I have just inherited my College’s collection of long-playing records, now redundant, with permission to retain, give away, otherwise dispose of if and as possible.
I have just inherited my College’s collection of long-playing records, now redundant, with permission to retain, give away, otherwise dispose of if and as possible. The cumbrous piles, gradually easing into categories, have littered my rooms all summer; their dispersal is piecemeal and slow.
Put together with love and knowledge from the late-Sixties on, the collection eventually totalled some 300 records. But are they so redundant? Though the universal triumph of the CD has swept away the LP as surely as the LP superseded the 78 rpm, the jury has crept back to reconsider questions of quality and fidelity.
The new technology’s advantages remain obvious — compactness for a start; then the longer duration, the imperviousness to dust or scratch. The (so far) non-degeneration; and then the extraordinary, bright sonic clarity, apparently limitless in its ability to capture and reproduce a vast range of dynamics and textures without strain. The medium’s success encouraged in its heyday a fantastic extension of availability, covering an ever broader repertoire as well as rescuing enormous amounts of archival material, sometimes of the utmost value — not least, by transferring classic recordings from the LP era (a few of which had in turn been remastered from 78s).
It’s here, however, that I first began to entertain doubts. One seized eagerly upon such treasures as the Flagstad/Furtwängler Tristan or Schwarzkopf/Ludwig/Hotter/ Fischer-Dieskau in Strauss’s Capriccio — no crackles or splotts, no distortion at climaxes, no (or rather fewer) side breaks — only to be disconcerted by a diminution of calibre in the new sound; the velvet/silk/satin of the orchestra gone scrawny, of the voices tending towards sour or shrill; and quite soon reverted to the familiar hard-worn originals purchased so long before. Thank goodness, they’d not been jettisoned!
The doubts began to extend to the CD in itself. Together with its manifest brilliance, weren’t there some less satisfying features — the preternatural clarity X-ray rather than illumination, the uncanny lack of shadow, indeed of substance, in the sound, its squeaky-clean quality, its sense of putting the original at a remove, encasing it in gleaming metallic plastic, rendering it somehow unphysical and unreal?
These reservations don’t always apply, of course. But neither, despite constant astonishment and fairly consistent pleasure, do they wholly vanish. And dipping bit by bit into the memory-pool of the ex libris hoard, I’ve been thrilled again and again by remembered warmth of sound, alongside and inseparable from remembered marvellous performances, confirming all these impressions — and doing so despite all the evidence on many of heavy communal usage as well as the wear-and-tear expected from the medium. Some will go straight into my own prior collection, still extensively enjoyed.
Such thoughts are compounded by the recent acquisition of new equipment from Meridian, of truly superlative quality, way beyond anything I’ve owned before. Two hulking yet elegant Daleks stand guard each side of the fireplace; and the sound they make is delicate beyond belief, and grand past what I dare if I’m not to imperil the fabric of the house. Yet the paradox is that on this wondrous machine it’s the LPs that win: unless battered beyond rescue (after all, some are more than 50 years old), they come out to compelling advantage, outclassing the CD whether there’s direct comparison or not, in almost every instance, for warmth, fullness, immediacy and what I can only call realism. OK, in anything longer one keeps having to get up to change sides (humming the preceding phrase or note over and over to retain continuity): which seems a smaller price to pay than the effortless convenience of a sound heard through a glass brightly.
But I was born a Luddite…
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