Reissue roundup.

Back in the '70s when I lived in Memphis, I met a young man in an audio store in Little Rock who had an interest in music recording. I traveled to that city on business frequently, and had seen an advertisement for the store in the Yellow Pages. On this particular visit to Little Rock, I made it a point to visit this store where, much to my surprise, I found that the two owners were displaced northeasterners just as I was. We quickly developed a camaraderie, these two New Yorker storeowners, the audio recording geek, and I, with the three of them making periodic visits to my home just a bit more than 100 miles away. The young recording geek (his name is David) was actually a student at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock at the time, but it was clear to all that his interest in the technical aspects of audio would draw him away from his studies there. After I moved to Louisiana, I had learned of David's decision to go to a music engineering school in New York. In our many telephone conversations, he would talk of how dramatically better was the sound of the master tapes he had heard when compared to their vinyl offspring. He would say things such as, "you have no idea what you're missing--even on the finest audio system money can buy."

Of course, I had no reason to doubt him, but neither did I have, then, an inkling of what a master tape might sound like. The closest I could come, I thought, would have been the Sheffield Direct-to Disk LPs that didn't even have a master tape. With the limited dynamics and bandwidth of turntable systems then (and now), I could only imagine what David was trying to convey. David came to Louisiana a few times to visit me, but it has been at least 22 years since I last heard from him. Still, it was David's accounts of his experiences in the field that led me to understand that engineering the master tape properly is vital to producing an end product that can approach the fidelity of a good master tape. That was then.

In the ensuing years we all had our introduction to the compact disk. Many of us thought the medium was a disappointing folly; others considered it to have its advantages over the old LP in both sound and convenience. For this writer, it took nearly 20 years after the advent of the CD to appreciate its worthiness as a medium for audiophiles. Coming to this point has brought me to understand, too, that an audio system designed for optimum digital playback is not always conducive to acceptable sound on vinyl.

A little more than six years ago, Sony and its co-conspirators addled us with news of a new digital medium that they called SACD. They told us that master tape sound could be had with this new equipment, and the abettors in the audio press went along. Parenthetically, I should say here that I am a proponent of the SACD as well; it's just that with the right CD in the best sounding players I've heard, I am now convinced that the best in either medium would sound essentially the same to the most ...