When will there be decent classical music recordings?


With "pop" music the recordings are such that you can hear the rasp of the guitar string, the echo of the piano, the tingle of the percussion ... and so on .... and in surround sound.
Surround sound is brilliant in picking out different instruments that would otherwise have been "lost" or merged with the other sounds.
Someone will say well that is not how you listen at a concert, but that is just archaic. As a friend said many years ago to me ... whats wrong with mono?!
I am sure Beethoven or whomever would have been excited if they could have presented their music in effectively another dimension.
I have yet to come across any classical recording that grabs me in the way it should, or could. Do they operate in a parallel universe musicwise?
I used to play in an orchestra so I am always looking out for the "extra"  presence in music ... in amongst it, not just watching and listening from a distance


tatyana69

Showing 5 responses by sevs

Let me respectfully disagree re. Herbert von Karajan legacy, his Beethoven and Bruckner cycles will outlive all of us and our great-grandkids! Just because he embraced digital and DG used skewed RIAA does not make him inherently Evil! True, his Tchaikovsky sounds wrong to the slavic ears, but how could he (or anyone) present the 4th the "right way" if he'd never been immersed into "the birch in the meadow" Russian folk song playing nonstop from almost everywhere?!? 
True, unlike Bernstein he did not waste his life on interpreting Mahler, he (or anyone outside Mama Russia) had never had a chance to present Tchaikovsky the way Mravinsky did, so what?!?!  I still choose Monteaux for the simple beauty of the music, without those extras of "Russian Soul" anguish.
Let me clarify, Karajan is Not my all-time favorite (I dont have any) but to dismiss him as lifeless and digital Evil seems absolutely wrong to my slavic ears...
@tatyana69 check "music in the round" column of Stereophile mag, I cannot afford decent surround but if I could I would have started there. Love your point that given a chance more composers would have used surround-sound effects. Stockhausen with his three orchestras comes to mind but, again, where are the recordings, and where is my surround B&W 800-series speakers :-(   Until then I am going old-school
@tatyana69    thank you for bringing it up! Based on the responses here the idea of bringing an extra dimension into classical music bothers a lot of a'goners!
I totally agree with the sentiment of Alex Ross from his book "The Rest is Noise" that segregating music into Music and Classical Music is WRONG... (a disclaimer, that is one of just two books I had read about music in my entire life! The other one was about Pink Floyd, the band Alex Ross referred to as "sounding like Mahler"). Most of us (myself included!) take this distinction a bit too serious... 
Once this segregation is disregarded as moot, I will be thrilled to hear DSOTM in surround with Gilmour guitar flying around me as much as "classical" recording from the perspective of being inside the orchestra. Totally agree with the guys that this has nothing to do with the original "intent" of the composer, but listening to Tchaikovsky under late Celibidache no one can pretend that they are listening to the "original intent" of the composer!... Beautiful, transcendent, but Definitely not the original intent!!! 
I hear ya! My second system is my old Saab, with a box of Furtwangler CDs in constant rotation while enjoying the awesomeness of LA traffic! :-)
Interesting thread! When I first read in "music in the round" that with SACDs there is an option to opt for a surround which puts you inside of an orchestra, I just laughed! TATYANA69, as I understand the original post, is actually looking for this, go figure!
Lets post the photos of our "big rigs" so that the thread could get more meaningful and less anonymous. I will try to post mine today...
Flying Gilmore guitar maybe a dud, but that was the "original intention" of the guys, and I would like to hear it. Until then I have no idea what that is and if it works for me, all I know is that I cannot afford surround at the same quality as my present stereo.
Well, I did it! Now you can see the photos of my "pride'n'joy"...
 a-Goners seriously segregate into buyers/sellers (me until recently), talkers (me as of this year) and Virtual System braggers (me as of today!).