Peter Katin
I am of course very impressed with what is clearly a great achievement — gone are the crackles and pops of the LP, and gone (in a digital recording) is the tape hiss. CDs are well boxed and easy to store, and I would like to think that 'the best is yet to be' in terms of great performances and superlative recordings. How- ever, so far I have remained insufficiently impressed by both to have more than a handful of CDs in my record collection. I know that performances — recorded or otherwise — are very much a matter of personal taste, but my real concern is with the way a digital recording is
presented on a compact disc. I said that we have now been released from LP noises and tape hiss, but we have also (depending on the producer) been deprived of ambience, which means that after each piece or movement there is a silence which seems quite unnatural (where else would one get this?) and, worse, on occasions the very reverberation following a chord is suddenly shut off prematurely. This flaw, or whatever one wants to call it, is already the subject of correspondence in certain journals and I'm glad I am not the only one to find it frankly unacceptable. However, at its best the combina- tion of digital recording and compact disc makes for very rewarding listening and I look forward to the time when I can buy them without a certain suspicion as to just what I am going to hear (or not going to hear!). But beware of mono transfers — with all my love for the great recordings of the past I simply can't abide the awful flatness that seems to be an inevitable part of a CD transfer, and I'm sorry, but I don't believe that nothing can be done about it.
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