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LSO Live Recordings

MRC01

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I find LSO Live recordings sound anywhere from excellent to fantastic. I have a lot of large ensemble classical music recordings from 1940s Toscanini to modern, and the LSO Live are consistently among the best sonically. They have big unstrained dynamics, natural voicing with no boxiness, neutral tonal balance, just realistic and natural, a joy to listen to. I play music and I attend live events regularly, and subjectively I think these LSO Live recordings do sound closer to the real thing than most other recordings.

Yet reviewers don't seem to like them as much as I do. They frequently complain about the sonics being "average" while they laud albums that sound worse -- at least to me. When I listen on inferior equipment: in my car, on a clock radio, etc. the situation often reverses. LSO Live recordings sound at bit dead and some inferior recordings having compressed dynamics and bright voicing sound more clear. This makes me wonder whether reviewers really know what good sound quality is, or have audio equipment (whether speakers or headphones) of sufficient quality to hear the difference.

I'm curious what say you all?
 

AudioStudies

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Well it is quite evident that there are many errors among reviewers. After all, they were exposed as recommending a $6600 DAC that measures horribly. I don't want to mention any names, but at the RMAF, I have seen some of them, and they seem pretty pompous at times. If they are that "into themselves" the likely don't have our best interest at heart (at least some of them). It very well could be that their priorities are advertising dollars, and I agree with you -- we need to be skeptical of what they conclude. I maintain multiple systems in my home and the same music can sound good on one system and not so good on another, and that is consistent with the room being part of the system, and perhaps other reasons. So they may be faithful in their reviews, but I have my doubts that all of them are completely transparent. I just recently got into headphones, and found that one of my recordings sounded better on headphones than played through loudspeakers. It has me thinking I should work with the room system.
 

GXAlan

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Glob

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Which specific recordings do you have in mind? I'd be interested to check them out.
 

TimF

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I recently bought the LSO Mahler set with Gergiev as conductor. I like the performances but the orchestra is distant compared to the current trends in recording. It seems like the old Deutsche Grammophon style of recording. I may get used to it and grow in my appreciation of these recordings.
 

GD Fan

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I'm not a huge classical fan but I do have a couple of their recordings since they're in SACD. The SQ is outstanding in my opinion.
 

Kal Rubinson

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I recently bought the LSO Mahler set with Gergiev as conductor. I like the performances but the orchestra is distant compared to the current trends in recording. It seems like the old Deutsche Grammophon style of recording. I may get used to it and grow in my appreciation of these recordings.
Try some of the Honeck/Pittsburgh SACDs on Reference Recordings if the repertoire appeals to you.
 
OP
MRC01

MRC01

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Which specific recordings do you have in mind? I'd be interested to check them out.
Holst Planets, 1999, catalog LSO0001, so I believe the first recording on the LSO label. Also the Dvorak Symphonies 6-9. All conducted by Colin Davis.
Reference recordings also has some excellent orchestral recordings, in the same league and all a big cut above the average.
 

mansr

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I have a few dozen LSO albums that I got for next to nothing through B&W's defunct Society of Sound thing. No complaints from me regarding the quality, but then I don't tend to scrutinise recordings in minute detail looking for flaws. If nothing annoying jumps out spontaneously, I'm happy.
 

Daverz

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Perusing the LSO Live catalog at Presto, most of the conductors don't interest me (I steer clear of Gergiev for various reasons), and most of repertoire has intense competition elsewhere so is not very compelling to me.

I did buy a download of Gardiner's Midsummer Night's Dream incidental music, which is very good.
 

Sashoir

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I have a few of their recordings. When purchased directly, they are actually quite reasonably priced (there is usually a £3+(~USD 3.7+) premium vs Presto/HRA/et cetera).

Their Mahler under Gergiev compares favourably (to me) with the Bernstein/New York Phil/LSO recordings across the board. I prefer some of the LSO recordings under Solti, but I've not found them on reasonably priced digital download, and I haven't a CD-rom drive to rip them (nor a Compact Disc player to play them) in physical form.

Their Planets under Davies is passable, but I prefer the new one on the Chandos Holst Orchestral works series, or the Dutoit/Montreal one.

The LSO Alpensinfonie under Haitink is the best one I have by a long chalk. My others are a Neema Jarvi/SNO one where several members of the orchestra haven't tuned their instruments (which is just shameful and if I ever see the Maestro I'll demand my money back), and Karajan/Berliner Philharmoniker (which is excellent, but I find that the LSO Live recording seems to be more detailed in the quieter passages, at least on my system).

The Scriabin (under Gergiev) symphonies are my only recording (I had some of them on LP when I still had a record player, but that's at least 15 years ago now), so I haven't anything to which I can directly compare them, but I think they're excellent, particularly the 2nd in Cm.

The Rachmaninov Symphonies (also under Gergiev) are excellent also, but inferior (to my mind, again) to the Svetlanov/USSR Symphony Orchestra recordings.

The Suite from Romeo & Juliet (again, Gergiev) is superb, but not so good as his earlier one with the Kirov, which I used to own on compact disc and must have lost/forgot to rip during my purge of physical discs. Sadly I haven't been able to find a place to buy those marvellous Philips CD recordings from the 80s/90s as digital files. Still, it's very, very good (or rather, I really like it).

I'm not enough of a critic of the recording or mastering process to say that they're all technically perfect, but nothing sounds "flawed" in any way: the voicings are all distinct; no mics too close to heavy breathers/rustly shirt wearers; sounds like a concert hall recording (I don't mean that it's necessarily been recorded in a concert hall with people in it, but the sound from the speakers sounds similar to my uninformed ears to the sound I hear when I go to concerts, only cheaper).

I would say one thing (which also seems to apply to 90% of digital file downloads) is that the metadata tagging is horrible. I don't mean that their conventions are different to mine (maybe everyone else in the entire world does it differently, and that's okay), but they are not internally consistent. Sometimes tags are there, sometimes not. Sometimes the track title includes the full work, sometimes not. Sometimes hindu-arabic numerals, sometimes roman numerals,... no internal self-consistency, which makes me exceeding wroth.

I must admit, however, I'm very new to the world of digital music (or rather, I've come back, having been away for 20 years), so I wouldn't take my word as gospel.
 

amadeuswus

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I believe LSO Live recordings are generally made in London's Barbican Hall, which has been criticized for its acoustics. So perhaps it's a tribute to the LSO Live engineers that they can obtain good results there:

https://acousticengineering.wordpress.com/2015/03/09/what-is-wrong-with-londons-concert-halls/

Conductor Simon Rattle (now the music director of the LSO) "has previously been withering of his assessment of the London’s two big venues. He once said of the Royal Festival Hall: 'The will to live slips away in the first half-hour of rehearsal.' And the Barbican’s hall has been described by him as 'serviceable'." -- https://www.theguardian.com/music/2...london-grand-ambition-orchestras-simon-rattle
 
OP
MRC01

MRC01

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Our ears have different off-axis sensitivity (polar pattern) than most recording microphones. And this has a big impact on how a room sounds, because the difference between rooms is in reflected sound, which comes from different angles. So I would not be surprised if the halls that sound best to a live listener, aren't the same as the ones that sound best in recordings.
 

DuxServit

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I only have one LSO Live recording - Faure: Requiem SACD, which sounds great btw.

https://lsolive.lso.co.uk/collections/cd/products/faure-requiem

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