Mussorgsky: Pictures at an Exhibition, A Night on Bald Mountain, and Other Russian Showpieces [Hybrid SACD]

How can something older than me sound so good? The recording is top notch. Dont be fooled into thinking it is "just stereo", the ambience of symphony hall comes thru as though it were recorded in surround. Exquisite detail and perfect tempo. Timpani has realistic impact. And all the other music with Pictures makes this a real bargain!

They sound good, without the 'edge' often associated with CDs. CDs are a Fourier Transform of the analog source - that is to say a subset of it.

Great value. Great performances. On my krell sacd player, I found small differences between the SACD layer and the regular. The recordings are outstanding. Consider the price and that this is a 2 lp set, this is a deal.

What a treat for the ears!

The Living Stereo series was wonderful then and it's even better now. This hybrid SACD has fantastic sound quality and, thankfully, is completely true to both music and the original recording. Originally recorded in "3 channel stereo" that's what you get here--no, there's nothing in the rear channels of the surround mix but that's exactly the way it should be. Taken directly from the nearly 50-year old (!) masters, the engineers did nothing at all to the sound except digitize and transfer each track to the SACD/CD master. Nothing added, nothing subtracted. And the quality of those masters is astounding--clear, bright and full. No tape hiss. No loss of highs. Just wonderful music expertly performed.

Dissapointed you're only getting 3 channels and not 5-7? Don't be. You'll hear the musicians arranged across the broad, but shallow, Chicago Symphony Hall just as the engineers heard them in the recording sessions in 1957. And those musicians are superb, particularly to my ears, the brass and woodwinds. This is an excellent orchestra caught at its prime.

In short, get this CD! Even if you don't have a universal player now, the 2 channel transfer is equally good, a faithful recreation of a classic LP. And if you can play the SACD layer so much the better because for the first time you'll hear exactly what was recorded and what the engineers heard in nearly 50 years ago.

Just how hard can it be, in this age of digi-techno miracle machinery, to make a recording of a major symphony orchestra that sounds natural? They could do it at RCA Living Stereo (and Mercury Living Presence) in the 1950's with only two or three microphones and analog tube equipment. Today, with all the gizmos, most orchestral recordings are over-processed, over-equalized, over-mixed and blended, pasturized and homogenized into grating sterility.

This recording is wonderful. The performance is magic. The SACD layer is even more natural sounding than the CD layer. Keep your 5.1 multi-channel surround sound, I'm hooked on Living Stereo.