One of my favorite Mahler albums on vinyl is the legendary Solti Decca recording of Symphony No 2 with soprano Heather Harper. In the first few seconds of this mammoth work, Mahler begins with growling double basses and cellos. On vinyl, the sound is astonishingly lifelike. I recall an old TAS review by Mike Fremer (welcome back to TAS, Mike, we missed ya!), who compared this legendary recording to the then latest EMI digital recording that critics were raving about by Simon Rattle with the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, before he moved to conduct the Berlin Philharmonic (and now he’s back in the UK). As Fremer put it, somewhat sarcastically, in this precious few initial seconds of the piece that sets up the ominous atmosphere for the fabulous symphony, one hears instead of growling double basses and cellos, a “blob of sound” that moves from one channel to the other. That about sums up what I hear with far too many modern digital recordings of the famous symphonies of the classical repertoire. And I’m puzzled as to why. Why does the modern Rattle recording of Mahler 2 sound so much worse than the great analog Solti recording on Decca. It doesn’t make sense. Digital should sound way way better, but except it doesn’t, although as with the legendary Mercury Living Presence series, one can make the remastering sound very good. Even for the MLP series, I recently bought some test pressings of the famous vinyl releases of the MLP albums released by Michael Hobson for Classic Records. To my ears, they completely blow away the digital remastering in terms of their tonal richness and sense of ambience. Something really striking I’ve noticed on many CDs is the almost complete absence of ambient space. This of course makes sense. Ambient noise of the recording venue is very low in level, where digital resolution is likely to be the weakest. I recall an old Gramophone review of the SME 30 turntable where the reviewer compared a series of vinyl albums on EMI, Decca etc. with their digital remastering, and concluded the SME was far better at revealing the ambience of the original venue than the digital remastering. I mean, Gramophone is about as old fashioned and stodgy as you can get for audiophile reviews. This magazine is largely devoted to reviewing classical albums and has been around for many decades. These guys are not audiophiles!
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