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Folks with large collections.....

When did you last reassess CD's which you had previously thought too glassy or etched to be enjoyable - great performances perhaps, but hard on the ear?

Well FWIW I was just browsing thru some old classical I was just keeping for reference and pulled out a Brahms Sym #1 with Horenstein Conducting, a Brahms PC 1 with Rubenstein, some Mozart Piano Sonatas by Uchida, all of which now sound great with my present equipment. These were all purchased over 15 years ago. Makes me think that a lot of the earlier digital may not have been all that bad, some was, and still is :-), but it looks like I got a new project. Best of all, its free!

Has anyone else experienced this?
newbee
aroc
760 posts
 
Apparently Viridian has not heard the 50khz Soundstream recordings that Telarc did in the late '70s and early '80s! Else he could be qualifying his comment to at least exclude those from the swine.
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aggielaw
267 posts
 
What about the "remasters" many companies are doing now? I don't mean the off-label remasters, but rather the ones the major labels are doing themselves?

I have some of the remasters, but not the original discs, so I can't compare them. The remasters I have are still somewhat deficient, unfortunately.
newbee OP
4,775 posts
 
Aggielaw, I have some of the RCA CD remasters - If I didn't have the LP's I might have thought they were OK, just sort of bleached out perhaps. But in comparison, well there is no comparison! I was thinking more about a lot of new issues in the late 80's and the 90's - I'm starting to believe that the recordings were a lot better than the equipment available for replay at that point in time - those are the ones I was addressing (although the first two I mentioned were old reissues of which I did not have an original copy). Some of EMI's Recordings of the Century are notible for performance and a few have quite good sound as well, but I have found many of their early remasters, DG and Phillips remasters as well, as you have. Lacking! I've kind of enjoyed most of the Mercurys, but then Merc was always about technicolor sound so I guess it shows thru in the remastering a bit more. I never had many jazz LP's to judge by, but so far I've been impressed by some of the re-masters by Blue Note, Verve, and especially Concord Jazz. I have virtually no experience with the other styles as I never saved my old worn out LP's and I'm not nostalgic enuf to buy reissues. But is kind of fun now looking thru the dust for nuggets.
aceto
273 posts
 
You know, I already threw out all the CDs I did not like from the old days. Which is most of the 80's. I still have the Uchida because I remain smitten, but I have not had the heart to play on my new gear. Now I will. But I will say that my father's and grandfathers' that I just could not part with, sound great now. And some of my LPs I got used, I am just now starting to play with great improvement. But I have thrown out a couple dozen from 70s to 80s that now sound worse! So you cannot put lipstick on a pig but that's not the part I care about.
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