RESCALING EVEREST
At a recent press conference in the New York City studios of Sony Classical, Seymour Solomon, president of Vanguard Classics, announced his company's plans to issue on Compact Disc the entire Everest stereo catalog. Those of us who knew the late Bert Whyte had advance word of this as early as last winter-and as soon as that word leaked out, audiophiles had just cause for rejoicing.
Everest was an unusual company. A division of Belock Instrument Corp., it was only in business from the late 1950s to the early '60s. Harry Belock and Bert Whyte were the men who made it run, and during its short existence the company turned out more than 90 stereo LPs and tapes. The repertoire was basically orchestral and tended toward the showpieces of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Orchestras, conductors, and venues were among the best, and the recordings more than held their own with those of the major labels. As Mercury had done earlier, Everest proved that a newcomer to the commercial classical recording scene could not only compete in musical terms but show the majors a few things in the technical department as well.
Whyte was not happy with the distortion and print-through of even the best tape stock and the best Ampex recorders of the day, so he went to John Frayne of Westrex to tap into the advanced recording technology that had been developed for stereophonic motion-picture sound during the mid-1950s. The thick oxide coating and base material of 35-mm magnetic film, along with its 18-ips speed, provided the extended frequency response and low print-through Whyte was looking for. The bulk of Everest's product was recorded with this technology, that is, in three-channel stereo, but matters of expense eventually forced the company to use standard half-inch, three-track tape mastering as well.
When Belock decided to leave the record business, he sold the Everest catalog to a company in Los Angeles.
Few, if any, additions were made to the catalog, and the high quality of transfers and pressings was not maintained. Eventually, the market place forgot about Everest; the catalog became history, and only middle-aged audiophiles spoke of it.
In 1989, Philips leased a small number of Everest masters and reissued them on CD in its Legendary Classics series. Many of us thought this would be the rebirth of the catalog, but we were disappointed. To my knowledge, no more than six items were released in this series.
Earlier along the way, there had been a handful of Everest reissues on LP, aimed primarily at the audiophile LP market as it came of age in the 1970s.
But back to the present. Seymour Solomon described seeing the Everest masters in a tape vault in Los Angeles in 1993. There they were sealed in their cans and unopened for three decades. (He likened the experience to Howard Carter's taking that first glimpse of King Tut's tomb.) When the cans were opened, there was the rancid smell of de composing acetate base material; overall, however, the recordings were, luckily, found to be in remarkable condition.
A good part of this, Solomon explained, was due to the fact that virtually all of the post-Belock Everest LP production had been from two-track, quarter-inch tape copies of :1 the originals--and subsequent generations of those copies. In a sense, the original master tapes had been virtually sealed for posterity, and, quite fortunately for us, posterity turns out to be now.
After careful spooling of all reels and re conditioning of splices as required, the original recordings were digitally transferred via 20-bit A/D conversion. Wherever possible, replicas of the original Westrex analog gear were used, and careful attention was given to establishing the exact re play equalization of the magnetic tracks.
At this point, the digital capabilities of Sony Corp. were brought into the picture. Solomon had been impressed by Sony's Super Bit Mapping technique, which takes a 20-bit digital recording, old or new, and produces a 16-bit master that results in CDs with a lower apparent noise level than that of normal 16-bit recording. The fundamental 16-bit noise limitation is still present in the CD, but the frequency distribution of that noise has been shaped, or "remapped," so that most of it lies outside the 2- to 5-kHz range where human hearing is most sensitive. Noise-shaping is one of the hottest technical topics in digital audio today, and hardly a CD is issued with out it. Noise-shaping pushes the apparent noise envelope to even lower levels than that of CDs made just a few years ago.
Is all of this effort audible to the average listener ? Maybe not as such, since most listening, even critical listening, is done in environments that are not measurably qui et enough to demonstrate the Sony technique's lower noise floor. Yet at slightly elevated monitoring levels, when care has been taken to use the quietest microphones in the quietest recording environments, the difference can be heard. Overall, I am thankful to know that the very best of modern digital technology has been lavished on these priceless analog masters.
Incidentally, the inherent noise floor of the Everest recordings is low enough that Vanguard never thought of using any kind of digital noise-removal algorithm. I certainly believe that these reissues are the better for it.
One of Solomon's biggest problems in this vast reissue program is how to telescope the content of 90-plus LPs into 40-plus CDs. At the time of the recordings' original LP release, the playing time of a quality vinyl disc, with allowance for full bass response, was perhaps no more than 20 minutes per side. The original releases were based on this limitation. Today, of course, the CD can handle almost twice this playing time, and the decisions of which couplings are to be made--and which pieces of original album artwork are to be incorporated into the CD booklets are anything but trivial.
So far, Vanguard's Everest project is off to a fine start. Twelve items are now avail able, and more titles are due in February.
The current CDs are:
Falla: The Three-Cornered Hat, London Symphony Orchestra/Jorda; Bartok: Dance Suite, London Philharmonic Orchestra/Ferencsik (EVC 9000).
Vaughan Williams: Symphony No. 9, LPO/Boult; Arnold: Symphony No. 3, LPO/Arnold (EVC 9001).
Rachmaninoff: Symphonic Dances; Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring, LSO/ Goossens (EVC 9002).
Copland: Appalachian Spring, Gould: Spirituals for String Choir and Orchestra, LSO/Susskind; Gershwin: An American in Paris, Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra/Steinberg (EVC 9003).
Stokowski Conducts Strauss: "Don Juan"; "Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks"; "Dance of the Seven Veils" from Salome, Stadium Symphony Orchestra of New York/Stokowski; Canning: Fantasy on a Hymn Tune, Houston Symphony Orchestra/Stokowski (EVC 9004).
Shostakovich: Symphony No. 6, LPO/Boult; Symphony No. 9, LSO/Sargent (EVC 9005).
Vaughan Williams: Job; Overture to The Wasps, LPO/Boult; Arnold: Four Scottish Dances, LPO/Arnold (EVC 9006).
Villa-Lobos: "The Little-1 rain of the Caipira"; Antill: "Corroboree"; Ginastera: "Panambi"; "Estancia," LSO/Goossens (EVC 9007).
Bartok: Concerto for Orchestra, Houston/Stokowski; Kodaly: "Psalmus Hungaricus," LPO/Ferencsik (EVC 9008).
Hindemith: Concerto for Violin, J. Fuchs/LSO/Goossens; Symphony in E Flat, LPO/Boult (EVC 9009).
Beethoven: Symphonies Nos. 1 to 9, LSO/Krips (five CDs, EVC 9010 to 9014).
The Sound of Everest: a sampler including pieces from Bartok, Berlioz, Falla, Ginastera, Gould, Mussorgsky, Prokofiev, Rachmaninoff, Shostakovich, and Vaughan Williams, conducted by Boult, Fistoulari, Goossens, Jorda, Sargent, Stokowski, and Susskind (EVC 9050).
Next time, I will review a number of these initial releases.
(adapted from Audio magazine, Jan. 1995)
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