert von Karajan showed yesterday at Carnegie Hall that he could conduct with tension and virility. In dealing with the first and last symphonies of Beethoven he proved that he could combine an awareness of tradition with a strong feeling of personal involvement.

This was, for the most past, Beethoven brimming with vitality and passion. The New York Philharmonic gave Mr. von Karajan playing that had delicacy and muscularity, tenderness and power. It was a supple, responsive instrument. It cooperated with the conductor at every turn. It enabled him to prove that he was a Beethoven interpreter of character..."

Howard Taubman, New York Times, from Concert Review, 22nd November 1958
Full review available from New York Times archive

WEBERN, MOZART AND BEETHOVEN

This week we bring you the second of three volumes comprising the only recordings of Karajan conducting the New York Philharmonic, taken from his short appearance as guest conductor in 1958.

Webern's modernistic Five Pieces clearly gave both audience and radio announcer some cause for worry, but thereafter we're into the much safer territory of Mozart's Jupiter and Beethoven's first symphonies, with masterful conducting of an on-form Philharmonic.

Although the recordings are taken from AM broadcasts, limiting the frequency range, they really are top notch for the medium, making this an essential set for collectors and music-lovers alike.

Download long listening sample: (Mozart "Jupiter" Symphony, 1st movement)

Notes on the recordings:

"Herbert von Karajan (5 April 1908 – 16 July 1989) was an Austrian orchestra and opera conductor. His obituary in The New York Times described him as "probably the world's best-known conductor and one of the most powerful figures in classical music". Karajan conducted the Berlin Philharmonic orchestra for 35 years. He is the top-selling classical music recording artist of all time, having sold an estimated 200 million records during his career." - Wikipedia

Despite his lengthy and varied career, Karajan was predominantly a Europe-based conductor and rarely conducted American orchestras - in 169 concerts in the USA he conducted only three orchestras: the Los Angeles Philharmonic once (1959), the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra fifteen times (1967-69), and the New York Philharmonic eight times in November, 1958. His only other engagements with an American orchestra were two concerts with the Cleveland Orchestra in Salzburg and Lucerne during August 1967.

The New York Philharmonic concerts were split into two groups of four: The first concerts, of 13-16 November 1958, consisted of three works: Webern's Five Pieces for String Orchestra, Mozart's "Jupiter" Symphony, No. 41, and Richard Strauss's Ein Heldenleben. A week later, between 20th and 23rd November, Karajan played an all-Beethoven programme, beginning with the First Symphony and ending with the Ninth - in the case of the Ninth "Choral" Symphony these constituted four of ten performances the conductor gave of this work in 1958 alone - three with the Berlin and three with the Vienna Philharmonics complete the total.

Transfer notes

Each group of four New York Philharmonic concerts received a radio broadcast - in each case it was the third of the four concerts, held on Saturday evenings, which was broadcast on the CBS radio network. At the present time the only surviving recordings of these concerts appear to have been taken from AM broadcasts. Although the quality, both of the recordings and the transmissions themselves is very good, they are inevitably diminished by the limited bandwidth and dynamic range of this broadcast medium.

As a result there is no recorded signal above about 6kHz, and at times some of the very loudest passages sound somewhat compressed in volume. However, with such obvious interest in these rare recordings, made by such top rank musicians, it was clear that they could not be ignored, and we were delighted to be sent excellent source copies by an American collector. Restoration has revolved around minimising hiss, dealing with very occasional light drop-out, the odd click and crackle, and one short instance of line whistle. Thereafter the XR remastering process has been used in order to ty and extract the very best sound quality possible from this compromised source material. Although the results would be considered fine for a recording of earlier years it's clearly not up to the standards one normally expects of 1958 technology, hence the designation "Special Interest" for this release.

P.S. Following the release of the first volume in this series I received the following in an e-mail from a regular contributor: "Why are you releasing these as "SI", though?  The sound is not that bad -- decent AM radio quality". He's right - in many respects the sound quality is excellent, with very low levels of background noise, an excellent signal, and a very clear recording. Certainly the recordings make for an enjoyable listening experience. But I do think that it would be easy to miss the small print pointing out that this is an AM radio broadcast and assume full-frequency 1958-quality sound if we didn'thighlight the fact prominently, something which might not suit some purchasers. The idea of SI releases is to encourage listening and reading prior to purchase!

Andrew Rose

 

 

Available as 320kbps MP3, 16-bit mono & Ambient Stereo FLAC, 24-bit mono FLAC, CD
or listen on demand with Pristine Audio Direct Access (PADA)

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