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Early Digital Recordings Didn’t All Suck

Early Digital Recordings Didn’t All Suck

Utter the words “early digital” and most audiophiles, even younger ones, will know exactly what you’re talking about. The term references sound lacking body and warmth, the fatiguing deficiency of dimensionality and tonal complexity that characterized digital encoding for much of its first commercial decade. This was the era when, invariably, someone would show up at the local audio society meeting wearing a DIGITAL SUCKS T-shirt. But those of us who were practicing audiophiles at the time remember one important exception, Telarc Records, a label that kindled a hope that the new technology would someday go beyond its undeniably impressive dynamic range, signal-to-noise ratio, bass power, and (once the compact disc arrived) convenience to deliver a more completely satisfying listening experience. Four of the LPs recorded by Telarc Records International of Cleveland between 1978 and 1981 are now available on 180-gram vinyl from the reissue label Craft Recordings.

By 1976, audio engineer Jack Renner and his partner, producer Robert Woods—two-classically-trained former music educators—recognized that the business they owned was at a critical juncture. Their record label, Advent Records, had a reputation for excellent sound quality but was clearly a “vanity” operation for professional musicians, releasing LPs of challenging contemporary music and recitals by little-known soloists that could reasonably be expected to sell only in small numbers. Renner and Woods longed to work with well-known artists in repertoire that would attract a general audience and with their brand now known as Telarc—the loudspeaker manufacturer Advent Corporation didn’t look favorably upon the name the pair had been employing—they managed to talk Lorin Maazel into participating in a direct-to-disc recording of the Cleveland Orchestra. They did two other such projects with organist Michael Murray, but it was apparent to the partners that selling a few thousand such records (per project) was another dead end, in terms of economic viability. It was then that an industry colleague urged them to investigate the work of a University of Utah electrical engineering professor named Thomas G. Stockham who had built his own digital tape recorder and was trying to market it.

Commercial digital recording had launched in Japan in the early 1970s, and the few imported LPs they’d heard hadn’t overly impressed Woods and Renner. Nonetheless, they arranged to meet with Dr. Stockham at the 1977 AES meeting in New York City and had a listen to his Soundstream recorder. They felt that the professor’s machine had promise and brashly told him that if he could improve the machine’s high frequency performance—the version they’d heard in NY cut off at 17.5kHz—they’d use it for a major project. Stockham happily obliged and Telarc was poised to make a splash with the first-ever digital recordings of large-scale music played by world-class orchestral musicians.

The quartet of Craft Recordings reissues includes three excellent choices from the early Telarc catalog—and there’s one inexplicable omission. Essential is Robert Shaw’s electrifying performance of Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra (the “B” side was music from Borodin’s Prince Igor), a record that was hard to avoid in audio stores for years. Craft also picked Erich Kunzel and the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra’s album of Tchaikovsky orchestral favorites, Telarc’s best-selling recording of all time, that features the 1812 Overture with its sensationally recorded, cartridge-humiliating cannons. From Shaw/Atlanta as well is Carl Orff’s Carmina burana, the hour-long cantata spread over three LP sides with the fourth holding a performance of Symphonic Metamorphosis on Themes by Carl Maria von Weber by Paul Hindemith. The last early Telarc LP resurrected by Craft is a perfectly capable but unmemorable rendition of the four violin concertos from Vivaldi’s Le quattro stagioni performed by Joseph Silverstein, the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s concertmaster for 22 years, supported by Seiji Ozawa leading a small ensemble of BSO players.

Conspicuously absent is the very first Telarc digital recording, recorded in April of 1978, an album of Holst, Handel, and Bach from Frederick Fennell and the “Cleveland Symphonic Winds”—woodwind, brass, and percussion musicians players from the Cleveland Orchestra complemented by other area professionals. This was the perfect program with which to debut the technology: Cleveland native Fennell was famed for his epochal Mercury recordings with the Eastman Wind Ensemble and Renner was a big fan of Mercury’s three-microphone methodology. The result was a demo disc that even eclipsed Firebird in its audio salon ubiquity; one can only imagine how many loudspeakers were sold on the basis of the bass drum thwacks heard in the last movement of Holst’s First Suite in E flat for Military Band. Hopefully, there will an opportunity for Craft to reissue this title, assuming there are no legal barriers to its doing so.

