"CDs are too small"!!!

[mamboni]

Here's a few to get you started - these are some of the real CD gems in my collection - ones I return to often:

Bernard Hermann conducting London Philharmonic Orchestra: Music from Great film classics (Moble Fidelity Sound Lab UDCD 701) Ultradisc II
Comment: Amazing presence and clarity – brilliantly recorded and performed. This is a fabulous disc for demonstrating imaging.

Famous Blue Raincoat: Jennifer Warnes performs the songs of Leonard Cohen (Private Music).
Comment: A perfect recording of one of the most beautiful voices alive – Ms. Warnes has a warm rich tone and perfect execution. Excellent demo disc for female vocal and soudstaging. Very interesting songs too!


The Hunter: Jennifer Warnes (Private Music).
Comment: Another gem of a recording and just gorgeous singing by Warnes – perhaps the most beautiful female voice extant. This disc is recorded perfectly and has outstanding demo-quality bass lines throughout – good workout for your subwoofers.


Dmitri Shostakovich Symphonies No.1 & 7: Leonard Bernstein conducting the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (Deutsche Grammophon) [2 discs].
Comment: This is one of those rare combinations of the best of everything: great orchestra in it’s prime, a great conductor at the peak of his interpretive powers and maturity, live recording at the old Carnegie Hall with it’s legendary acoustic, fantastic live recording with loads of air and presence, and one of the most powerful tour de force symphonies in all of the orchestral repertoire, Shostakovich’s 7th. The CSO just blows the house down in the finale – if you want to experience the full power and majesty of one of the world’s great orchestra’s performing at full throttle, this is the recording to have. Shostakovich is an acquired taste, like single malt scotch, that will transport one from the emotional depths of despair to the exalted heights of total triumph and victory.

Tchaikovsky 1812 Festive Overture (original scoring), Capriccio Italien; Beethoven’s Wellington’s Victory; Dorati – Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra (Mercury Living Presence).

Comment: Live sounding recording like only Mercury Living Presence could register. This is an extremely dynamic recording, with non-compressed recordings of cannons, bells, and all manner of guns and muskets that will amaze you, and quite possibly blow the fuses on your amplifier power rails or bottom your woofers – be warned. If you want the version of 1812 to really lift the roof off your house, this is it. Yes, there is some tape hiss and slight microphone resonances which can render the strings a bit wirey sounding – but trust me – it’s worth the listen! The Beethoven piece is incredible too – rarely recorded because the gun shot effects required.

Elgar Overtures: In the South – Froissart – Cockaigne – Handel Overture in d minor; Gibson conducting the Scottish National Orchestra (Chandos).
Comment: Fantastic recording of powerful and emotional performances – the acoustic is large and spacious – and wonderful demo disc for sounstaging. The brass section playing in the Alassio is thrillingly powerful and gutsy. Elgar was a master orchestrator whose Straussian tone-poems contained herein will make the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end and cause major goose bumps with their alternating lyric beauty and sheer Wagnerian power.

Some great organ recordings:

In a quiet cathedral: Todd Wilson performs on the Aeolian-Skinner Organ [Delos – 2 discs].
Comment: These discs are loaded with infrasonic organ bass – including 32 foot pipes and 16 Hz tones. This is a perfect disc for demoing your subs – if they can hack it! Great musical selections by all the greater organ composers of the past.


Pomp & Pipes: Fennel conducts Dallas Wind Symphony and Organ (Reference Recordings RR-58CD).
Comment: Powerful music for wind ensemble and organ recorded scrupulously perfect in a large acoustic by Prof. Johnson. The organ bass on this recording will shakes the floors and doors – a demo disc to sure. The final cut, Weinberger’s Schwanda is a show stopper – amazing low organ finale with overlaid blazing winds.

Virgil Fox Encores (Living Stereo): What performances – what a large spacious recording – organ recorded just right.

[gvr4ever]

Originally posted by FastEddy
gvr4ever: " ... They had the German realease of Eric Claptons Unplugged and the Batman sound track and many others that I wanted. The problem is, I still don't have a player yet. ..."

I just got a new player that handles SACD & DVD-A to 192k ( http://oppodigital.com/dv981hd/dv981hd_index.html = w/ Philips chips, I believe), so if you have a web link to those German releases, I am very interested. Here in the states we seldom have access to the other "zones", audio or video ... (Now I have to dispose of the several older players, probably have to give them to the local library or a school.)

The german release of Eric Clapton was for vinal, not SACD. I have some SACDs that have German master recordings, but I got them from Amazon.com. They aren't a German only release like the Eric Claptons unplugged. Pretty sure the US only got a CD.

[Myrtonos]

Compact discs, and other subsequent disc formats, don't get any larger than 5 inches, while phonogaphic discs, and laserdiscs too, are rarely smaller than 7 inches. It is technially possible to produce a 7 inch DVD or SACD but it wouldn't play in any existing player because the drives aren't large enough. CDs are all single sided, and in this way CDs are less flexible than analog disc records, not all disc records have a definite side order, and album from the vinyl era were structured in terms of what was placed on each side. Bob Dylan's Bringing it all Back Home does have a definite side order, but side one is electric and Side 2 is acoustic. Both sides of Highway 61 Revisited are electric but even here, each side of the album features a different style. Side 1 of Simon and Garfunkel's Old Friends/Bookends tells a story. Side 1 of Van Morrison's Arstal weeks is called In the Beginning, and Side 2 is called Afterwards, Side 1 of Morrison Hotel by the Doors is called Hard Rock Cafe and Side 2 has the album title.
CDs and single sided DVDs only have room for a label on the blank side, while vinyl and shellac records, as well as laserdiscs can be double sided and still have room for a label.
The smaller size might seem advatageous beacuse of portability, but this is not an advantage for all consumers, at least not all the time.

[JoeDJ]

I suspect that Dylan simply made that comment "tongue in cheek/ facetiously.

Don't forget, Dylan is from the vinyl generation and has wry/off beat sense of humor at times.

[sofaspud]

Sony recently bought Columbia, everything:

True, if you consider 1988 "recently".

[Brede]

I'd just like to add my own thoughts on digital/CD vs analoge/vinyl. I know that's not what this thread is entirely about but a lot of people bring up that ever lasting debate. First a disclaimer, I have not heard a vinyl (at least directly), but I have heard real people sing in real music halls. I've heard guitars, drums, pianos, and violins live and I've found my entirely digital setup to reproduce such sounds evxtremely well. It's not even very expensive. Sennheiser 555s, a good headphone amp and DAC (asus xonar essence st) , and a computer. And of course a large collection of music ranging from actual physical CDs, to lossless rips, to mp3s. Also a few lossless vinyl rips. Some vinyl rips just don't sound quite like the real thing, some cd rips sound harsh, and some mp3s barely even sound like the any real instrument is in them. however some of my MP3s sound incredible to the point i go back and check to see if I read the format right. many of my FLAC cd rips make me think I'm sitting in the place it was recorded and I can even tell what kind of setting they were recorded in with relative ease (hall, studio, etc). Ultimately i think the recording and mastering process are much more important to the faithfull reproduction of music than the medium, as long as it's pretty good quality. That said none of my MP3s sound as good and my better CD rips. But by far the most important thing is that i don't notice the sound of my setup. It's transparent enough that I can focus on the music. I don't hear the headphones or the amp or the dac. In my good recording I don't hear the mastering, just the music.