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Recording of December 1966: Tchaikovsky: Swan Lake & Sleeping Beauty

Tchaikovsky: Swan Lake & Sleeping Beauty Selections
New Philharmonia Orchestra, Stokowsky
London Phase-4 SPC 21008 (LP); Ampex LCL-75008 (open-reel tape). Tony D'Amato, Marty Wargo, prods.; Arthur Lilley, eng. TT: 46:50.

These are exciting, lilting, concert-style (as opposed to ballet-style) performances of the best-known excerpts from Tchaikovsky's second- and third-most-popular ballets. (First, of course, is the Nutcracker.) The recording is a surprise, after the excesses we've heard on earlier Phase-4 recordings. Gone are the screaming highs, the room-rocking bass boom,…

HDCD: Keith Johnson, Pflash Pflaumer, Michael Ritter

The men behind HDCD (L–R: Pflash Pflaumer, Michael Ritter, Keith Johnson

High Definition Compatible Digital® (HDCD®), the proprietary process for improving the sound of 16-bit digital audio, has finally arrived. More than a dozen digital processors using the technology are on the market, and the professional encoder used to master HDCD discs is following closely behind.

Anyone who has followed my writings on HDCD (including the review of the Spectral SDR-2000 Pro processor in this issue) knows how enthusiastic I am about the sound quality offered by this new technology. I believe…

HDCD: Keith Johnson, Pflash Pflaumer, Michael Ritter Page 2

You therefore had to draw a line and say you've got a 40dB-dynamic-range system; I can't use the stuff that's below that. The problem is made worse if there's a good rim shot on a drum or a cymbal crash. A peak level on an orchestral session can be 110–120dB. The analog tape will saturate, but it only happens during a brief moment in time. You're not aware that it has happened, but a digital system will go crazy if you overdrive it. After the peak, you're back in the soft passages below the 40dB range where things don't work well.

The very thing the digital systems were touted as being…

HDCD: Keith Johnson, Pflash Pflaumer, Michael Ritter Page 3

Pflaumer: That's true. In the human ear, the cochlea has hair cells that respond to about 80kHz. And yet, for steady-state sinewaves, even a young person can hear only 20kHz as a steady-state tone. As we get older, that deteriorates. But the sense of frequency extension is largely based on transient events—things that happen only in short instants of time.

The shape of a wavefront generates harmonics in the bone structure of the middle ear, which are then picked up by the hair cells in the cochlea and used to reconstruct the picture of that wavefront.

The army did quite a lot…

HDCD: Keith Johnson, Pflash Pflaumer, Michael Ritter Page 4

Johnson: Because recordings made with the encoder sound better on standard playback equipment, there's no hindrance to the recording industry for using HDCD, even though the decoders are not out in large numbers yet. And since HDCD-equipped playback equipment makes standard CDs sound better, there's a real advantage to putting the decoder chip in playback equipment, even though there aren't a lot of HDCD-encoded recordings out yet.

The combination of those two things, combined with the magic that's there when the encoded recordings are decoded, will allow HDCD to enter the market from…

TAD Dems in Manhattan Thursday July 19

Thursday July 19, 12–8pm, Manhattan specialty audio retailer NoHo Sound (62 Cooper Square, New York, NY 10003) will be having an open house. Special guests Jonathan Derda and Ben Newhall from MoFi Distribution will be on hand to demonstrate the TAD Micro-Evolution One loudspeaker (above), which received a rave review earlier this year, the TAD Compact-Evolution One loudspeaker, and TAD D1000 Mk.II DAC/SACD player, which was a "Greatest Bits" Award winner on our sister site AudioStream.com. All the dems will be in conjunction with McIntosh Labs electronics.

Light snacks and refreshments…

Recording of August 2018: The Gershwin Moment

Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue (1924 jazz-band version, orch. Grofé). 1 Piano Concerto in F. 2 "Summertime." 3 Gershwin-Wild: "Somebody Loves Me," "I Got Rhythm," "Embraceable You."4 Oscar Levant: "Blame It On My Youth." 5
Kirill Gerstein, piano; 1–5 Storm Large, vocal; 3 Gary Burton, vibraphone; 5 David Robertson, St. Louis Symphony Orchestra1, 2
Myrios Classics MYR022 (CD, 24/192 FLAC). 2018. Kirill Gerstein, prod.; Stephan Cahen, prod.,1-5 eng.; 1, 2, 4, 5 Paul Hennerich, 1, 2, 4 Doug Decker, 3 engs. DDD. TT: 73:45
Performance *****
Sonics *** (CD), **** (24/192 FLAC)

I…

This Magic Moment

I remember the Tuesday night that music broke free of my hi-fi. The sound stirred my soul—everything was so right that I was tempted to call over my audiophile pals to earwitness its magnificence. But I didn't, fearing that sharing the sound might break the spell cast first by the Allman Brothers Band's At Fillmore East (2 LPs, Capricorn ST-CAP 712223 VSRP), then by Jimi Hendrix's Live at the Fillmore East (CD, MCA MCAD2 11931). By the time Hendrix got to "Machine Gun," I could almost smell the pot wafting up to the Fillmore's top balconies. Next came John Mayall's unplugged album The…

Wilson Audio Specialties Alexia Series 2 loudspeaker Jason Victor Serinus August 2018

Jason Victor Serinus wrote about the Alexia 2 in August 2018 (Vol.41 No.8):

After two-and-a-half years with Wilson Audio's Alexia serving as my reference loudspeaker ($52,000/pair), I was eager to hear the differences between it and its successor, the Alexia Series 2 ($57,900/pair). My first serious listen to the Alexia 2 speakers took place at Definitive Audio Bellevue, before my review samples arrived. That system's dCS Rossini DAC and clock, D'Agostino Progression stereo amp, and Transparent Audio cables and interconnects were sonic familiars, but Definitive's music collection was…

Exquisite Art Songs from Sandrine Piau

Given how much fuller and more natural I find hi-rez audio sounds, I rarely review recordings that are only available in Red Book quality in the US (footnote 1). But when the soprano is Sandrine Piau, whose voice conveyed the essence of springtime when I heard her live at UC Berkeley a little over six years go, and she sings as marvelously as she does on Chimère, her latest song recital with pianist Susan Manoff, I throw such self-imposed strictures out the window.

Piau and Manoff's recital mixes songs in German, French, and English that, in some manner, address either the mythological…