The finest technically recorded album. LP or CD

Please try and excuse me for posting a dissent I'll probably regret ever having let out of the cage:

The majority of these responses ably demonstrate why one should never trust an audiophile in matters of music - or sound...Not only do most of the nominations - including the thread-head's - show little-to-no relation to the question (which I'll acknowledge and as Viridian rightly points out requires some interpretation, but Champtree's subsequent attempt is not far off), even if we take the question merely in the spirit in which it's answered...Well, all I can say is Man! What a laughable parade of missing the forest for the trees. (Hint: Reread SDC's response.)

My apologies. We now return you to your regularly-scheduled audiophool programming...

Champtree, Onhwy61 correctly applies the second part of my critique to your comments re the Willie disk. Let me put it this way: I believe that many audiophiles originally arrived at their interest in the quality of reproduced sound through their prior love of classical music in particular, and indeed that the whole hobby evolved largely because of this motivation. But today this is no longer true so much. I do NOT believe that many Janis Ian fans (not to pick on her for any pejorative reason - she's an estimable artist in her own right) found their way to the high end because of their need to better hear Janis. Rather, many audiophiles found their way to Janis because some reviewer said the sound was awesome. If you really like her and discovered her as a result of being an audiophile, great. But if what you really like is the Stones (not to pick on them either, but at least everybody will get what I'm talking about when I bring them up) and you're sitting around listening to Janis because she's 'recorded so well', you get no sympathy from me. Any audiophile who has stopped listening to ANYTHING they love - even one record - strictly because of its sound is a loser in my book. To do so is to utterly pervert the reason we presumably (hopefully!) got into this stuff in the first place.

Lugnut, I know Willie and Janis aren't "rock" with a capital "R". I mentioned rock AND pop recordings, but said it was obvious that many responding here were RAISED on rock - true in your case, apparently, and I hasten to add in mine too. This is a telling factor for me about what I believe are misguided nominations FROM AN AUDIOPHILE STANDPOINT. This matters to me (to a degree - everybody's entitled to their opinion, and we can't make everyone who's opinion we think we have good reason to believe is wrong our personal crusade) in theory for two reasons: People are apparently listening - and by inference also NOT listening - to stuff for (what I say) are all the wrong reasons, and they are also sinking money into a hobby they don't yet have a fundamentally informed grasp of. Neither of these things precludes some degree of genuine enjoyment in this pursuit, but it will probably be short-lived, and followed either by frustration and disappointment - Or with luck and perseverence, by greater learning and a future personal breakthrough that allows them to continue happily, poorer but wiser and refocused on what's really important, their music.

My point wasn't so much that these may not be fine recordings in some sense, although I'm sure they were close-mic'ed in a studio. I am also not a big classical guy myself, but I realize that this is the main genre in which the challenge of capturing a live acoustic event being recorded in true stereo-mic'ed fashion, from the audience perspective within a genuine performance space, is frequently attempted (more or less, but let's not digress needlessly). Moreover, it is arguably the genre where the importance of being able to successfully approach achieving this difficult goal is of the most paramount importance to the proper communication of true musical event and intent. Champtree's observations about the Wagner example show he intuitively and intellectually understands this. Now - according to me - he has to go back and relearn that this understanding DOES NOT necessarily apply equally to great rock recordings (to pick an example out of the air to support John Lennon's view on this subject, think about Elvis' seminal recording of "Hound Dog" - think about how the SOUND of that record affects you, what it makes you feel inside, minus all audiophile preconceptions).

As far as the Dan goes, you'll get no argument from me about how 'technical' these studio performances were (for better or for worse), but I maintain that the RECORDING quality of their albums is neither that extraordinary from an audiophile standpoint, nor that amazing or unconventional from an artistic production one. They sound like what they are: competently but ordinarily recorded 70's studio pop played by competent studio musicians. The Dan's songwriting, lyrically and musically, and arranging were much more interesting than anything about the way their stuff sounded recording-wise.

