RCA Records has re-launched its digital LP, this time in full audiophile format.
Sumptuous big press event. So now we know where we stand. Audiophile has reached
the ultimate, the top, after, of course, starting at the very bottom. The newly
packaged RCA line (also cassettes with Dolby) has interesting implications
in these heady times when we can wonder whether the sound-only phonograph record
can survive independently in the face of the videodisc. No--that crunch is
yet to come, as RCA is aware, since its own TV disc is still pretty new in
the marketplace. But (and I am now putting words in RCA's mouth) there does
seem to be a lot of hay still to be harvested out there in LP land, and the
name of the harvest is audiophile.
Short-term capital gains, I'd call it. And better hurry while the pickings are good. They still must be, what with once-little Telarc hiring the Philadelphia Orchestra and, recently, the Boston Symphony, plus world-famed soloists. And this right under the noses of RCA, Columbia and Philips! No wonder.
There have been RCA digital LPs of a simpler sort around for quite some time now, as you probably realize. There was an earlier digital launching, too, with the press transported en masse to Philly to sit in on a digital recording session--Bartok. Perhaps these two events were merely complementary, one to begin, the other for the end result, but I think not. What we have is a new policy. The new RCA digitals are packaged to match the fanciest (including Columbia) and even carry a different letter/number designation. The price, $15.98, has been hiked to fit. That is the name of this game. What you need is an outrageous price, yet they're worth it. And that, needless to say, is a major part of the significance. Earlier RCA digitals didn't cost enough.
This second RCA launching was admirably managed. Entertainment and edibles, of course, including salmon and the Canadian Brass live as well as re corded. But admirable also in the verbiage. RCA modestly describes its new policy as "The Evolution of Excellence"--quite so. This is no revolution, unless within the RCA house. The excellence has been with us elsewhere for a good while. But what is astonishing is the manner of its achievement here. In a few words, RCA is farming its business out.
Of the three new RCA digitals I have on hand, two were recorded on Soundstream equipment, Dr. Tom Stockham's, the man who made the first classical dig ital tape for Audio's Bert Whyte at the end of October 1977, and dozens of well-known recordings since. The third disc was done on Sony, also familiar though more recent. The mikes and the entire cutting equipment are out of Neumann of Germany. The plating is by Europa Disk (a U.S. company), also familiar in many an earlier audiophile release. Pressing? You can guess. Not by RCA. By Teldec in Germany on 140 gram pure vinyl.
So it's an evolution, all right, and, as RCA says, state of the art, with much credit going (I say) to these other firms who have between them largely made it possible. An odd world we live in, you'll admit.
The above, keep in mind, is only the basic engineering, the sheer audio portion of the package. RCA had plenty to do elsewhere in the production, ranging from providing the music and the recording halls and the technical direction to, needless to say, the new packaging. All praise! Here, the company is closer in and we feel its collective hand in every detail, including a certain RCA sound, out of as few as four mikes. But the packaging! I was awed by the "heavy duty" outer skin, so thick I hated to throw it away. Inside the double card board is a new "high density polyethylene" slip envelope, somehow both limp and stiff as well as slippery. (On it in white is printed the dog, Nipper, once the trademark of Emile Berliner's early disc operations.) Excellent protection.
The liner notes are full and tasteful, the audio specs well set out, and the excel lent article on digital, "Quality by the Numbers" by RCA's John Pfeiffer, which was on the original digital re leases, is also on the new discs. It is the best and most honest popular description of what "digital" means to the buying public that I have seen.
Excellence, in sum, all the way, though I will say nothing about audio excellence here, since this is not a record review. You can surmise for yourself.
Unless somebody made unconscionable goofs, this second RCA digital launching has got to be good in the sound. It ought to be, with all that hardware.
RCA played digital copies of some of the new material at its press event, coming from Sony cassettes as I heard--and here we must recall that one of the fabulous virtues of digital recording is that the information may be copied with out significant loss through the generations. This, of course, only at the digital end of our present digital/analog composite operation. RCA thus took on a certain risk in playing a segment of one of the actual "digital" discs, which of course is analog. At that point, RCA was heard to remark (in the person of Thomas Z. Shepard) that if a single tick showed up on this disc, the entire RCA staff would be sent in to eradicate it forthwith, on the spot. Or words to that effect. Fortunately, no such operation was attempted. No ticks.
