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CD getting as good as LPs - recommendations

Having bought a German Audionet Art V-2 CD-transport anda Chord DAC64, I was delighted how good CD can sound these days. I think the rigid affirmations "CDs never can sound as good as LP" no longer hold true. There's by now a lot
of excellently produced, or remastered CDs (not SACD, DVD-Audio) that, given good CD-players, sound excellent, sometimes better than the old LPs.
Good examples are a lot of remastered CDs from the EMI "Great Recordings of the Century"-series. Then, there is the XRCD-series from JVC. In Germany,even high-end-die-hard-vinyl-pope Attila Csampai was forced to admit that they sounded better than the original LPs on his state-of-the-art turntable system. I did a vinyl-CD-comparison with a vinyl-fan, and even fooled him when playing from CD. Are there goners which made the same experience? And what are your recommendations for excellently recorded, or remastered CDs that make you smile?
hassel
dekay's avatar
dekay
5,504 posts
 
Hassel:

Never heard of XRCD (good luck finding Charles Trenet performing his composition "La Mer" in this format:-).

I find Red Book CD's to be (in general) inferior to LP's.

That said, I own 1500+ RB CD's and 2000+ LP's (I'm a sucker for the music, not the format).
justacoder
66 posts
 
We agree with Seandtaylor99 that the Decca Legend CDs are fantastic - and we have a very high resolution system (Audio Aero Capitole mk II, Lamm L2, Edge Signature monoblocks, Valhalla, Shunyata Anacondas, Acapella Campanile Highs). The CDs are all classical music, remastered at 24/96, and are recordings of some of the best performances of the last century. In general, I find them to be better than XRCDs (we have have about 20 XRCDs here, mostly jazz, and about 20 Decca Legends so far - but have just ordered the complete set) and they are MUCH cheaper ($12 at AMZN, $13 at iclassics.com). At iclassics you can see them all together (I have not found a way to search AMZN correctly to see an exhaustive list there):

http://www.iclassics.com/iclassics/catalog_line_detail.jsp?catalogLineId=6
subaruguru
1,375 posts
 
Yes, remasters continue to shine. I accidentally bought TWO sets of La Boheme recently, and am surprised to find that the 1969 budget set with Pavarotti on Opera D'Oro is preferable to the 2000 set with Bocelli on Decca!
As well I'm a fan of the LSO's direct recordings, but was surprised to find that their most recent CD with Rostropovich is bettered by his 10yr old effort with the SAME orchestra! So surprises abound. A "live" recording on Pickwick of the 1990 performance of "Sacre" by Zander at Jordan Hall still makes my hair stand on end, as well Chesky's early transfer of Horenstein on Dvorak's New World. There are simply too many examples to note, but there IS a correlation with age and quality, although a fairly weak one. You gotta hunt and peck, as it's still mostly a function of the recording engineers, acoustics and mic placement...all occuring well before the ADCs, nevermind your transport and DAC choices.
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