Toscanini

This week we return to Toscanini's two Brahms concerts in London, which took place in the Autumn of 1952 at the Royal Festival Hall with the Philharmonia Orchestra, then widely regarded as one of the finest around.

As with the concert of 29th September, which featured the first two Brahms symphonies together with his Tragic Overture, each half of the 1st October concert featured a symphony, with the first half adding the Haydn Variations to the programme.

Once again we've managed to bring together archive BBC commentary with high quality EMI music recordings to help try and convey the fantastic atmosphere of the event.

It seems my guess at Richard Baker as commentator in the first concert was correct, and I had two suggestions for the announcer in the second concert, both BBC veteran newsreaders and announcers: Frank Philips and Alvar Lidell. So I spent some time earlier this week digging around various online sound archives for examples of both commentators' speech patterns, both as announcers and in more casual settings (or, at least, as casual as it ever got in a BBC radio studio in those days!) and decided it must be Frank Philips here, thanks to a slightly lower vocal register than Lidell.

This is of course secondary to the magnificent performances, and, for many, we have here two of Toscanini's finest in this repertoire. For MusicWeb International's reviewer Marc Bridle, this Third Symphony is indeed Toscanini's best ever: "one of the most memorable things Toscanini did in his last years", he wrote in 2000. And when the next paragraph in his review begins "Almost as memorable, in fact, as the astonishing Fourth..." you know it's worth hearing again and again. Once again, XR remastering has worked wonders on these recordings, and anyone who loves either Brahms or Toscanini has to hear this concert in this superb audio quality.




I had an e-mail earlier this week which has prompted some thought and a little research into NAS, a storage technology I've started to take for granted at my home, but appreciate may be something of a knowledge black hole for many readers to this column. Here's an excerpt from that query:

Pristine's Netgear NAS

  
Is a NAS is not the same as a USB external drive?
I suspect that most of those reading this newsletter can easily get their heads around the idea of an external hard drive, something that attaches to their PC most usually using a USB connection. It's a straightforward device, perhaps the size of a packet of playing cards, perhaps bigger. You attach it to your computer and it appears as an extra drive, just like you can with a USB memory stick. The drive can be formatted as you like and it'll hold anything to care to save onto it.

A NAS drive is, in many way, very similar. But instead of attaching it directly to your computer (though this is entirely possible), it normally attaches to a network. In the home this usually means you can attach it to your wi-fi router, or, if you have a wired network, you can plug it into some sort of network hub - in a domestic setting, a little box not dissimilar to a USB hub, simply networking together everything that's plugged into it.

A self-contained mini-PC
Unlike the external USB drive, a NAS actually has a small, relatively low-powered computer built into it. This usually runs on a free operating system called Linux, which handles the unit's drive(s), networking and other basic tasks. In my experience, this goes on transparently - you don't need to learn a new computer system or connect the NAS to a monitor or keyboard to set it up and use it as you would a PC or a Mac. Instead, control over the device takes place in a web browser such as Internet Explorer, Safari or Firefox on your main PC, with the commands being transmitted across the wired or wi-fi network. Normally this is simply a case of "set it and forget it" - once configured as you want, the NAS works on your PC as if it were any other hard drive, and you can read and write data just like you do with an external or internal drive.

So why bother?
Well, first of all a NAS offers independence from any other PC. If you acquire a new amplifier, for example, such as those recently produced by a number of hi-fi companies which include network connectivity, you should find it can "talk" directly to your NAS and play the music stored on it directly, without need of any intervention from your PC. (Some of these devices have additional, optional control applications that can run on a PC or a smartphone, but that's a separate issue.)

Or you may wish to use multiple music devices in different rooms. Again they can communicate directly with the NAS drive if they're logged into your wi-fi. Thus in our house we use a networked wi-fi "radio" in our kitchen which can also play music directly from the NAS. Likewise my iPad can access it, as can my son's PC in his bedroom, and my Samsung Android-powered phone.

Pristine's NAS: The PADMC02
In the case of the NAS we offer as a digital music collection device, pictured above, there are two disc drives slotted into the case. The NAS controls these entirely independently of any PC or Mac, as I've just explained. It formats the drives when they're new, and it maintains them, ensuring each is a perfect copy of the other, so that all of the data is permanently and safely backed-up. None of this is "visible" to the user under normal operation - it doesn't need to be, unless you want to go looking with that browser control panel I talked about earlier. All you see is a single hard drive on your system, it's just that it's busy looking after itself so you don't need to. The NAS is shipped with a complete collection of our FLAC files in all mono, stereo, ambient stereo, 16-bit and 24-bit formats as available, as well as other recordings from our PADA Exclusives MP3 collection.

Connecting to a NAS at home
The question above relates principally to connectivity. How would our correspondent best integrate a NAS into his system?

