Oldest Recordings that sound “audiophile”

Relaxin', Steamin', Cookin'! Great band!

Also Sprach Zarathustra - Fritz Reiner and the CSO in stereo - 1954! RCA Living Stereo!

This post got me thinking (a rare occasion) and I dug out some of my old Mercury Living Presence recordings which I haven't listened to in many years. The first recording was the Liszt PC's recorded in Moscow. Was this a SOTA recording? I don't think so. Was it a recording for audiophiles? I don't think so. Was is a true replication of a live performance, i.e. a great engineering effect? I don't think so.

What was it then? An in your face, exciting performance which brought into clear focus the piano contribution to the Concerto. To hell with 'audio'  I say! This really draws me into the music. Love it!!!!! Now I have a project, i.e. listening to all my old Mercury recordings. There must be more like this one. :-)

FWIW.

Good stuff.  Lots to lookup and stream online.  Keep ‘em coming. 

This is just a FWIW follow up on my post above, but the CD version of The Ghost And Mrs. Muir I have is Varese Sarabande - VSD 5850 and The Captain From Castile is the one from the Screen Archives Entertainment label.

For The Ghost And Mrs. Muir, there is a 1975 rerecording made by Elmer Bernstein, but I have not heard it.

In looking up the materials for these two soundtracks, I found this:

"The uncovering of long-stored Hollywood archives have shown that the studios were experimenting with multiple angle, or dual channel, sound as early as M-G-M’s Meet the Baron in 1933."

The Captain From Castile: "Tony Thomas wrote in his notes for an LP reissue of the original music in 1975, '[The discs were] considered so hi-fi in their day that record dealers often used the ‘Conquest’ side as a demonstration record.'"

and even

"Newman was famous for his swooning, romantic tunes and the lushness he could obtain from the strings came to represent the epitome of “the Hollywood sound,” a sound Bernard Herrmann, for one, famously did not want."       Possibly a bit ironic here, given that the very word "swooning" is an apt description at times of Herrmann's own score for The Ghost And Mrs. Muir, but admittedly is perhaps a rare concession from him on that point nonetheless.