#telarc

When I was a kid my dad would listen to broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera from New York on Saturday afternoon. I was surprised to find they still do that and have for almost 80 years. Poking about I found the Met now has a subscription service where you can stream any opera they have done for many decades. I have not signed up. But I thought about it as I played a DECCA CD of operatic gems. I have a 5 CD set of opera "highlights".

That lead me to other sources and I then played a stream of La Boheme on the Apple platform. It was a good one with Pavarotti. I have noted before that Opera is great music presenting mostly terrible plots of unpleasant people. In La Boheme it is writers and artists stealing and cheating as background to love then death from disease. Oh Joy.

As is usual there is limited information about the performance save for the key artists. Dates? Venue? nope. You could hear the people move about the stage, and there was some space apparent, but it was probably not on an Operatic stage. Trivial. I could clearly hear it was Pavarotti, his voice is particular. I was tired and may have drifted off a couple times, but hey its opera.

After a few hours of arias and such I decided to play my TELARC Carmina Burana. It is a pure digital document. No analog at all from an age when DDD was a good thing. It is very well recorded in Atlanta Georgia USA with a well drilled orchestra and choral group. Once you get past the spectacular parts, of which there are many, there is much to notice. The vocal timbres and textures were excellent. You could definitely hear there were people making these sounds in a real space. Oh and even the HUGE drum had texture and presence. It is interesting how the big boom is everywhere, but the drum is solidly located in the back left side.

This is a great recording.

While I was listening I read up on the composer and the origin of the work. It is a setting by Carl Orff of medieval manuscripts of poems and songs that were published in the late 19th century. Orff was a German (Bavarian) composer know mostly for this one work, though he produced others including things for music students. His most productive period occurred during the Nazi Era. He was cleared by the American occupational officials after that came to a violent end.

The manuscripts were by and about students writing about the things young people still worry and think about. Weird to think that there were monks in cloisters copying out stories of love, lust and drinking parties into medeival manuscripts, but hey.

Apparently Orff was buried in a church within a Barvarian monastery that is famous for strong beer.

I have the Telarc Sampler disk serial CD 00007 playing. Consistent with that title it has 22 tracks of "sonic spectaculars". 75 minutes of big sounds. That is almost too much. I fired it up as a warm up for a loud session. Then I started serious listening. Many things but the big thing is the really low bass. Like earth shaking.

Oh and like that A&M Audiophile LP sampler this one is also labeled NOT FOR SALE. Got it anyway.

One track has the finale of Saint-Saens 3rd Symphony you know the one with the organ. And no lie you can hear a very low organ note just idling like a dangerous beast. 30 Hz? Lower? 16 Hz is the 32 foot pipe. My speakers should not go that low. I suppose a CD could almost go to DC ( 2Hz by the book apparently). It would suit those guys to show off. The CD player would be hurting down there.

My recollection of general CD complaints were in the treble. I do not recall anyone complaining about the bottom.

Oh right now its into the Grofe' Grand Canyon Suite Cloudburst part with Thunder. It almost sounds like a real storm. It is taxing the measly 60 Watts the ARC can push.

This thing is the apotheosis of a test record.

You know the rest of the sound is not bad. Good ambience when the engineers caught it for the quieter cuts. I suppose if I were more hostile to digital I would find something to complain about. But I have nothing but praise for the Bass.

Specifically TELARC from the 1980s. Back when CDs were the future I climbed on that wagon. Telarc bragged about their all digital process which I think used the Soundstream system. They made very good recordings. Several sources claim that they were 16 bit 50 kHz. Why would you ever need more!? Oh and now it must be converted to a slower sampling rate for CDs. Oh dear! The math, the math!

I have a handful of Telarc CDs. My Carmina Burana is a Telarc. I have some others with Eric Kunzel with the Cincinnati Symphony. One I mentioned before was the Grand Canyon Suite with digital thunder. They went into that stuff like real canons in the 1812 Overture.

Anyway I am a bit puzzled as I know I have heard the Telarc 1812 as I clearly recall the other tracks on it Capriccio Italien, and Mazepa. I do not have it anywhere I can find. I also remember a disk called "Ein Straussfest" which had a track with gun shots. Being Telarc they used real guns. Again not in my stash.

It may be that I borrowed them from, or lent them to a friend I just don't recall. My wife uses some CDs as weights to hold down papers when she is cutting out patterns for sewing. I should check there too.

Here comes the rabbit hole.

Of course I went to see if there were any of these out in the "verse". Of course there are. Discogs has lots. I found out that people have painstakingly documented every issue and pressing of most of the Telarc CDs. HUH?! Apparently there are worse and better pressings of polycarbonate just like for vinyl. Some were done in Japan by JVC or Matsushita or several others. Some were done in Europe by Polydor. Oh and some issues were clipped or poorly mastered. They did that with CDs? It should just be a FN digital file.

So rather than just slag them as CDs and stop there they curate the better and worse ones. This is a tribe I never knew existed. So now aside from just buying a clean disc you need to see if it is off a good batch. Life is so complicated!

Hey I just want the music. I love vinyl, but I like most of my CDs. Some of those are my favorites for a given recording. Many are my only recording of a piece. My Mercury Living Presence CDs are excellent as are some Telarcs.