Right now his laptop holds and plays his music. It connects via a wireless Bluetooth* adaptor to an ingenious Arcam DAC (digital-to-analogue converter), which attaches as an audio source to his amplifier. Unlike the external USB system I use, which is wired directly to my audio PC in the living room, he can use his laptop anywhere within Bluetooth range (around 10 metres) and play music in very high quality from his laptop onto his hi-fi. I admit I'd not seen this Bluetooth DAC before, and I'm very impressed with it. (*I use Bluetooth earphones to play music while I'm cycling to avoid being physically attached to my phone - it's like a short-range kind of wi-fi connection.)

Right now our correspondent's Internet connectivity is, I imagine, coming to his laptop from a wi-fi linked ADSL modem - the thing plugged into the wall socket which connects him to the internet. (Or it may be a modem which then connects to an separate wireless router, which is what I use, and has a number of network sockets on it.) Either way, the NAS connects to the wi-fi transmitter using the standard network cable that comes with it.

Under Windows (the system we mainly use) the NAS then appears, as if by magic, in a list of Network items, from which it can be directly accessed or assigned a disk drive letter. On a Mac the process of connection to a NAS is also very straightforward. Once this connection is established you can start to play any music files stored on the NAS, as well as saving your own recordings or other files onto it, just like any other drive. And any other device which connects to your wi-fi network has, in theory, the capability to play media stored on the NAS, as I described earlier

Wired or wireless? Both, actually...
Now because the NAS sits on our network, here at Pristine we can access ours both on wi-fi and wired networks. All of our five office PCs can use it as an external hard drive, as they're all connected together on our network. And as I've already indicated, because there's a wi-fi element to our network, our NAS can also be accessed anywhere in the building where a wi-fi signal can be received. In addition, thanks to a wi-fi extender, I can even connect to it while I'm out in the garden - even if all our PCs are switched off - and listen to music via my phone's wi-fi connection (on my Sennheiser Bluetooth headphones, of course!). The NAS operates independently of our PCs, and is built for always-on, low-power reliability. Change your PC or laptop and it's still there. Add another replay device, whether it's a PC or a smart TV or a wi-fi pre-amp, and it's still there, a small, simple computer dedicated to the task of looking after your music collection and giving you access to it whenever you want it.

So is NAS right for you?
It won't be the answer for everyone. And it won't make your system sound any better. Whether it's worth investing in will depend on your own needs. Our correspondent already has an external drive attached to his laptop, and this may well suffice. In my case, the ability to locate the drive in a different room, where any noise it may make from cooling fans or whirring drives (it's very quiet but not 100% silent - no computer with moving parts ever is) takes place behind closed doors, is another bonus. I have a music replay PC that is totally silent in my living room, and keeping my music on a NAS several rooms away keeps it so.

In the case here of music on a laptop, already connected to a DAC by a wireless Bluetooth link, wi-fi access to a NAS would mean our correspondent could unplug his external USB drive for good, and then move his laptop around the room, unencumbered by extra boxes and wires, which may have some additional appeal, as would the peace of mind of that permanent back-up. In this scenario, the laptop operates simply as a data conduit between the NAS and the DAC - who knows, at some point he may choose to augment or replace it with a mobile phone or tablet device that can do the same job even more portably, as the latest generation of devices probably could. Ultimately a NAS would be then an investment for the future which offers an added degree of flexibility today over all-in-one solutions, such as the heavily-advertised Brennan JB7, or a simple external USB hard drive. (Just don't throw away that external drive - it'll plug directly into the NAS and appear as an extra drive on your network if you want it...)

So is there a definitive conclusion?
It seems to me that what's best about these new systems and ways of playing and storing music is also potentially their biggest drawback: endless, almost infinite choice and flexibility. By comparison a CD player is a simple device - you pop the disc in and press play. What could be easier? (The tiny "computer" inside it is well hidden from view!) Why change? It ain't broke, why fix it?

The best answer to these questions will be different for everyone. For some it's a question of space: our correspondent is moving into a smaller home where he simply can't accommodate a big music collection on vinyl or CD. I know how I appreciated saying goodbye to shelves full of CDs which never seemed to stay in the right order and de-cluttering my living space. Simply being able to find a recording pretty much instantly has its merits too. For others, perhaps foreseeing where music retail seems inexorably to be heading, the hassle of downloading music and then copying it to CD in order to listen to it is something they'd like to say goodbye to - there's no need if you download direct to your music folder on your NAS. Others too will be intrigued by 24-bit downloads and 96kHz sample rates that CD can't handle but an entirely hard-media-free digital system can.

It's another paradigm shift, then?
Like the change from 78s to LPs, and from LPs to CDs, doing this doesn't necessarily invalidate the old technology, nor does it force you into a trip to the charity store with all your old equipment and discs. The two can easily co-exist. But like those earlier pioneers into vinyl, and then digital CD, once you've had a taste of the new, somehow you might find yourself reluctant to go back; the dust starts to gather on that disc collection and CD player, and you begin to wonder whether the extra clutter is still worth it...