When you consider the great British conductors of the middle of the twentieth century a handful of names immediately spring to mind: Beecham, Boult, Barbirolli, Sargent, Stokowski perhaps at the forefront of the period that covered both the shellac and vinyl eras. All five recorded extensively, of course, and much, if not all of their recorded output remains available today, decades after their deaths.

So it came as a surprise to me that such a well-recorded conductor as Sargent had conducted so few major symphonies for the record companies. He was widely regarded as perhaps peerless in the choral repertoire, and of course this makes up a substantial portion of his discography. Likewise, concerto soloists felt him to be one of the most sympathetic conductors, with an almost telepathic ability to anticipate what they were about to do, almost before they'd worked this out for themselves.

As with the other conductors mentioned above, Sargent of course also did his bit for English music, and here we do find some symphonic recordings. But pay a visit to ArkivMusic.com today and you'll search in vain for a CD of him conducting a Brahms symphony, or one by Mozart, or Haydn. Indeed their current lists including nothing at all by Schubert, and only piano and violin concertos by Beethoven - and this from a listing of 180 different recordings.

So was he any good at the Austro-German symphonic giants? Well this week you've an opportunity to find out for yourself, with a couple of war-horses of the repertoire, Beethoven's Eroica and Schubert's Unfinished symphonies. Both were recorded in stereo in the early 1960s for HMV with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, an outfit Sargent arguably saved from extinction following the death in early 1961 of Sir Thomas Beecham.

Both were very well received at the time, with The Gramophone's reviewer admitting that he "should never have guessed Sargent as the conductor" without already knowing it. It's a lovely pairing, and I've coaxed some fine sound quality from those HMV grooves. Don't expect the thrills and spills of a Toscanini-driven performance; rather, something far more, how shall I put this, "civilised" perhaps? Well-mannered and very well executed, they're fine performances both.



"Dear Sir, I am confused by all you have written about the highest resolution downloads from Pristine and my iMac. I purchased several FLAC files and use XMBC to play them on my computer but cannot send them to my very high end 2 channel stereo system.  I am interested in beginning streaming music and using the Pristine ultra high resolution streamed music on this system, as well as from other sources.  Can you tell me the best way to do this..a streaming device, as well as being able to purchase and use your hard drive collections. If this can be done, I would be willing to pay a reasonable amount..my audio system uses Wilson, Levinson, Threshold, Lexicon, and OPPO..so expensive that I have not added multichannel..don't wish to have to finance upgrade with a home mortgage." - 11 January 2013, via e-mail

 

How I wish there was a simple answer to this question. I wish I had the time and resources to devote to trying out different systems, testing one against the other, listening closely to the results, and reaching a definitive conclusion.

The biggest difficulty in working out what to do if one wishes to invest for the future, at a time when the UK's final major high street music retailer (an outfit you may have heard of called HMV) has gone into administration and CD sales are in what may prove in a few years to be a terminal decline, is trying to gaze into a crystal ball and second-guess what will be the ultimate shape of music storage and reproduction in the future.

Currently it feels like we're in the curious early days stage of any new technological revolution. There are an abundance of systems, not all of which are compatible with each other, not all of which offer to play what you want them to play, not all of which offer ease of use, and not all of which offer the kind of quality one might hope for.

To make things harder for the traditional hi-fi manufacturers, much of this has sprung from a DIY process of trial and error and self-help that's grown out of the PC industry, something almost unthinkable a decade ago.

A wise old hand of the computer industry, who spent many years at IBM during their heyday, made this observation to me a while back: The history of digital devices has followed a pattern that's repeated itself over and over again over the course of recent decades. Whatever new digital technology we develop it usually starts life as a box of expensive hardware. It needs cutting-edge electronics and dedicated internals to do what it needs to do. Trying to do the same thing on a regular PC or Mac can't happen as they simply don't have the required fire-power to brute-process in software what needs specialist hardware chips to achieve.

But those PCs and Macs - and now mobile phones and ultra-cheap "hobby" computer devices like the Raspberry Pi - keep getting faster and more powerful, until after a few years they do have the fire-power, they can handle the kind of calculations that previously needed special chips, and what's more, and this is crucial: they can do it better and cheaper. Better because they can offer a degree of flexibility and ongoing development in software that a hardware-based approach can't match; cheaper because it's just a load of data that you're buying into - the binary 0s and 1s of computer code - rather than something that needs to be manufactured, assembled and distributed. It's why I now prefer the GPS sat-nav software I have on my phone, that keeps getting better and better, to the hard-wired sat-nav device I bought a couple of years back for my car.

This observation is as true in the world of audio restoration and remastering (think original Cedar hardware - very, very expensive - vs. PC audio software) as it is now becoming in the world of hi-fi. It's why personally I'm steering well-clear of all-in-one boxes like the Brennan JB7, winner of a Hi-Fi Choice Best Buy award in June 2008 and looking decidedly last-decade today. (The 2012 update, we're told, added iPod compatibility to the device. Well whoop-de-doo. That the iPod was launched in 2001 and its imminent demise has been forecast every few months for a couple of years at least as sales plummet seems to make a point for me: buy one of these all-in-one systems and you'll be locking yourself into a technology that's out of date before it's out of the factory.)

