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In the grail article in the last Stereophile regarding searching for rare classical music, the CD cover (pic) is shown of the collated CBS recordings from Carnegie Hall of Richter's recitals from 1960. There is a humorous description of how Richter hated microphones and how they hid them under the stage and even used a Wollensak R2R at 3 3/4 speed to master the tapes.I have been getting some used LP's from friends, and got a bag of stuff which included Vol II of the Richter recital, on fair to scuffed vinyl, CBS Columbia 6 eye, cover is fair to middlin'. Great closeup of his fingers and picture of the artist inside. I haven't cleaned and listened but don't expect much. It's 10.25.60 & includes Schumann and Debussy and one Haydn piece.
Is this 2 LP set valuable? How is the CD transfer sonically? Just curious.
Follow Ups:
DoReMi's CD transfers are notoriously awful, completely rolled off in the treble.As for the vinyl, it's probably not worth much, given the condition you describe. Classical vinyl is only valuable if mint--with rare exceptions.
but the LP's came out clean. One side (Schumann) is scratched of the 3. The Debussy record sounds clean with background noise at times, but eminently listenable and the high frequency is rather typical of some records in the mid 50's, but the low end is rolled off.
let's face it, it's better to have some of these great old performances on Doremi than not at all, and their catalogue is impressive to say the least. I had assumed that the bad sound on some of their CDs was due to the bad condition of the old 78s and LPs they are forced to use as source material, but that's just a guess on my part.
On the one hand, I guess we can say that a crappy DoReMi transfer is better than nothing. But then again, when companies like Doremi put out their versions of historical recordings, it probably discourages others from going back to the source, doing a good transfer, and doing a legitimate reissue, which would inevitably cost more.The problem with Doremi transfers, in my experience, is not the source, but their atrocious use of filtering. Most of them sound as if somebody had thoroughly damped the treble. In the case of the SR Carnegie material, the original lps sounded fine--not great, but good enough. I would guess Doremi's "engineers" (and I do use the term loosely) were working with a third or fourth generation tape, and just turned down the treble knob to get rid of the hiss.
there is audible hum on the master.
You may be entirely right about Doremi's transfers. However, I well remember my days as a young music student in the 70s, when pre-stereo records were nowhere to be found, except maybe for Toscanini's Beethoven symphony set or Rachmaninov playing his own concertos. The classical catalogue was very thin in those days compared to the amazing abundance of today (some would say over-abundance). I was very happy to see the mono catalogue begin a serious comeback in the mid 90s, and Doremi has contributed to that. There will be plenty of chances for a competitor to beat Doremi at its own game, especially as we transition from prepackaged CDs to downloads, so we have a lot to look forward to.
I am having a field day getting donations of mono records and buying them in thrifts and so on.
Yes, now you can get whole collections of old LPs for next to nothing, including plenty of Richter LPs, now that LPs are obsolete for most people. But back in the 70s, most people weren't giving away their LP collections yet, and the mono LPs were almost all out of print. Of course, that was also before eBay.
as I posted. The LP is not overtly rolled off, just limited as such old material usually is. It sounds more extended than many studio recordings from the 50's (some I sampled recently were Tebaldi opera recital ffrr, Schumann piano with Gilels & Moonlight with Gieseking on English red and silver Angel, Ormandy mono New World 6 eye, etc.).Thanks for the information re DoReMi, and I am interested that the Stereophile article never mentioned anything. Maybe it was off topic.
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