Britten: The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra; Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge.(Sound Recording Review)

Britten: The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra; Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge. Benjamin Britten; London Symphony Orchestra, English Chamber Orchestra. JVC XRCD 0226-2.

While upgrading to new and better hardware is always fun and most often rewarding, if one can afford it, the struggle to find suitable software--LPs, tapes, CDs, or DVDs--to do the new equipment justice has long haunted the audiophile. Open-reel master tapes would seem to be the ideal answer but obviously impractical. Direct-to-disc and half-speed remastered recordings took up some of the slack in the vinyl days, with gold discs taking their place early on in the compact-disc era. But now that the gold disc has gone the way of the dodo, one has fewer choices.

Understand, during all the time I reviewed gold discs from Mobile Fidelity, DCC, Compact Classics, and the like, I often found improvements in the sound of the gold over their silver counterparts; but as I said time and again, I was never convinced it was actually the gold-foil that contributed to the sound's betterment so much as it was their superior transfer engineering. The gold, I always figured, might have just added to the discs' allure and justified their high price. Careful, expert, and time-consuming engineering of the tape to disc is where I considered the improvements to have come. Which is where JVC, the Japanese Victor Corporation, entered the scene several years ago. They have eschewed the gold plating and gone with the best possible transference to silver disc, first remastering some of RCA's best old "Living Stereo" recordings and now starting in on some of Decca's older product.

Most of JVC's choices have been consensus classics, and the comparisons I've made with over a dozen discs have found improvements--some slight, to be sure--in JVC's product over the conventional equivalent. They have also packaged the product handsomely in old-fashioned 78-type foldout albums. Unfortunately, JVC have not eschewed the gold-disc price. They are issuing exactly what appeared on the original LPs, no more, no less, and at a price almost double the cost of a conventional disc. Worth it? Not to most people, and, indeed, not to me if I didn't already own the dozen or so things I've bought so far and didn't already love each and every one of them. Nor have I been disappointed. The sonic improvements have ranged from barely audible, maybe not audible at all and only imagined, to clearly audible and extremely worthwhile. In most cases, the improvements have been in overall smoothness, sometimes in definition, sometimes in bass extension or bass solidity.

Yet it's here that we run into the old audiophile vs. skeptic argument: The audiophile will argue that if you can't hear the differences, it's because your equipment is not good enough to reveal them. Conversely, the skeptic will argue that if you hear a difference it's because you're predisposed to hear a difference, especially if you've just laid out a chunk of cash for the new product.

My advice: Trust no one in these controversies. Try one of these JVC discs for yourself. Compare it to your old disc. If you hear no difference, take it back and never buy another ...