Play Classics final calibration: TRT sound 2.4a …no more R&D

[Mayfair]

Hi Mario,

 

If it's not too late, I would like to take up your kind offer and my choice would be 'Around the World With Kreisler' by Olga Yukushina and Elizaveta Yaroshinskaya.

 

Thank you

[Mayfair]

On 10/15/2021 at 12:08 AM, Mario Martinez said:

May I ask you all a question about something that I do not understand from my perspective?

 

I understand that everyone on this forum (there must be thousands of people here) is interested in high fidelity audio reproduction. I also understand the relationship between better gear - more accurate reproduction. But it seems to me that most people have forgotten that reproduction is just one part of the chain. Accurately reproducing a bad recording is never going to make it into a good one.

 

My question is: have people forgotten that? Are they not aware of this?

 

I sometimes go into other threads to see what people are recommending just to listen to other recordings and compare their production work with ours.

 

Some of the things I encounter are quite astonishing and I am only talking about classical music. People praise recordings that are completely artificial. The type that seem to be most popular is the violin piano type where you could listen to the whole album to find yourself asking at the end: was there a piano playing in it? I can imagine what the pianist himself must have thought when he was fist presented with the results of that recording.

 

I do not know if the cause is a lack of ever having heard the real thing or may be people just find that artificial product more enjoyable. But there is obviously something going on and I feel that I am not getting the grip of it.

 

I strongly believe that our approach is the right one, but seeing how little repercussion it has I feel that our project may be completely offline with the general public.

 

Music lovers from classical music forums will not even try to listen to our albums because our artists are not “famous” plus they would not want to get their ears contaminated with anything other than recordings from big labels, and audiophiles (in their majority, not the 15 of you) are to busy talking about cables and gear to pay attention to the quality of the material they are going to feed their systems with.

 

What is going on? …am I missing something?

First, thank you for the code to download "Kreisler Around the World".   I immediately noticed the naturalness of the sound and the "presence" of the  instruments.  It's a very enjoyable recording, in terms of both the performance and the sound.  I wish all my recordings, let alone my classical ones, sounded this good. 

 

I also agree with the commenters who have mentioned that for them, ultimately it's the performance that's the critical factor.  The quality of the recording is a factor, too, but in practical terms, that involves me searching for and buying specific masterings by a particular artist of a recording  (e.g., pre-loudness wars jazz/pop/rock/blues/country or Mercury Living Stereo classical recordings from the 1950s), rather than choosing entirely different artists and recordings because the recordings sound better.

 

I've got recordings by performers such as Vladimir de Pachmann, Fritz Kreisler, Josef Hofmann, Walter Gieseking, Artur Schnabel, and Leopold Godowsky that are recorded on what would today (and 50 years ago) be considered primitive recording technology.  But I don't find it hard to listen past the limitations of the original recordings through to the excellence of the performers.  That is very much helped by the efforts of Ward Marston and others who have done superb work to restore and rescue old recordings by old masters for modern listeners whose grandparents or even great-grandparents hadn't been born when the original recordings were made.

 

So, I agree with others who suggest trying to spread the word about your technology and its benefits to well-known performers, sound engineers  and audio review publications who have the clout, readership and contacts to lobby the major labels and who might convince them that they can sell more recordings and make more money, all other things being the same, if their recordings also sound as good as yours do.  I'm sure some of them must read blogs like Audiophile Style, so I think and hope that your efforts will not go unnoticed on the supply side, and wish you every success.