when you put this disc into an actual cd player you can tell its an old recording.i wouldnt recommend this garbage to anyone i care about…
You gotta love Amazon’s unconditional reviewing policy. As long as the writer doesn’t use unacceptably naughty words, or spew forth sociopathic venom, just about anything goes on an Amazon list of reviews. Reviews almost always reveal far more about the reviewer than the item under consideration. In this case, the reviewer speaks to us with eloquent clarity: I am a moron.
But a moron who reflects a surprisingly wide opinion, especially amongst younger listeners, which is that there’s something offputting about older recordings—i.e., in mono or not altogether full-frequency hi-fi. Whenever I encounter somebody with such a mindset I’m always a bit taken aback, given that said somebody is likely to be be festooned with a set of cheap earbuds. Meaning that he or she wouldn’t know hi-fi if it reared up and bit him or her on his or her fanny. It’s almost as though audio without a horizontal spread is utterly unacceptable. But we hear single-channel audio all the time.
It’s a simple experiment. Walk away from a stereo system while it’s playing. No matter how exalted that audio rig’s ancestry, no matter how elevated its price, no matter how high its status amongst audiophiles, it will turn monophonic as soon as you walk into another room. Or even stand rather to the side of the speakers, instead of front and center. Real live playing doesn’t do that; it remains stereo no matter where you stand in the room, although your perspective changes. (Yes, I know that radial speakers can retain the stereo soundstage regardless of the listener’s position, but radials are hideously expensive, require equally expensive electronics, and are correspondingly scarce in real-world situations. So ix-nay with the ivia-tray.) And even live playing goes monophonic when heard from another room. Out there in the world, we’re surrounded by monophonic sources—retail Muzak, restaurant background music, most TV sound, ditto radio, the shattering din of a dance club, you name it. None of it has a discernible stereo image, even if technically it might be a stereo recording.
All recording was in mono until the mid-1950s. That’s an awful lot of stuff, from those earliest incunabula of 19th-century opera stars (Tamagno, Patti, Melba, etc.) to those big robust monophonic albums of 1955 with their full frequency ranges, depth, and rich color. Monophonic encompasses the entire discography of many legendary artists—Rachmaninoff, Toscanini, Koussevitzky—and a surprisingly large amount of the legacy of those artists we tend to associate more commonly with stereo—Karajan, Klemperer, Rubinstein, Heifetz, Callas, etc. There’s no point in refusing oneself this vast and wonderful heritage just because it isn’t stereo.
To be sure, stereo sound does a lot more than just add a left-to-right mix. Stereophonic sound increases audio realism. That’s why even a modestly defined soundstage, such as is typically the case with solo instrument or chamber recordings, imparts a much more vivid sense of reality than a mono equivalent. Stereo was a glorious development, no two ways about it. But to think that monophonic recordings aren’t worth hearing is the uninformed prattling of, well, a moron.
The ear adjusts. The ear adapts. Even recordings from before World War II shed much of their old timey-ness once the ear adapts to the relatively constricted frequency range and the underlying 78rpm swoosh, not to mention clicks and pops and the like if you’re listening to original elements. Why deny yourself hearing Koussevitzky’s downright magisterial Brahms 4th with the Boston Symphony? Yes, it was recorded in the 1930s. No, it doesn’t sound like a pristine new digital recording. But after a minute or so you adjust, and even if you’re aware that the sound is antique, you stop listening to the audio and start listening to the music.
Because that’s all that matters for a musician, in the final analysis. It’s all about hearing the performances, the players, the music itself. When you become caught up in a great rendition of a piece of music, sonic objections fall away. One of the more vivid experiences in my life was hearing Debussy’s La Mer for the first time; I was sitting in my car, listening to AM radio. The piece absolutely threw me for an erotic loop, despite the sharp limitations of AM radio, despite the tinny speaker in a 1965 Ford Galaxie 500. I should add that I was also transported into a realm of sonic bliss in the Fort Worth Cinerama theater, circa 1964, courtesy of the six-track How the West Was Won soundtrack. It was a different kind of thrill, to be sure, but a major sensory jolt nonetheless. It’s possible that my lifelong devotion to orchestral music came from that first hearing of La Mer, just as my lifelong audiophilia just might originate with How the West Was Won.
Punchline: the imbecilic review that inspired this article was for a two-CD set of Arthur Rubinstein’s 1965-67 album of the Chopin Nocturnes. Fully modern audio, analog to be sure, but just about as good as it gets no matter what, apart from a bit of tape hiss perceptible only on higher-end gear. Ah, well. Moron is as moron speaks.