Hi-Rez Highway: Bringing the orchestra home by csuzor

I had the pleasure of sitting just 4m behind the conductor last week, the reknowned Michel Plasson, directing the Provence orchestra on Faure, Gounod and Bizet, suites and symphonies. Fantastic.

Back home, getting a similar feel of such a performance is a challenge. Sure enough, SACD is very accurate with the timbre, the vibrato, the strings, even the brass instruments. What is missing is the spatial accuracy, the depth of the stage, and the "breath" of the orchestra.

Some mch disks are very good at spatial accuracy, especially older analog recordings, like Mercury LP, with the simple 3-mic approach. Newer recordings seem to distort the soundstage, occasionally bringing drums "out in the front", or sometimes causing some sounds to apparently come from a different position to the main instrument (violin from the right, trumpet from the left). However, these analog recordings are marginally less clear, not quite reproducing the complex acoustics of the real instruments, whereas the dsd recordings are crisper and truer (although some recordings are a little too crisp).

By breath of orchestra, I mean the air that makes the paper "programme" vibrate in my hands in the real event, where at similar volume at home the paper does not. My 3 identical front speakers go to 38Hz flat, but perhaps what is missing for this "breath", is below this... I need to get a sub to try it.

Perhaps depth of stage can never be reproduced at home, the 2ch or 3ch stereo imaging can only ever be an approximation to 3-d point source instruments, and this is blatantly obvious when sitting so close to the orchestra. For a better representation, I would need 2 rows of speakers up-front, in a 3 + 2 arrangement...

Of special note, sitting so close to the orchestra, rear-surround effects are almost non-existent (or at least not noticeable), and back home, I am happy to switch off the rear-surrounds in favor of 3 fronts... the problem is that very few mch discs use the center channel correctly (or sufficiently).

Overall, I am happy with the mch sacd capability to reproduce "in great part" the experience of the live orchestra. I have read posts from some people on this forum, claiming that the sound is often better at home, but under these circumstances, playback at home is just an approximation of the event.

Regards, Christophe Suzor