This video is essential for not just Pavarotti’s fan but every classical listener. Just miracle in every way.
The best place to start is his 1968 recital for Decca (especially if you are not already an opera fan and listening to a complete opera is a challenge). Otherwise, the recordings (complete operas) already mentioned are great, I would add two more recomendations where you can hear his voice in his finest youthful glory - "L'amico Fritz", recorded for EMI, and "La fille du régiment" on Decca.
Muza Rubackyte is my favorite complete recording of Annees de Pelerinage! Why would it have libretto?
Yeah it doesn't have any libretti, they're compositions (three books) for solo keyboard. IMHO some of Liszt's best.
Ahh I'm sorry I associate libretti with texts for operas, cantatas, oratorios, etc. There is indeed a booklet for that has some information on the works, but for $20 that is really a great deal for a quite hard to find set. I can send you a PDF when I am back at my regular house.
I've heard more superficially virtuoso performances, but few match his weighty, majestic playing. Superb sound.
Entire collection? Hardly. I'm probably resting between 50% and 60% ripped. Unfortunately, what gets you is that, should you find something later that you want to go back and correct in all of your previous rips, you've not only got to stop going forward, but you have to find all of the mistakes in your past rips... For example, I've noticed that the artwork I've pulled from the web has, by and large, been low-res or poorly cropped, scanned at an angle, etc. Where possible, I've been going back and scanning my own artwork in higher resolution. Needless to say, this is time-consuming. Still, manage five discs a day and that adds up over time (I'm not that disciplined, it's very feast and famine). Likewise, I realized ages ago that my decision to use lower case letters for shorter verbs ("is" being a prime offender) really scans poorly and looks improper to my eyes, so those verbs often crop up in older rips with incorrect title case based on the rules I'm trying to apply going forward. You may not be nearly as anal retentive as I am going into this! What helps overall is that I have a DAC that is designed for recording attached to my computer which directly passes through anything plugged into it to my Emotiva monitors. What this means is that I can do whatever I want with the optical drives attached to my PC (which is where my listening mostly takes place anyway) and not rely on my PC for direct playback. I just adapt the outputs from my old Technics CD player to run into it and I'm off to the races. This is also handy when doing a fresh Windows install and the like. Basically, I'm spoiled for choice when it comes to listening. I have a portable player for the road, Plex to stream my rips on the road without being at the mercy of the Spotify programming managers or rights holders, a PC with digitized rips when I just want to throw my collection into the DJ shuffle from hell (interesting with the range of genres I have on tap), or just a CD player run through good speakers. It's work, but it's also something I can put to work for others. My roommates, for example, frequently take advantage of the server and my curation of the collection. I satisfy myself that this saves me from being a lowly hoarder with obsessive-compulsive curation tendencies!
All my CDs have been ripped but I still have SACDs and BluRays to put in the hopper. What sort of mistakes? Ripping errors or metadata problems?
Some more Shost. I'd listened to the excellent disc of cello concertos by Heinrich Schiff dir. Maxim Shostakovich a few weeks ago; I thought I'd revisit the rest of this collection, even if much of it's miscellany. I might even listen to those Barshai "chamber symphonies". Shostakovich: CONCERTOS, ORCHESTRAL SUITES, CHAMBER SYMPHONIES (Decca, 9cd)
I doubt I want to bother with ripping my another music collection to the computer or some music streamer. It is just too much work. After all, the playback equipment like CD/SACD player and turntable are meant to play back your music. Even in hi-res format, the FLAC files will not sound better than the original CD's ...
Spotify is the ultimate answer since it will be a matter of time before it will start streaming hi-res ... I like the @bluemooze approach of mixing in Spotify listening with the old-fashioned playback. Ripping only my favorite CD's should be my approach.
Until I discovered this album, I did not believe classical music in monaural sound could sound so beautiful. This record has a wonderful sound that owes nothing to any other erudite music album recorded in stereo. It was recorded in April 1951, released in 1953 and has a sound quality that is timeless.
It is supposed to be the leading music streaming service, even ahead of Apple music since it is platform-agnostic. It runs on PC, Mac, Android and iOS ...
The Mercury engineers have always been top notch. The CD sounds great and has Bartok's Music for SPC as well.
I know you didn’t ask me directly but what I am finding frustrating is errors in metadata like misspellings, incorrect dates, titles, completely missing fields and mostly wrong cover art. One CD I ripped to my Bluesound vault returned a photo of a CD sitting on a table. That’s the best they could do?
Fortunately, ripping errors are more or less removed from the equation courtesy of secure rip via dBpoweramp. With iTunes, on the other hand.. Let's say, those were dark days. What it basically amounts to is metadata issues from "user error." Coming up with a consistent naming scheme when song and album titles don't always adhere to the rules of "title case" can be tricky and it's basically down to how I'm comfortable looking at this stuff. Unfortunately, as I go, I end up finding things that grate over time (the capitalization of short verbs I mentioned before being a big one) which didn't seem so big a deal at the time. The primary allure (for me) is that I have access to whatever I've ripped anywhere that I have unfiltered internet access or cellular reception. Granted, there are some sound quality trade-offs due to the tech that Plex uses, but nothing that totally compromises the experience, say, in the car. Put another way, while it's nice having the discs at home, it's nice not needing to take them on the road or to the office to hear their contents. I'll cop to it though - if I were retired, I'd probably bag the whole enterprise because there'd be no great need or appeal to having the entire collection available "on the go."
