The Source

Blomstedt, Gothenburg, Stenhammar, and BIS: Heaven

I'm definitely an audiophile but I sincerely hope that I never devolve into the crazy subspecies that sees nothing amiss in dropping $20K on a power cord that offers only an imaginary benefit to the overall sound of the system. I'm first and foremost a working musician, and like almost every musician I know, it's the music first and foremost that matters to me and less the nuances of high-end audio reproduction.

That said, I have reasonably developed tastes in audio. My hackles rise in the presence of lower-treble blare or unnatural distortion. I'm just fine with making mental adjustments for much older recordings; I can listen to Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra in late 1930s audio that would be laughably bad by today's standards, but I'm listening for the music-making. I'm not particularly bothered by monophonic audio, nor do I have any axes to grind vis-à-vis digital vs. analog or tubes vs. transistors.

All of that said, my biggest peeve with audiophile-dom and its various priests is that they keep neglecting the single most important aspect of fine audio reproduction, and that's the original recording itself. You can't make a silk purse and all that. If you want really superb audio, just fun to hear for its own sake, then you've got to start with a beautifully made recording.

That struck me with unusual force recently when I was researching a program note on Wilhelm Stenhammar's Second Symphony. I wanted to listen to the piece, of course, and although I had a recording of Neeme Järvi conducting the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra (which was Stenhammar's orchestra back in the beginning), I find it tough sledding due to a seriously harsh treble range. So I looked around and found a modern BIS recording with the magisterial Herbert Blomstedt conducting the same orchestra.

My, my. What a difference. The Blomstedt disc is ravishing. You hear the orchestra in its full range but without any of the dreadful shrillness that so disfigures the Järvi rendition. Depth is superior, soundstage is wonderfully broad but instruments are well-defined. The whole thing just sounds like a million bucks on my very good but hardly exalted audio system. It also plays well through headphones, including my brand-new Bluetooth Sony WM-1000XM6 pair.

But it comes most fully in its own on the home system with its Bowers & Wilkins 803D speakers, driven by a pair of Schiit Tyr monoblocks that are fed their signal by the preamplifier stage of a Luxman 505u integrated amp, it in turn fed by the almost-can't-beat-it beauty of a Schiit Yggdrasil+ DAC, one of the finest digital-to-analog converters available on the market today despite costing a fraction of units from Berkeley or dCS.

It's all in the original recording. That's probably 95% of the audiophile experience right there. As long as you have equipment that can reproduce a fine recording with reasonable accuracy, and you have it set up well enough spatially and so forth, it's all going to come down to the original recording.

The moral: $250K for a home sound system is nuts if all you're going to do is play crap recordings on it. Beautifully engineered audio such as this Blomstedt/Gothenburg BIS disc of Stenhammar orchestral works will shine no matter what. So save the $250K and spend way less on fine recordings. Good for the pocketbook, good for your ears, and good for the music world. We need more Herbert Blomstedts and fewer supra-$200K speaker systems or the nouveau riche nitwits who buy them.