Re-Discover my Direct to Disks


Greetings,

I haven’t listened to my D2D in years. The other day I pull one out and gave it a listen. What wonderful recordings they are. I’m not talking about Sheffield D2D. I’m listening to the other great recording companies of the past. Such as M&K Realtime, Crystal Clear, Sonic-arts Laboratoy Series, Diskwasher and others. Most of these D2D were made during the late 70’s. The golden age of D2D?

All my D2D were cleaned years ago with my trusty VPI 16 RCM. So I started to clean them all with my US record cleaner. So far I have cleaned 35 albums with another 30 to go.

What wonderful recordings they are. From classical to jazz and rock and roll. Yesterday I started listening to music at 10am and didn’t shutdown my system till 3am this morning. Just couldn’t turn the music off.

If you have any D2D in your collection give them a spin. If you don’t have any I suggest you try to find some. Wonderful recordings both for musical content and sonics.

 I highly recommend them all but 2 stand out. Sonic Arts Labratory series #7 “Woofers Tweeters and all that jazz” and #11 “76 Pieces of Explosive Percussion”. These can make anyone’s system sing. They might be hard to find but they are out there. I found another one last week at my record store. A Reference Recording D2D RR4. Yes, Reference Recording did make D2D for their first 4 albums. I have RR1 and RR4. Still looking for 2 and 3.

Enjoy your music

Joe Nies

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I have a bunch of D2D and obscure Japanese high resolution discs from the 70’s that I need to pull out and listen to on my new equipment. Won’t be back home till next week when I can dig through and see what I’ve got.

I love the umbrella Toronto Chamber Symphony records and David Montgomery “The Piano” on Direkt to Disk may be the best piano recording I’ve heard. I’m not totally convinced it’s because they’re D to D. I think it’s the fact that they were done using excellent recording techniques and acoustic spaces. I think that going direct to 30ips tape may have produced the same result. I think Sheffield always ran a 2-track tape backup and released records pressed from the tape. Grusin and Michael Newman guitar, which are both wonderful recordings. 

I thought I had a bunch of Direct-to-Disk records but I must've sold them all sometime in the past. The only one I apparently have at this time is Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops doing Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov's Capriccios recorded at Boston Symphony Hall. And yeah, it sounds good.