Decca: Supreme Stereophonic Legacy

[tima]

I want to put in a plug for a book that is about to go out of print: Decca: Supreme Stereophonic Legacy.

This is authored by forum member astrotoy (Larry) who is the most knowledgeable person I know about Decca recordings and easily one of the most knowledgeable about Classical music in general. His breadth of experience is amazing.

The book details the history of top Decca recordings and includes 42 tracks on disc highlighting the label's golden age, along with many photographs and stories about the artists, producers and engineers involved. The discs are from FIM, Winston Ma's company (rip).

I have a copy and the entire production is top-notch. I'm only writing because, as noted, there are only few copies left out of an intial 1000. Elusive Disc is the source for the remaining inventory. HERE. I have no interest in or association to any of this, just a classical music lover who enjoys reading about label history.

Edit: it is out of print; limited copies.

 

[LL21]

Thanks...we have a set ourselves. Great stuff and enjoy yours!

 

[asiufy]

I concur. I bought it when it came out, and it's fantastic indeed.

 

[Odyssey]

I've meant to do this. Your reminder prompted me to buy mine today!

 

[astrotoy]

Tim and others, thanks for the kind words.

When the book first came out, Winston offered it first in Hong Kong at their big audio show. To our surprise, the book (1000 copies first printing) sold out within a week, with most of the sales going to audio dealers in Asia. It was reprinted (I think another 1000 or maybe more) and these are the books that are left (Elusive Disc was Winston's distributor in the US). Winston was the one who chose the selections on the four CD's and he used the team of Michael Bishop and Robert Friedrich to do the remastering of the selections. Michael and Robert each have a bunch of Grammies from their work in their company Five/Four Productions, and with their previous employer, Telarc Records. One contribution I made was changing the order of the some of the selections and also getting them to include the entire Grieg Piano Concerto (Radu Lupu and Andre Previn and the LSO). Originally it was only going to be two of the three movements.

I had some great fun as Winston and the two engineers (Michael did discs 1 and 2 and Robert did discs 3 and 4) went back and forth tweaking the sound of each selection (Winston took his job as producer very seriously and knew exactly what sound he wanted). For some of the discs, I was sent a disc and could listen for myself what the changes were between iterations of the selection. The care that Winston took and his choice of the top mastering engineers was the reason I believe accounts for the top quality sound of the FIM CD's. It also costs a lot more this way.

Larry

 

[tima]

Thank you Larry for the history behind Decca: Supreme Stereophonic Legacy. It's a cool multi-media production.

 

[marty]

Just ordered the set. I already have many but not all FIMs. Looking forward to it. And of course, there's some ravishing music here.