Deutsche Grammophon sound quality

Great post.
Yes, I, too, know some Decca original vinyl with nasty distorted sound. One example is the Knappertsbusch’s Wagner disc with Nilsson and London. The WG CD sounds clean and amazingly beautiful.
And as for the peculiarity of the RCA cutting, Steve explained some times in this forum.

 

You must be a Japanese.

 

My wife is a Baroque music collector, and she considers DG to have some of the best recordings available. After listening, I tend to agree. We have over 100 LPs and CDs from DG.

 

Isn’t she referring to Archive?

 

No, although we have a bunch of those as well. The DG logo is hard to miss. We have a lot of them. We've also gotten rid of a bunch of DG stuff, but usually not due to sound quality. My wife is a stickler for the performance with classical music, so if the orchestra doesn't nail the piece, that recording gets sold.

 

It's not my list so I don't take it personally, but good heavens the poster just wanted a list of some records with above average sonics. I have heard or owned a fair number of them and obviously some pressings sound better than others and I might rate them somewhat differently, but that wasn't the point. The poster just wanted some records to compare sonics with his collection of DG LPs.

 

The LPs I find mixed. The U.K. pressings were very variable.

I have the first Beethoven cycle of Karajan, and the Kublick Mahler as 24/96 downloads. The sound of both is excellent, as is the 24/96 cycle of Beethoven sonatas by Kempff.

My conclusion is that many of the issues are to do with mastering of the LPs - and Karajan was a notorious tinkerer with the sound which may explain why some of his recordings sound odd.

 

IMO Karajan wanted the ‘sound’ in which he wanted the listeners to find every bit of nuances of the performance. It didn’t matter for him if such sound was natural or not.

 

Interesting that this thread pops up today, I received my first Deutsche Grammophon yesterday, Elvis Costello's My Flame Burns Blue, and was surprised that I had to turn the volume up a lot more than usual. I think it sounds really good, and found it more engaging than the CD that I've owned since it came out.

 

If you want to hear the great sounding recordings of HvK, get these from EMI and Decca catalogue.
Meistersinger of 1970 version
Bartok and Hindemith disc
Any opera recordings by Decca pre 1973 (Boheme, Aida, Boris, Tosca, Carmen...)
Rosenkavalier with Schwarzkopf
Falstaff with Philharonia
Tchaikovsky 6 (r.1955 issued 1980s)
Brahms 4 (r.1955 issued 1980s)
Some of them are as great as the very best of Living Stereo or Living Presence. I’d say that none of DG recording is in this league.

 

Oh, Happy birthday, Karajan!

 

Hello

Someone knows what mean the * or -/+ before the catalogue number on the "made in germany" vinyl labels?


Jean Sibelius - Berliner Philharmoniker, Christian Ferras · Herbert von Karajan - Violinkonzert · Finlandia

Thanks

 

Never the tulip pressings.

 

What do you think of Japanese pressed DGG? I have a handful of them but find them bright compared to the German originals.

 

Bright and lifeless, even made from the same metal parts.

 

No one knows about the * or -/+ before the catalogue number on the "made in germany" vinyl labels?

 

Have you ever head Mahler's Titan by Kubelik? That's got to be the biggest offender. I spent good money in Taiwan, all on Japanese-pressed DGG.

 

good to know. thanks!

 

I think the Nonesuch label is greatly under appreciated. Which is great. It's very easy to find them cheap. Many of them are very fine recordings.

 

Yes, the DG covers are particularly prone to splitting at the seems, but, happily, they are among the easiest to repair invisibly and permanently. Go to your local art supply store and buy a small bottle of PVA glue. This is the glue that high-end bookbinders and collage artists use. It is acid free, stable, and permanent. Just draw a fine line of glue along one side of the split and press under books for about an hour and the cover will be as good as new. If the split is bad, it's easiest to break the original glue all the way and then to reglue the entire edge.

 

Here's a perspective on the sound of DG pressings that people reading this might find interesting. Gives a good overview of how covers and labels changed during the early period.
Deutsche Grammophon Stereo LPs

 

Tulip label. Both the above and this one.

 

What year is this? My Sacre of choice is the Solti Chicago Symphony, but I bet the Karajan is good as well.

 

There are some excellent masterings and pressings on DG. They're usually the earlier releases, on the tulip label.

The very early releases - in the super hard, heavy cardboard "sleeves" - which are almost like boxes - are the quietest.

Here's one:
Mono, also available in stereo.




Gotta love that tulip label.



I was dismayed at the amount of tics on many of them, though.
And, the surprisingly muddy sound on more than a few.
German pressings on other labels are flawless in my experience.

I attributed the poor sounding releases to my turntable and cart.
A B&O RX, with a 1K cartridge - the moving magnet, fine line stylus MMC2.
It picks up every sparkling detail on good recordings - as it should at that price - even on a B&O RX table.

The MMC2 just didn't seem to like DG pressings, I thought. Maybe I was wrong about that...