Pizzarelli, John: My Blue Heaven.(Sound Recording Review)

Pizzarelli, John: My Blue Heaven. Recorded in 1990, at Studio A, in New York City; remastered for surround ca. 2003. Engineers: Bob Katz, Barry Wolifson, and Nicholas Prout. 59+ minutes. Chesky SACD 254.

The first thing I noticed with this recording of old-time vocal favorites was the background rumble. It is very low in frequency and is often quite emphatic, and my Hsu TN1220 subwoofer grabbed hold of the shuddering and most of the time would not let go. Sometimes the noise seems independent from the music and at other times it seems to emanate from it, although with some quiet passages and less-energetic tracks the artifact was not there at all, or at least very low in level. The noise was also there at times when I played the disc's PCM tracks, although it did not seem quite as strong as with the surround SACD tracks.

I have heard this artifact from some (but certainly not all) recordings made in Studio A in the past, and the only way I can see the Chesky team missing it is that they did their monitoring work on B&W 801 speakers. For all of their positive attributes, those are no match in any way, shape, or form for the Hsu at really low frequencies. To be fair, neither are my middle system's Dunlavy Cantata speakers (which roll off below 35 Hz and are almost a dozen dB down at 20 Hz), and when I changed the bass management to send the low frequencies to those systems and not the subwoofer the rumble ...