A major problem here is one that any hardware-based solution is liable to run into: the sheer pace of development. Hi-fi companies have spent the last year or two busily releasing wi-fi streaming devices coupled with amplifiers. But faster as they can get them onto the dealers' shelves along comes new, faster, more powerful wi-fi protocols they can't handle. Or perhaps they won't play back certain file formats you've got in your collection. Or they're simply the wrong format for the job in hand: a small LED display on the front of a hi-fi-sized separate is simply inadequate for navigating your way through the number of recordings I suspect you and I both own.

It's these kind of consideration which may finally have led some companies to accept that they really need to leave this kind of thing to a device far more flexible and capable than a souped-up amplifier - i.e. a computer of some sort - and get on with what they do best: developing proper hi-fi gear, to interface with your PC or Mac and produce the best possible quality sound.

Thus in the last few days we've seen the launch by British hi-fi manufacturer Naim Audio of just this kind of thing: the DAC-V1 is a £1250 USB Digital to Analogue converter and pre-amplifier. Plug it into your PC or Mac and let it do the difficult bit of turning those digits into glorious analogue sound (there's a new matching power amp to go with it as well). It's not cheap, but I suspect it would fit in very well with the system described in the e-mail that inspired this column.

I'd certainly be happy to attach one to the silent, fan-less, no-moving-parts Windows 8 PC that sits in my living room and handles all my listening and viewing requirements. It runs the same XBMC software my correspondent uses on his Mac, free software which is being updated and improved on a daily basis. The PC's wi-fi connectivity can be updated or upgraded with the swapping of a USB cable. And should the whole thing prove inadequate to handle whatever ultra-high-definition future the video industry comes up with next, I can whip out the SSD drive that holds the software and operating system and pop this into a more powerful unit - though for now it's more than capable of sending HD video down its HDMI connector to my TV without breaking into a sweat, probably the most intensive task it gets asked to perform. (A few years ago this would, of course, have required an expensive box of hard-wired electronics...)

SO if you're looking to dip a toe in the water of this new audio technology revolution, you'll probable benefit from doing some research. Naturally, the Internet is your friend here: you could to a lot worse than visit the website Computer Audiophile, and in particular their online forum, which covers all sorts of questions, problems, solutions, devices, software, high resolution downloads, and much more, in a mutual-support way which can prove so helpful to anyone new to the subject (or, indeed, not so new!).

As you'll have noticed, my preferred solution is a small, silent PC hidden away in the listening room, controlled by both a wireless keyboard and a TV remote (as required), and using a TV screen as the user interface, so you can easily read your artist listings and track names from the other side of the room. This then connects wirelessly to music and video content stored somewhere convenient on big (and therefore possibly whirring audibly) disc drives that keep themselves backed up at all times to preserve your collection. I'd certainly be interested in swapping my USB DAC with the new Naim - the current device is designed for recording engineers rather than hi-fi buffs - but I see from the aforementioned forum that there are plenty of other alternatives out there at more reasonable prices, made specifically for this kind of set-up, something you couldn't easily have said until very recently.

And what I don't want is a box that "does it all" in 2013 (or claims to), only to find it's run out of space in 2015, or won't talk to my new TV, or can't benefit from a new DAC, or won't play some whizz-bang new file format, and then leaves me stuck on a limb in a kind of digital steam age. Yes, it used to be that you went out and chose your new CD player after reading a few reviews and doing some listening tests in the hi-fi shop. Right now it's not so simple - but choosing your next music player has the potential for so much more fun!




Since April 2011 we've been offering a free weekly download of one of our albums as a low-quality 128k MP3 file, and I know many of you have discovered a lot of music through these downloads.

This week we're trying something different, which I hope will have a similar appeal. Each week from today we'll be offering a complete album - which may be a single, double, triple or quadruple-CD length release - at half the usual price for all variants of FLAC downloads. This means a standard full length release will be priced at €4.50 for 16-bit and €7.50 for 24-bit FLAC for a week.

Each week when I update the Pristine Classical website the discounted album will change - sometimes I'll chose something at random, sometimes I'll select a recording because of a connection to a new release.

A couple of weeks ago we broke through the 600-album mark for our main classical catalogue, which means there's a fair chance you may have skipped or missed quite a lot, and I've got plenty to choose from! I hope this new offer might tempt you to dip a toe in the water with an extra full-quality FLAC download from time to time.



CDs: backlog cleared after illness and Xmas

There's been quite a few winter bugs going round here lately - I spent most of Christmas Day feeling grim after a dose of norovirus (AKA Winter Vomiting Bug), and soon after this, our CD department was laid low for a few days with the flu.

This did cause some delays in getting through our CD orders, but I'm happy to report that we're now all up to date and every order placed before today is on its way. Please accept our apologies for any extra delays this may have caused.



Win Klemperer's Beethoven Symphonies

As you may know, we've partnered with the Audiophile Audition website to offer five copies of the complete Beethoven symphonies as conducted by Klemperer and issued over recent weeks in new XR remastered editions on the Pristine label. All you need to do is visit their extensive website at www.audaud.com and register there during the month of January 2013.

At the end of the month the website's editor, broadcaster and reviewer John Sunier, will draw 5 names from the new subscribers and the winners will get to choose from CDs, FLACs or MP3s of the 6-CD set. You don't even need to answer any tricky questions! And while you're there, don't forget to check out the classical reissues pages, where Gary Lemco regularly contributes reviews of Pristine releases, some of which you're sure to have read here before now.