Bigshot

On Blu-Ray there's a good version with Placido Domingo and Julia Migenes-Johnson. It's all shot on location. Beautiful photography and great sound.

He did the same with his concerts. Lots of duplication in Horowitz disks, but he performed the same pieces quite differently over time and live, so it's fascinating to compare the various performances. Never too much Horowitz!

By the way, that Horowitz on Television DVD is amazing! They took the master tapes of the concert and reconfirmed them to the TV broadcast, so it's a TV show with hifi sound. GREAT performance too!

I don't remember any overlap between the two, but there might be one or two disks. No more than that, I'm pretty sure. I remember checking when I ordered both.

I love the Fiedler Living Stereo recording of Gaetie Parisienne. It's a "best of" arrangement as a ballet. Good if you want to just dip a toe in the water.

Compression codecs really aren't designed to work with antique records. They are designed for modern music. All of the clicks and pops and crackle can cause some codec/bitrate combinations to artifact badly. I want a CD if I am buying a physical product though. I REALLY don't want vinyl. That is like throwing money in a hole at this point.

The replacement for the cheap "complete" box is the bells and whistles "Most Wanted" set, so it is a double good deal if you don't mind calling in for replacements. The only problem is the replacement set needs five replacements too. Someone at CBS must not have marked the masters clearly to indicate which is the original broadcast version and which is syndication.

Then that's a good thing, because now we can pick up the ones we are missing cheaper, right?

Vienna + Oistrakh + 2 Blu-Rays = same shipping

I bought the Vienna box and the Oistrakh box at Amazon.it yesterday. The Vienna box was 55,12 and the Oistrakh was 12,71 after VAT was taken off. Can't beat a deal like that with a stick!

The complete Perry Mason is on sale this week at amazon for $150, but it's back ordered. That's a whole lotta Burr!

Hmm... I'm not sure either. I don't see either a Dutchman overture or a New World Symphony in there, but I'm remembering back to the early 70s when my parents had these records. Perhaps they were a different conductor. In any case, the Phase 4 box looks like a lot of fun.

11 Stoki recordings in the Phase 4 box? SOLD

That's his best Jack Benny impression!

I want a phonograph with a MAGIC BRAIN!

The Complete Fugitive 33 disks for $50. http://smile.amazon.com/Fugitive-Complete-William-Conrad/dp/B00TGNLUSI/ This series was originally released on DVD with some of Pete Rugolo's music cues replaced. Then they went back a couple of years later and restored the original music and released a high end box set. Now the restored DVDs are being released in a budget box

Around 1939, RCA Victor introduced record changers and the sides were sequenced to be played back in a stack, then turned over to play through the other sides. Before that, record 1 was side 1 and side 2, record 2 was side 3 and 4, etc.

Back in the 78 era, the record sides were about four minutes long. So the conductor simply stopped the band at the end of the side and started it again at the beginning of the next one. There usually was about a second of overlap. Amazingly, the conductors were so precise, it's rare to find sets that can't be joined seamlessly. Their beat and balances were almost always perfectly accurate from side to side. The biggest single set of 78s that I have ever run across is Adolph Busch's Concerti Grossi Op 6 by Handel. It spanned fifty sides.

Amazon.ca has the Seon box for very cheap too.

If you have a 5.1 system, you can significantly improve the quality of a lot of the recordings in this box by using a DSP. Toscanini recorded in a dry shoebox of a recording studio. If your AV receiver has hall ambiences, try adding one and you'll be amazed at how much better these recordings sound with a little bit of life in the room. My Yamaha receiver has a DSP based on acoustic measurements taken from the Vienna Sofiensaal. When I use that, it sounds almost as good as stereo.

Absurd. All I want is CDs and booklets. I'll wait until some European label bootlegs this set for a dollar a disk.

That Boulez box cover reminds me of the old TV show Mannix.

I actually think that late Rubinstein was an aesthetic choice, not due to failing hearing. I agree that both are great, and the earlier versions are more vital. But the later ones are models of perfection with their own particular aesthetic choices. Live Rubinstein is the proof that he was the absolute drop dead genius when it came to Chopin.

Those who own a iPod classic, hang onto it. There is a hard drive now that fits in it that holds 240 gigs. It isn't cheap (around $300) but wow... 240 gigs!

Beecham