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In the Forum: Analog Playback
In the Thread: Audiophile Re-issues: What's Lost and What's Gained?

Post Subject: What is the alternative?Posted by montepilot on: 6/1/2009

While there is much complaint about contemporary reissues of classical music on vinyl, what is the alternative if you don't currently own original pressings? While visiting a friend here in Boston he went through 3 different DG pressings of Listz Piano concerto no.1 with Richter as pianist. Mind you this is 3 different pressings including the original of the same performance and same label but issued at different times. Of the three one was slightly better than the other two. Clearly there were terrible pressings of noteworthy music in the past and audiophiles put up with them and were still able to discuss the musical merits they contained. Now we have "some" contemporary pressings with problems, but for some audiophile/music lovers why are there no musical merits to speak of? This is not a rhetorical question. I invite your comments.

My point is that the contemporary pressings allows one to own performances that have long been out of print. I remember many years ago (1970's) reading Sid Marks excellent survey of original Mercury Living Presence and RCA shaded dog pressings. He not only discussed the audiophile attributes but he gave some history abouth the orchestra, the conductors, the concert halls and microphones used. He compared the performances and sound with other orchestra's and labels issuing the same works. This gave me a good introduction to classical music and performances as my main interest was jazz. Even then I had a hard time finding these records due to his reviews causing a run on these pressings and forcing the prices to skyrocket. I scoured every used record store that I could find in the Sanfranciso/Oakland bay area at the time. The only thing that was plentiful was Mercury Golden Imports and RCA Dynagrooves.

For those of you who find contemporary pressings to objectionable to own, if you don't have an original pressing and the music was also reissued on cd, would you purchase the less expensive cd rather than paying the high price for the contemporay pressing? In other words do you find cd the next best alternative to owning a original pressing?

Regards, montepilot

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