Richard Pennycuick wrote:

>Coincidentally, I read a review by Jerry Dubins in Fanfare of a Brahms
>chamber music DVD-A on MDG.  He was hugely enthusiastic about the new
>technology, the realism of the sound and so on.  Go back twenty or so
>years and we had similar raves about what was then new, the CD. Go back
>twenty or so years before that and we had simultaneous releases of mono
>and stereo versions of the same recording (although sometimes they were
>different performances, which gave rise to discussion of their relative
>merits as *performances*).  I doubt that the birth of the LP produced
>laments about the demise of the 78.

Well actually...when electrical recording was introduced, some purists
lamented to demise of acoustic recording.  I remember reading reviews
which equated electrical recording to something evil as it was an unnatural
transformation of mechanical energy into electrical energy.  Interestingly,
there was something to be said about the purity of sound from an acoustic
disc (within a given frequency range) providing a certain purity of
sound.

And, on another related note, just read a book "Repeated Takes A Short
History of Recording and Its Effects on Music" by Michael Chanan.  Anyone
else read this?  I was reminded of the profound effects recordings have
had on performance and our notions of music.

Karl