Veteran audiophile and hobbyist Art Dudley rather stepped in it this month, during the course of his Andy Rooney-ish rambling-putterer column in Stereophile. He had taken a casual look through his vinyl collection and had looked up some prices on sites such as popsike.com, where the latest sale prices for LPs are maintained in an easy-to-consult database. Here’s what he said:
Keeping in mind that this market is driven far more by collectors and music lovers than audiophiles, it’s interesting to note that, where the choice exists mono releases are in greater demand than stereo, and that the supposedly best-sounding and most highly touted (in high-end audio circles) stereo records do not fetch very high prices.
That pretty much condemns audiophilia to the murky alleys of geeky fetish-dom. No way it’s about the music, that’s for sure.
I am reminded of an acquaintance long past. The chap was stone-cold tone deaf but made like a faux-audiophile as part of hanging out with a revered audiophile elder. He had his pair of Quad speakers (the de rigueur gear for the 1980s), his bulky expensive amp from a tiny boutique maker, his basic Dual or Linn (I forget which) turntable, and a cassette deck that ran way too slowly. Not that he could hear the difference. All he knew was that a record was really, really good if it made a little greenish indicator on his boutique amplifier light up in a certain periwinkle blue shade. I recall the way he would go on and on and on, tirelessly and tiresomely, about the glories of the Fritz Reiner/Chicago Symphony recording of Scheherazade. I had heard the record at some point, but it had never registered all that much with me beyond being a pretty good performance with bad distortion in the louder parts. His glowing regard for the thing was unaccountable, given his inability to tell music from mucous. Many years later the light dawned: said Scheherazade was said revered audiophile elder’s most prized recording. It made little greenish indicators light up in certain periwinkle blue shades. A lot.
Once I began reading mags of the Stereophile and The Absolute Sound stamp I became aware of audiophile-blessed recordings and performers. There was a pianist I had never heard of — and I’ve heard of a lot of pianists — who made his boodle by contracting with one of the audiophile-blessed labels such as Reference Recordings or whatnot. Any time an audiophile reviewer started describing the sound of a Beethoven sonata recording on the gear under review, inevitably the sonata was performed by this obscure (to me) chap. To this day I have never encountered this pianist’s name outside of audiophile mags. With all the Beethoven sonata recordings to choose from—Alfred Brendel, Murray Perahia, Clifford Curzon, Richard Goode, older masters such as Schnabel or Kempff—it was always what’s-his-face, because what’s-his-face was an audiophile-blessed performer who recorded for an audiophile-blessed label. In audiophile-dom there is no female jazz singer on the planet other than Diana Krall. Mind you, I have nothing against Diana Krall beyond my general indifference to jazz. But why is it always her? Because she is on an audiophile-blessed label, that’s why. Because her records can make little greenish indicators light up in certain periwinkle blue shades.
Part of my summer fun has been re-discovering and exploring the RCA Living Stereo recordings, both on LP and in their digital reincarnations. Lots of great stuff in there, including that Reiner Scheherazade of audiophile reverence. But Reiner’s is hardly the only jim-dandy Scheherazade out there, musically or sonically. We’ve got Kirill Kondrashin, late-Romantic Russian-ness embedded in his DNA, leading the Concertgebouw in a blazing Scheherazade from 1979 that is guaranteed to raise pimples on every goose in the house. We’ve got Antal Dorati taking a white-hot Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra through a white-heat rendition captured in Mercury Living Presence’s Sunday best you-are-right-there clarity and dynamism. We’ve got a luscious and opulent acousti-fest courtesy of Herbert von Karajan and the burnished glory of the 1964 Berlin Philharmonic. We’ve got a grand classic 1942 entry from Pierre Monteux in San Francisco, musically still a serious contender despite its murky un-hi-fi sonics. We’ve got a bracing and studly-wuddly romp courtesy of William Steinberg and his ultra-buff Pittsburgh band, originally on Capitol and now on EMI. We’ve got as many Scheherazades as nasty old sultan Schariar had posthumous wives. Everybody has their favorites, I suppose, except for those frowny sourpusses who view Rimsky’s ear-erotica confection as just so much sticky treacle.