I liked the hole-in-the-cover art, borrowed from a long-ago series of His Master's Voice albums reissued here by RCA. You see through the outer cover to a part of the big picture on the hard inner liner. I liked the faded red label. Dignified, with another Nipper. I liked the music--but that's another story.
Almost. For a good deal of the significance of RCA's move is in the music chosen for digital release, audiophile-type. It has its "hi-fi demo" moments, of course, and some of the discs are demo-inclined: The Canadian Brass in a lot of well-recorded corn and that much-re corded showpiece of the hi-fi age, "Carmina Burana." But RCA has pointedly included other releases that are definitely music first and in direct musical continuity with the analog past. One does not need all four sides of the vast uncompleted Mahler Tenth, in the Deryck Cooke final version, to produce hi-fi effects! (Better the Beethoven Fifth, which is a fifth as long.) Rather, this album ties in directly with other Mahler symphonies in the RCA catalog also conducted by James Levine, though on analog, not digital.
Similarly, RCA's new digital of the Sibelius Violin Concerto with the new young virtuoso Dylana Jenson (19 years old) is not at all "demo" in the content. Rather, it says to us, RCA's longtime musical policy continues straight ahead, if into audiophile: Keep recording the same old popular show pieces (musical show, not audio) with an ever-new stable of virtuosi. That policy goes back to Caruso and the like and it has never changed, though often supplemented by other types of music.
And so a few conclusions may be drawn. RCA makes it clear (as do many other labels) that the move to digital LP in the fancy audiophile format is basically two things--at a price: Superior engineering and superior packaging. But not, definitely not, a change in musical policy. Even Telarc, the innovative audiophile pioneer of a few years back in the classical area, now is edging sensibly (in both senses) back towards pure music, well recorded and well pack aged. The Boston Symphony doing the Beethoven "Emperor" Concerto with Rudolph Serkin! That will be an audiophile first, and it won't be out of Columbia. (That concerto, incidentally, is one of the longest of Beethoven works, almost up to Mahler.) Thus I can also conclude that the present splurge of top-level audiophile classics does not contradict my earlier assertion that in the long run digital re cording will simply become the universal method, for whatever purpose (and then everybody can charge the outrageous higher prices--if they dare). It's all a matter of tactics. And a number of labels, including RCA, guessed wrong in that respect. They followed what was merely logical. That, in today's market, you don't do.
The logic of it says that if digital in the production of LP is simply a technological improvement, not so different from stereo (or, earlier, electrical 78-rpm recording), then a gradual changeover is in order, the old and the new as nearly parallel as is feasible until the shift is complete. Therefore--a modest price premium on digitals to help amortize the change, mildly different packaging (as in quadraphonic and stereo), and for a good while a dual line of goods, not violently different, so that the old "in the can" musical material can be put to work and the old machinery phased out.
To this moment a good many labels continue with this policy. Some, notably Crystal, offer their digitals interchangeably with analogs at the same price. Nor is RCA the only big label to cleave to the principle. The major European companies lean heavily to the same in their digital releases.
And yet--it hasn't worked. Not here, anyhow. There are observable reasons. This time around, the playback equipment is already in place. So we need not "go easy" on the buyer who must acquire a painful lot of new equipment. He's ready to put his big money more directly into top-quality recording and superior packaging.
And oh boy, has he! The higher the price, the faster the sales, and a good value, a lot of people obviously think.
Which leads to a more potent reasoning:
Right now, money still rolls out towards the outrageously expensive package, any sort. Cars, hi-fi, records, skis. High-price audiophile is bound to sell. That is still the assumption. The hay, we trust, is still there for the harvesting.
Well, I can only say in a small voice that I think this is one of the most dangerous assumptions we can make--for the future. And the same, I might add, for extremely expensive gadget-ridden hi-fi equipment of the sort that we now see, no matter how marvelous. It sells today--maybe. But tomorrow?
by Edward Tatnall Canby (adapted from Audio magazine, Jun. 1981)
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