When I first heard
that PentaTone would be reissuing multichannel music releases from the dreaded
quadraphonic era on Hybrid SACDs, I shuddered in revulsion. After all, I had lived through
that disastrous time when trombones blared from the rear of the room and instruments
swirled all around the listener. Holy Santayana, I thought. How many times are
we condemned to repeat this particular history?
But I was mistaken. It turns out that there were people
who attempted to do things right during the quad era, at least on the recording end, and
most prominent among them were the folks at Philips Classics. At the time, Philips was one
of the most prestigious classical labels in the world and its engineering staff was
top-notch and its roster of artists was rivaled only by those of London and DG. Philips
responded to quad by commissioning four-channel recordings that located all four
omnidirectional microphones in a configuration that actually approximated the locations of
the speakers in a typical home setup. (In those pre-workstation days, it was the simplest
way to avoid arrival-time anomalies.)
The rear-facing microphones only recorded the hall ambiance
-- they were never used to put members of the orchestra behind the listener. The resulting
recordings were extremely good, everyone agreed. The records produced from them, however,
were compromised in many ways. The technology of the early 1970s was simply not up to the
task of reproducing all the nuances the engineers had captured.
The original configuration has been maintained. Even though
modern multichannel systems can handle five channels plus a subwoofer channel, the
PentaTone Remastered Quadro Recordings (RQRs) remain four-channel; there's no
center-channel and no subwoofer channel.
The analog four-channel masters are converted to DSD and
mastered as Hybrid Multichannel discs (meaning dual-layer discs containing both stereo and
four-channel mixes).
The only disc I've auditioned at home on my reference
system is this Mendelssohn/Mozart violin concertos performance, and it suggests that
things were indeed done right. The orchestral sound is big and brawny -- although, as
always with the Concertgebouw, smooth as satin. The soloist seems a tad large, but that
is, I suspect, an artifact of the microphone configuration used. It's far from a case of a
50-foot violinist.
The ambiance seems more pronounced than I have ever heard
from a real hall. When I heard PentaTone's NY demo, I assumed this was because of the
extreme toe-in of the rear-channel speakers. However, my rear speakers aren't
toed-in and I noticed the same effect at home, so I suspect (once again) the microphones.
It is no secret that microphones "hear"
differently than ears. The same finely calibrated instruments that need to be placed so
precisely close to a musical instrument have no problem picking up environmental noises
blocks or even miles away. PentaTone says their mixes use no sweetening or reverb on the
rear channels and the natural sound they have achieved makes this quite obvious. The
company also proudly claims it carefully calibrates the rear channels to be the same level
as the front.
Then why do the ambient-information speakers seem to be too
loud? I suspect the microphones are just too good at picking up the smallest sounds --
they catch that reflected sound coming off the rear wall of the hall with too much
precision. I found I needed to pot down the rear channels substantially to get the effect
of a big hall to sound convincing.
And it was -- oh man, was it ever!
These performances actually sound a trifle old-fashioned
nowadays, especially the Mozart where contemporary practice would have scaled the ensemble
down in size. This will be just dandy with some listeners -- and I enjoyed them
tremendously for their old-fangled "novelty."
They are suave and assured. Vesko Eschkenazy has chops and
style -- although I found his tone a trifle assertive in places. Marco Boni gives him
solid support and the orchestra, as already mentioned, is its usual marvelous self.
It's true this might not be my all-time favorite
performance of any of these works, but they're all worth hearing. Factor in the fantastic,
full-bodied four-channel sound and they become far more appealing. There are no gimmicks
and these are world-class musicians performing real music with passion and style --
as far as I've heard, they have no multichannel equals.
Even better, there's great stuff to come -- such as the
Stephen Kovacevich Beethoven piano concertos, which remain among the best and best
sounding ever recorded. To anyone waiting for great multichannel software, the debut of
PentaTone is very good news indeed.
To all you hard-core two-channel-only music cultists out
there: You can listen to the two-channel layer and completely ignore the four-channel
track, and in the interests of not offending your delicate sensibilities, that's why this
review appears at www.onhometheater.com,
where, presumably, people already have multichannel systems and aren't afraid to
use them with their TVs off.
...Wes Phillips
wes@onhometheater.com