There’s nothing all that earth-shattering about the Reiner Scheherazade, certainly nothing that warrants its status as an audiophile sacred cow. Audiophile-dom is the only environment in which it’s treated like some kind of holy relic. Everywhere else it’s just yet another good rendition of an oft-recorded work. OK, it’s a very good rendition. But it’s Scheherazade, for krissake, not the Missa Solemnis.
Listening through tons of RCA Living Stereos reveals that, all in all, if forced to chose I would place the Charles Munch/Boston Symphony recordings well ahead of Reiner’s Chicago outings. Partly that’s due to repertory—Munch/Boston recorded mostly high-class music with occasional detours into frou-frou, while a lot of the Reiner/Chicago albums are fizzy stuff à la Respighi, Richard Strauss tone poems, and the like. That’s not to say that there aren’t some Reiner/Chicago recordings of real musical substance—a marvelous Pathétique, a first-rate Brahms 3rd, and one of the finest Schubert Unfinisheds I know. But on the whole the Munch/Boston Living Stereos are more distinguished than the Reiners.
And yet both of RCA’s prize orchestra/conductor combos were roundly outclassed by two competing operations going on at the same time—i.e., the late 1950s and early 1960s. In London’s creaky old Kingsway Hall, Otto Klemperer and the Philharmonia Orchestra were creating discographic history with repertory cornerstones set down in ravishingly beautiful audio by EMI. And way out west in Hollywood an elderly but still vigorous Bruno Walter was leading his handpicked Columbia Symphony Orchestra—mostly the LA Phil with additions from the cream of the studio musicians—in Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, and the like, for Columbia Masterworks.
Neither the Klemperer nor Walter recordings have become audiophile fetish items on the order of the Reiner Scheherazade or Munch Daphnis, although their audio quality pretty much blows RCA’s best efforts out of the water. That wouldn’t have been apparent to American listeners back in the day when they were made. The Klemperer albums had the rotten luck to be distributed in the United States by EMI subsidiary Angel Records, thereby cursed with pitifully poor pressings that robbed the audio of much of its grandeur. Recent high-class digital remasterings make clear that the audio was quite worthy of the mighty Philharmonia at its awesome peak. Lousy pressings also bedeviled the Bruno Walter recordings, exacerbated by meddlesome East Coast engineers who screwed around with producer John McClure’s musically solid balances. Heard in their latest digital incarnations, the magic that was being worked in Hollywood’s American Legion Hall is made abundantly and unmistakably manifest. The RCA Living Stereo releases got all the love because they were distributed in first-class pressings, at least up through the mid-1960s.
Thus audiophiles didn’t go all gaga about Bruno Walter’s Brahms symphony recordings—although they should have—because most folks were saddled with sleazy Columbia Odyssey LPs, cardboard-y, papery, and lifeless. Ditto the Klemps on those horrid Angels. And audiophiles tend to be older guys with long memories. So it doesn’t really matter how good the Klemps and Walters sound now compared to the Living Stereos now. It’s the then that creates the perceived value. Nor do the musical values count for all that much, although they should: Klemp and Walter were gold-medal heavyweights compared to welterweights Reiner and Munch, and while Walter’s Columbia SO might have been in a dead heat with Boston and Chicago, the Philharmonia was an orchestra for the ages.
In short, musical values and audiophile values don’t necessarily coincide. That is witnessed time and again by those professional musicians who are perfectly content with plain-jane stereo sets. Musicians hear mostly inside their heads and have little need for the pseudo-music provided by even the toniest of high-end audio. Few musicians are indifferent to fine stereo equipment—but our musical lives are not necessarily diminished without posh stereo gear.
So of course we musicians value different recordings. We don’t give a rat’s ass about little green indicators lighting up in certain shades of periwinkle blue. We’ve got the real thing, and we know it.