Again, I think we're probably running into some semantic trouble with the question posed in this thread, specifically with the words "finest" and "technically". This being an audiophile forum, I tend to assume that SCD's and Viridian's interpretation is the logical one. The music you mention seeing live, just like the music I see live, is almost always being brought to your ears courtesy of a PA system - compare that against the classical concert hall live experience. I happen to think that any informed audiophile should appreciate this important distinction, EVEN IF they are not big into classical music, because it is important to understanding some sort objective standard for recording and replay fidelity (this is what HP means with the title of his mag). Even small club acoustic jazz is often mic'ed up through a PA during live performance, but not always (bluegrass either, for that matter), and this would also be a fair - if not exactly equivalent - substitute for classical in this paradigm. The artistic significance of the hall acoustic in classical music (or the church acoustic in choral music) - until very recently always and still mostly unaided by electronic amplification - is basically unparalleled for most other musics.

Lugnut, you and I are talking at cross purposes without agreeing on the meaning of the question, which is valid. On the other hand, some of the nominations (Physical Graffiti, which is just poorly recorded from any standpoint, or Eminem, which is mostly samples) bear no discernable relation to any probable interpretation of the question I can conjure up. Instead, what these responses are likely to represent are the posters' preferences for production jobs (and performances) they enjoy and find compelling from the arual and emotional perspectives - and many non-audiophile would agree judging by their popularity. Personally, I think those sort of responses are much more defensible from a music-loving viewpoint than those that parrot what some high end reveiwer said was a 'reference-quality' disk.

Even more than just the storage medium and generation aspect (significant, but less so in my mind), I am refering, from just the audio perspective, to the number of nominations of electric-instrumented, multi-track mono (they're not true acoustic stereo guys - they're just panned individual mono tracks), and highly produced (meaning altered after recording) studio rock and pop records above. Lugnut, that goes for Steely Dan too (I never understood this band's records' sonic rep among audiophiles, and never will). Whatever one's opinion of the musical content (I'm thinking of myself here), a strong case can be made that Elton John's albums, for instance, are very successfully recorded from an artistic standpoint, a fine "technical" achievement to be sure if the effect is to your taste, but this is not at all the same thing in audiophile terms as what Champtree calls the "presence" of the musicians - nor should it be. We should know better than to confuse the two things.

It is very telling that there are no classical music nominations above, but Rel, Viridian, and SDC all know what I am talking about. Folks nominating Joni, Willie, Lindsay, Janis, etc. apparently don't, no matter how 'great' they think those records sound, but as self-professed audiophiles they ought to. Everybody in the second catagory, go back and freshen up on Harry Pearson's definition of what the 'Absolute Sound' means.

However (and more importantly, to my way of thinking), my comments about the forest and the trees are not intended to denigrate the validity of rock and pop studio recordings. Quite the contrary, I am of the John Lennon school, who said that THE RECORD was the thing - meaning in his field, there WAS NO 'original performance'. All that mattered was when you slapped down that slab was how it made you FEEL. So what I find sadly (but in our hobby, typically) ironic is that these audiophiles - so obviously raised on rock, the music Lennon was speaking of - not only don't get the HP definition of what makes a recording an audiophilic reference, but are, if they are to be believed, all sitting around listening to the same 15 hackneyed warhorses because they believe the sound is so clean'n'pristine or something (and because they don't get into those genres, like classical, where the real answer to this question applies). I mean, legitimately liking some of these artists is all well and fine, but don't try and tell me you guys are all such huge Janis Ian and Willie Nelson fans that you wouldn't really rather be listening to "Tumbling Dice" or some other record where the way it sounds MEANS something, in the impressionistic sense and no matter how 'bad' in audiophile terms, in relation to some fuckin' great rock music! (Or say the same but about a Rudy Van Gelder primitive living room recording of some fuckin' great jazz music, whatever.)

My point is, if this way of listening is what becoming an audiophile has done to you, you've been screwed on both fronts: You don't know the natural sound of music, only of reproduction systems, AND you've sacrificed the feeling that music you loved as a kid gave you in your gut in order to learn this.