Your 5 Stupendous SACD vs Redbook


I have just bought a SACD Player/DAC 6, and would appreciate your top choices of 1-5 SACD in Classical or Jazz, others welcome. I'm most interested in great recordings that you have experience with in the redbook format and then purchased the SACD version and was blown away with the amazing results.

Thank you
proy

Showing 1 response by t_bone

As to the original question of CDs I have or have heard where the SACD stomps it... (in no particular order and nowhere near limited to five in either case).

Classical
1. Glenn Gould's Goldberg Variations
2. Murray Perahia: Chopin Etudes
3. Peter Wispelwey playing Britten Cello Suites
4. Maazel/Cleveland: Mussorgsky Pictures at an Exhibition
5. Ormandy/Philadelphia: Orff's Carmina Burana

Jazz
1. Bill Evans: Waltz for Debby
2. Al di Meola, John McLaughlin Paco de Lucia: Friday Night in San Francisco
3. Miles Davis: Kind of Blue
4. Charles Mingus: Mingus Ah Um
5. Sonny Rollins: Saxophone Colossus

In addition, there are a whole bunch of SACDs out there where I have not heard the CD (but they sound so good it is tough to imagine they don't stomp the CD). For classical, this includes (but is not limited to) all the SACD releases from the Channel Classic label, the Volodos & Perahia piano recordings on Sony (and a bunch of the older ones: Walter, Bernstein, and Boulez conducting), a bunch of the Pentatones, and ALL of the JSACDs on the Exton label (most of them Ashkenazy conducting the Czech Philharmonic) are great. For jazz, almost everything I have heard beats CD. I have many of the Miles Davis, Thelonius Monk, Brubeck, and other 'jazz greats' discs on SACD and am quite pleased with them.