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Direct 2 Disc

Holy Smokes!  I recently purchased and played a couple of Direct 2 Disc LPs on my turntable and I was simply blown away on the clarity and beauty of these recordings.  Wow, this was a wonderful experience.  I bought a Doug MacLeod and a Henry Gray 200gr LPs.  They were recorded at a place in Kansas.  Just starting to investigate these. On the merits of these two, I bought $150 more.  Do ya'll have any favorites that sound especially crisp?  I do have a couple of Third Man Record D2D recordings, but they didn't sound this good.
pgaulke60
bdp24's avatar
bdp24
10,132 posts
 

@pgaulke60, the musical content of a lot of direct-to-disk LP’s has not been their primary attraction (particularly true of the Sheffield’s), but their sound quality. As J. Gordon Holt once said, all too often the better the recording the worse the music, and visa versa.

D-2-D LP’s have for a couple of reasons long been used as reference material for evaluating hi-fi components. They will not be the limiting factor in the sound a system produces. To reproduce their transparency, dynamics, and true-to-life instrumental and vocal timbres is a real challenge. They all possess a startling "aliveness", a transient "snap" not found in most recordings made on tape (or in digits). It’s easy to hear when a component loses some of that characteristic.

Some D-2-D LP’s are common and not expensive, others rare and not-so-cheap. The For Duke album is, unfortunately, amongst the latter. It took me years to find a copy, and is not for sale!

pryso
1,977 posts
 
I agree about the Sheffield catalog. For example Lincoln Mayorga may have been a part owner/producer (?) for the label and a good musician, but his tastes were far too schmaltzy for me. And while the Harry James Sheffields are great recordings, you need to have an appreciation for the big band music that transitioned the ’40s into the ’50s to fully enjoy those.

So one might ask, "why not more D2Ds available to choose from?" Well, once the cutter head is lowered onto the master disk there is no stopping the performance until the end of that record side. Not every musician is prepared to record under that pressure. Today’s artists are mainly accustomed to having any mistakes corrected on tape or file by the mastering process. And studio time can be expensive. If obvious fluffs happen in a D2D recording the side must be started over. How many times will the producer be willing to do that?

So each of us can hopefully find a few D2Ds with personal appeal and treasure those.
rodman99999
6,206 posts
 
@pgaulke60- If you at all care for New Orleans style Jazz, Crystal Clear did a 45 RPM, D2D, titled ’San Francisco Ltd’. An excellent, dynamic, "crisp" and quiet recording/pressing, done in white vinyl. Regarding your last query: Whether, "better" than 33 1/3, I can’t say, not having the SAME music(in both speeds) for a VALID comparison. They’d have had to do the session over, at the slower speed, to release both. Never heard of anyone cutting/releasing the same music, as D2Ds, in that way. However- I’m not saying no one has. There are way too many variables, between any two D2Ds(of differing artists/sessions/producers/etc), to categorically determine one speed better than another, though my bias would be toward 45 RPM. https://www.discogs.com/San-Francisco-Ltd-San-Francisco-Ltd/release/2685500
pgaulke60 OP
312 posts
 
@rodman99999 Thanks much for the post and your thinking.  I too would bias toward 45 rpm.  Thinking there must be a reason that they are doing it, otherwise they would put more music on a side of a LP.  Those Discog prices for SF LTD are great.  Should be a easy investment to hear the music.  I'm a big Alberta Hunter fan!
rodman99999
6,206 posts
 
Those prices would be great, if the vinyls aren’t trashed. Better than four decades(ie: since SF Ltd’s release) offers a lot opportunity for abuse. Here’s hoping you find a good one! There are a number on eBay. https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=m570.l1313&_nkw=san+francisco+ltd+crystal+clear&_sacat=0
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