greg@olivej.UUCP (09/19/84)
In arguing against my comment on the lack of choice of repertoire on CD as against LP, someone mentioned that there are over 1,500 classical TITLES now available on CD. This is certainly not the same thing as the number of PERFORMANCES available on LP. For example, there are (including domestic issues, imports, pirated recordings, and out-of-print but still possible to find issues) over 30 performances on LP of Verdi's "La Traviata", included the great performance in outdated sound conducted by Toscanini and the excellent performance in modern analogue sound conducted by Kleiber. There is one CD performance with reasonably good conducting by Richard Bonynge and fair-to-poor singing by a past-her-prime Joan Sutherland and a very tired sounding Luciano Pavarotti. If you like Sills, Tebaldi, Callas, De Los Angeles, Gedda, Krause, or any of the others you'll be out of luck unless the record companies issue their entire back catalogues on CD, an unlikely prospect. There are also thousands of performances on "underground" labels which are airchecks of live performances. These are generally small companies with limited budgets and have no audiophile status whatsoever. They do, though, offer fascinating and, in some cases, unsurpassed performances by great musicians who never had the opportunity to record the particular repertoire commercially. If these are to be made available on CD, it's certainly far in the future. Therefore, for those interested in good sound, but whose first priority is music and its interpretation, the CD is currently viable only as a supplemental sound source, not as the core of a system. - Greg Paley