 

The sound of these early Telarcs holds up very, very well with sonic quality that’s far superior to most analog orchestral recordings from the “majors” in the mid- to late-1970s. It’s not just Stockham’s Soundstream recorder, encoding at a bit-depth of 16 and a sampling rate of 50,000Hz. Woods and Renner had the advantage of making these recordings in three very favorable acoustic environments—Atlanta’s Symphony Hall, Cincinnati’s Music Hall, and the Haughton Chapel at Wellesley College—and Renner’s long experience recording large ensembles with a minimalist technique contributed as well to the superb result. The electronics in the recording chain were beyond reproach, and top-notch mastering engineers, including Stan Ricker, Bruce Leek, and Richard Donaldson, cut the lacquers for the original discs.  Although some homogenization of the sound of Silverstein’s Stradivarius violin afflicts the Vivaldi recording—“digititis” was (is) the pejorative term—massed violins on the Stravinsky are feathery and transparent. Woodwind sonorities are wonderfully realistic in the Introduction to the Polovtsian Dances and with Carmina burana, the complex timbre of Hăkan Hagegărd’s baritone is beautifully characterized. The most dynamically exuberant passages of Carmina (the “O Fortuna” sections that open and close the piece, for instance) remain coherent, as does the cacophony of the overdubbed bells in 1812. The soundstage is wide and gratifyingly continuous with all four programs.

Original pressings of three of the four albums were on hand for comparison. (I never bought Carmina burana back in the day and used copies can be monstrously expensive.) In all instances, the new, thicker record was sonically superior. Instrumental sonorities were richer and more intense, and it definitely counts for something that the stylus remained in the groove throughout 1812’s artillery salvo, a feat my tonearm/cartridge combination could not accomplish consistently with the older pressing. I also compared the vinyl versions to DSF digital files derived from rips of the Telarc SACDs of these titles, all four of which I own. My analog rig is modest (a VPI Scoutmaster with JMW Memorial tonearm holding a Sumiko Blue Point Special Evo III) compared to my digital front end (files residing on a Synology NAS are played by a Baetis music computer that sends the data stream for D-to-A conversion by either an Anthem D2v or T+A DAC 8 DSD). It was no contest: the NAS/Baetis/DAC option manifested considerably superior dynamic range and bass power, and gave up nothing in the way of detail, tonal naturalness, and imaging specificity to the LPs. But if you lovingly maintain a good analog playback system, your results could be different than mine and the Craft 180-gram vinyl reissues—all cut by Eric Boulanger on equipment he purchased from Stan Ricker and pressed at Optimal Media in Germany—should be self-recommending.

The era of digitally recorded LPs was brief, as the compact disc rapidly established itself, following its commercial introduction in 1982. Thomas Stockham had his own ideas about how to implement the new medium that at least some audio professionals at the time felt were better than what eventuated. Needless to say, the Utah professor-turned-entrepreneur’s resources were no match for those of Sony/Philips, whose Red Book specifications were ultimately adopted. Thus began the digital winter. Stockham sold his company and went to work as a consultant; he died in 2004. Telarc continuously improved its digital recording techniques, advancing from 16-bit to 20-bit to 24-bit recorders before finally settling on 1-bit Direct Stream Digital (DSD) encoding. The company had an extraordinary run as an independent label, producing hundreds of CDs and SACDs in several genres, before Concord Records purchased them in 2005. Just a few years later, in the name of “corporate restructuring,” Concord fired the entire production team.

By then, the central role that Jack Renner and Robert Woods had played at the dawn of digital recording was beginning to fade from the collective audiophile consciousness. It became easier just to recollect that all digital audio “sucked” in the beginning and progress was a steady march from the bottom to the current high-resolution present. We should not forget that Telarc Records International gave us more than a taste of what was possible 40 years ago and Craft’s new vinyl pressings are an excellent way to remember this significant moment in audio history.

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