User Details - Jay-dub

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Name:
  Jeffrey Willson
Details:
  My CD collection is roughly
80% classical, 15% jazz
Location:
  Ames, Iowa
HiFi:
  Stereo only:
Marantz SA8001 player ->
Rotel RA-1062 integrated amplifier ->
B&W 704 floorstanding speakers
19 inches from long wall, 5 feet apart, toed in 15 degrees,
ears 6 feet from each speaker, 3 feet off carpet, 3 feet from back wall

Sennheiser HD550
Alternate CD player: Rotel RCD-1072
Email:
  willsonj@iastate.edu
Web:
 
Posts:
  45

 
 
Reviews
Found: 7 show all

Liszt: Années de Pèlerinage (complete) - Mûza Rubackyté          (6 of 6 found this review helpful)
  July 1, 2007

This is a remarkable recording. I have enjoyed it immensely, and I can recommend it, but Lazar Berman gave a fuller sense of Liszt's achievement and his recording is ultimately more satisfying. Mûza Rubackyté is a very spontaneous-sounding pianist. She lets her intuition guide her response to the ... more
Stravinsky: Les Noces, Mass, Cantata - Daniel Reuss        (7 of 9 found this review helpful)
  June 11, 2007

Here's as good a reason to invest in SACD as any: Les Noces is the twentieth century's greatest piece of music in the "classical" tradition, and its instrumentation makes it impossible to record adequately on RBCD. All the percussion instruments sound very similar if their transients are not ... more
Beethoven: Complete Piano Works Vol. 1 - Brautigam        (6 of 7 found this review helpful)
  June 10, 2007

The most successful performance on this disk is the great sonata in B-flat; the least successful is the sonata in G. The RBCD sound in first-rate, so that SACD stereo provides only the slightest improvement in the sound: in high-def, the fortepiano sounds less like an upright. The choice of ... more
Charles Mingus: Mingus Ah Um      (9 of 9 found this review helpful)
  June 8, 2007

This SACD was produced in conjunction with a regular CD edition of this album, in 1998, and apparently represents the high-resolution digital source which would have been sent to a mastering engineer for the finishing touch in CD production. The CD mastering task involves matching the volume levels ... more
Sonny Rollins: Plus 4        (2 of 3 found this review helpful)
  June 7, 2007

My standards for the remastering of '50's Van Gelder recordings are based on the JVC XRCD of Walkin' and the Analogue Productions SACD of Saxophone Colossus. They are both of them perfectly equalized in the bass: no note of the bass line drops out or gets boomy, and the piano sounds fairly natural, ... more

 
 
Latest Posts

Alert: All Downloaders of Hi Res files.
May 11, 2011
I frequently look at spectrograms of digital music files in order to get an estimate of the effective bandwidth of the recording (defined as the frequency above which musical features are no longer visible, being buried under the noise power spectrum even during louder passages). For CD's mastered with psychoacoustic (inverse A-weighted) ... more
BIS thread
August 30, 2008
About a year ago, I carefully reviewed my small SACD collection and came to the conclusion that BIS is the one company that consistently does everything right. If a performance is released on BIS, then I know that somebody with good musical judgment believes in that piece of music and believes that the performer can do it justice. Moving onto ... more
Future of audio only classical? (from occasional classical buyer/listener)
August 27, 2008
SACD is a format that appeals to people who don't enjoy watching musicians, so you should expect more negative opinions of the idea of concert videos here than almost anywhere else. No doubt a musician can learn valuable techniques by watching performances, but for many lovers of classical music the work has a special autonomy and listening to ... more
BIS thread
August 25, 2008
What? The inbuilt quality decrease of the iPod is quite slight. If you dock your iPod to a good stereo and listen to lossless files, it adds some noise compared to a good CD player, but doesn't really sound any worse than most cheap DVD players. (Listening to 128kbps files over the included earbuds is of course another matter.) People would have to ... more
Hyperion drops SACD
August 23, 2008
In the USA, the marketing of Hyperion SACD's was a disaster in many ways. Typical Amazon.com prices were around $26, which is well above the customary price for a CD and at least $5 more than the list price of most Hyperion CD's. In addition, the CD-only versions of several major Hyperion SACD releases were made available on BMG Direct Marketing ... more