Holst: The Planets - best fidelity?

I don't know if the XRCD is better than all SACDs, but I can say the the XRCD is exceptional. My experience is that the SACD vs redbook CD battle doesn't have consistent winners.

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Quote: My experience is that the SACD vs redbook CD battle doesn't have consistent winners.

Are you serious?

I guess I can conceive of some rerecording of an analog or pcm recording remastered to an SACD, sounding poor compared to some newer recording on a redbook CD, (some SONY classical reissues of Szell come to mind) but I think that would be unusual.

I can not think of any of my more than 300 newly recorded SACDs, in terms of tonal quaity, microdynamics and macrodynamics that are not strikingly superior to any of the several hundred rbcds I have. I am only using a Sony XA SCD 9000 ES so I'm not talking any super fi SACD player here.

More to the point, if you are talking about acoustical instruments played in an acoustical space (concert hall, church, recital hall, recording studio) then the 4 and 5 multi-channel SACDs just blow any form of mere stereo out the window! These multi-channel SACDs (PentaTone, Telarc, Channel Classics, Harmonia Mundi, BIS, Tudor, Avie, BeArton, Hungaraton, Chesky, Chandos, Capriccio, CPO, BMG, Sony and dozens of others) are actually succeeding in bringing the acoustic ambience of the concert hall into your listening room to create a very palpable illusion that you have been "transported to the concert hall". In stereo that just is not possible!

For most pop, spatial realism like that, of course, is not of any interest.

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Sorry I missed your comment. Yes, I'm serious. My experience is that recording quality can trump the difference between standard CD and SACD. Take, for example, the Mahler 5th. I prefer Chailly on London (Red Book), to Temirkanov on Water Lily (SACD). This isn't to say that the Water Lily disc is bad either (in fact it is superb in a certain way), but the engineer's choice of perspective just isn't as involving to me. In a completely different way, the balance on the Tilson-Thomas Mahler SACDs simply doesn't sound natural, at least on my system (nor when I heard it at a former Sony SACD facility using completely different equipment).

Given the huge differences in recording quality among red book discs, it doesn't seem at all surprising that there are big differences between SACDs as well. There is no reason that those recording differences shouldn't be at least as big as the inherent differences between red book and SACD (and lots of reasons that the recording differences could be bigger).

This doesn't even get us to performance differences, which certainly should be taken into account as well. I don't think the sheer audio quality of the Holst XRCD mentioned above is equal to the sheer audio quality of the best SACD recordings or the best red book CDs of all time of any work. But, that isn't the question as I understand it. The XRCD audio is good enough that, recording + performance considered, it could easily be better than an unknown SACD.

You raise in interesting point about multichannel. All other things being equal, I would certainly prefer an MC disc. But, sadly, all other things aren't always equal.

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In a nutshell, I would say the Waterlilly Mahler 5th has a pretty distant perspective. I can easily see why someone accustomed to, say, row P or upper balcony seats would like it/love it. Also, I think it would sound much better on a system with, say, Wilson Maxx's than on my setup.

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Bob! Great to see your name after all these years. Hope you're periodically in touch with Chris.

Also, thanks for the comments.

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