Home Hi-Rez Highway

New high resolution SACD releases, players and technology.

[ Follow Ups ] Thread: [ Display  All  Email ] [ Hi-Rez Highway ]
[ Alert Moderator ]

Teresa's List...

Well I can speak to at least a half dozen of these, the rest either aren’t rock or are total trash anyway. I don’t think there is anything there from the last 20 years.

Its been quite some time since I've listened to the first ELP and CS&N disks. So I'll withhold comments on those. While the Beatles white album and Maccos Ram are decent sounding, neither is as good as several of those Gabriel disks that started this discussion. In fact, the best sounding Beatles disks should include Abbey Road and Sgt Pepper, (which both won Grammies for best sound in their day). Pet sounds and Cream are also decent choices. McCartney’s Venus and Mars is a better choice than Ram (another Grammy winner for sound if I'm not mistaken).

This is pretty much what I'd expect from Teresa when asked to list best sounding rock disks. A mish-mash of total crap and B-listers, with a liberal amount of audiophile disks tossed in. Nowhere in the list is there anything truly stellar sounding (except possibly Pet Sounds).
Most telling is what is missing from the list. Off the top of my head, here are 15 truly well recorded rock disks you should have included, and I won’t even use any of the PG stuff:

Pink Floyd: Dark Side of the Moon
Pink Floyd: Wish You Were Here
Supertramp: Crime of the Century
Eagles: Hell Freezes Over
Roger Waters: Amused to Death
Ricky Lee Jones (debut disk)
Joe Jackson: Body and Soul
Beatles: Abbey Road
Steely Dan: Aja
Steely Dan: Two Against Nature
Alan Parsons: Turn of a Friendly Card (and nearly anything else)
Fleetwood Mac: Rumors
Dire Straits: Brothers in Arms
Steve Winwood: Back in the High Life
As Stewart: Time Passages

I could easily list you 10 more with decent sonic grades, and many more that would be much less mainstream (try "Ain't Love Grand", by the Suitcase Pimps, for instance). I'll bet Metralla can list 15 more (and I'd love to see his list, I might learn about something new), and I'll bet he agrees with the majority of my choices, and me with his. Good sounding rock recording is a pretty universal thing.

So what is the reason none of these titles are on Teresa’s list? Maybe she hasn't ever heard them? Maybe its because she's biased against Rock music? Maybe she doesn’t take this type of music seriously? Maybe all of the above. It scares me to think of what would be on her worst sounding list!

Unlike the vast majority of classical music audiophiles out there, I can forgive a poor recording if the performance is good enough ("Who's Next" comes to mind, as does the Zeppelin catalog). I don’t limit myself to listening to Sheffield Labs crap and direct-to-disk nonsense, because for me the Sonics never overshadow the performance. Teresa can't say the same. To her the sonics come first, and ALL rock sonics are "very low fidelity" compared to massed strings from 180 gram vinyl playing through a vacuum tube front end.

I don't pretend to know much about classical music. Hence, I would never try to recommend to someone what sounds good and what doesn’t in the classical vein. I don't know, and I could really care less anyway. It’s all pretty boring to me. But I don’t tell others that something is "very low fidelity" when in truth I haven't got a clue. Teresa would do well to follow that philosophy.

This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors:
  Signature Sound   [ Signature Sound Lounge ]

Follow Ups Full Thread
Follow Ups
You can not post to an archived thread.

[ Top Top of Page ] [ Contact Us ] [ Support/Wish List ] [ Copyright © 2025, Audio Asylum, all rights reserved ]
[ General ] [ Speakers ] [ Tubes ] [ Vinyl ] [ Digital ] [ Hi-Rez ] [ Video Asylum ] [ Cables ] [ Tweaks/DIY ] [ Music ] [ Films ]