It has been over a year and a half since Telarc released its last SACD.
Telarc was unique in that their recordings were the pure natural sound of music performed in a real space. Indeed what some call the Telarc "house sound" is nothing more than the true natural sound of musical instruments as heard live. Next time you go to see a live orchestra in a concert hall close your eyes and mentally compare it to a Telarc SACD.
As Telarc says "The Telarc Sound. Everything You Hear is True. Exceptionally clear, natural sounding recordings."
This is totally true and very few recording companies make recordings with all the set up and engineering done prior to recording so that when they start the recorders they are creating the audio version of a photograph.
The best sounding Telarc's are the domestic SACDs of American orchestras and Jazz groups engineered and produced by various Telarc team members including Jack Renner, Robert Woods, Michael Bishop, Robert Friedrich and Elaine Martone. The European Telarc SACDs engineered by Polyhymnia also sound excellent but are at a slightly lower level of realism, however IMHO they are the best recordings Polyhymnia ever made, considerably better than their work for other labels including PentaTone.
The closest I have found so far in DSD recorded SACDs are PentaTone and Channel Classics but they both sound slightly "colored" when compared to Telarc and live acoustic music. Perhaps the music is sweetened up a little in post production?
The few Reference Recordings SACDs from 176.4kHz PCM and analog masters from Prof. Johnson's focused-gap reel to reel recorder have been superb and very realistic including the important lower frequencies. I wonder what miracles he could do in pure DSD?
The list of recording companies making uncompromised full range recordings using no equalization, no sweetening, no artificial echo, and mixing only to correct obvious mistakes is small. In the past this would include Mercury Living Presence, Reference Recordings, Crystal Clear Direct to Disc LPs and a small collection of others.
I am hoping either Telarc returns or a new company is formed to make natural real sounding full frequency response recordings once again available in the superb SACD format.

i agree. with dawn of free DSD players for Mac and PC, and also now a real DSD DAC without conversion to PCM, we need more DSDs! I would like to start with Kind of Blue original from master tape in DSD!
ReplyDeleteMarek