Our favorite things: recordings.(STAFF PICKS)

Once again, we have asked our staff to pick their 10 favorites from among the many recordings they have encountered, employed, and enjoyed during the past year. We think you will agree that this is quite an eclectic list, and we hope that you find it entertaining and useful. Enjoy!

Steve Baird

My favorite non-classical release of 2004 is Bill Berry's Shortcake album (PA-004) available in vinyl only from Dennis Cassidy's Pure Audiophile label. I reported on this recording this past summer in issue 100. This is a limited edition heavy vinyl 2-LP set available from any of the audiophile mail order companies. Cassidy & Company have done an excellent job in bringing back the breath of life that Phil Edwards had given it for Concord Jazz back in the Seventies. Since it is a limited edition I recommend that you get this one before it's gone.

Speaking with my audiophile/music-lover voice, the year was one of my most eagerly anticipated in recent memory. Having considered Sony's new Super Audio CD/Direct Stream Digital medium as an improvement over PCM in 2001, much of my attention has been directed to learning of and sampling many of the reissues of vintage jazz and classical music that have been perennial favorites of mine as both a lover of great music and sound. In this regard, the past year brought us many reissues from all of the great jazz labels--Fantasy, Verve, Blue Note and Concord among them. In the classical realm, the great Living Stereo recordings from RCA and now the Mercury Living Presence icons have made their debuts. There were lots of classic rock reissues in multi-channel too, but I have been reluctant to try more than just a couple of these for reasons of personal taste. In many cases involving these reissues, audiophiles were given their first opportunity to hear these recordings in multi-channel sound. This development has been a welcomed one for many audiophiles, yet there are still some of us who hang on to the conventional two-channel playback mode loyally, and are not inclined to take the financial plunge to add three more speakers to our listening rooms.

Despite my eager anticipation, I must confess that I have been disappointed in many of the new SACD/DSD reissues I've sampled. The RCA Living Stereo SACD and Fantasy jazz releases were among those that disappointed me most. The good news is, though, that for SACD enthusiasts 2004 couldn't have ended on a more positive note. For as much as I was disappointed in those from RCA, I can't praise the Mercury Living Presence SACDs enough. I find these to be the most natural sounding of the reissues to come out this year, and they all receive my heartiest recommendation. So far I've sampled six of the ten titles currently available, and each of these has shown me some benefit over their PCM reissues of a decade ago. Classical music lovers will recall that Wilma Cozart Fine, who had been involved in the original recordings decades earlier, oversaw the conversion of these to CD. The results were then among the best analog-to-digital releases to emerge (and still are), but these new DSD issues demonstrate well just how limited the CD medium actually is in terms of its resolution and microdynamics.

Universal Music Group, present owners of the Mercury catalog, had the good sense to leave well enough alone, so the Fine-authorized versions from the Nineties appear on the CD layers of these hybrid disks. I verified this on three of these by comparing my CD versions with the CD layers on the new disks. In general, the new SACD conversions offer a greater sense of space, texture, dynamics and transparency than the earlier CD reissues. Here are some brief comments on each of the ten released so far.

Suppe & Auber Overtures, Paray/Detroit Symphony, MLP 470-638-2. This is, perhaps, the best sounding of the five MLP titles I have heard so far. The orchestra is spread deep and wide across the sound stage, with a transparency that offers a palpable aural glimpse into each of the sections. Tonal balance is superbly linear, and the dynamics are exceptional. If I were recommending only one of these titles, I would have a difficult time deciding if it should be this one.