Music to set systems by.
By Roy Gregory
In January 1942, the BBC first broadcast Desert Island Discs, a radio programme that has been running ever since. The premise is simple: part interview, part request radio. The twist comes in the originality of the scenario: if you were cast away on a desert island and got to choose which eight pieces of music you could take with you, what would you select? The presenter chats to the chosen ‘victim’, while they work through the reasons behind the different choices. It’s not hard to see why the programme has become such an enduring favourite…
In the audio world, disc listings are as common as their reputations are chequered. Perhaps the most (in)famous – Harry Pearson’s Super Disc List, a regular part of early Absolute Sound magazines – quickly became a price-gouger’s charter for second-hand record dealers, with prices for pretty much anything on ‘Harry’s List’ reaching stratospheric levels. This despite the general ignorance regarding the provenance or source of particular pressings. Throw in the fact that Harry’s taste was distinctly individual and his access to different labels and recordings nationally circumscribed and the whole thing made even less sense. That didn’t stop a whole host of audiophiles spending way over the odds to buy a dubious version of somebody else’s record collection!
Stereophile’s regular Records to Die From For feature was almost equally despised, albeit for different reasons. While HP’s musical choices tended to the bombastic, the collected writers at Stereophile produced annual lists so weighed down with audiophile discs of such astonishing musical mediocrity that they gave the high-end a bad name, adding ammunition to the argument that audiophiles were only interested in sound and cared not a fig for music.
Other titles and other lists exist, but few have the universal appeal their authors often expect – if only because musical tastes vary so much. However, there’s one category in which musical quality whilst important, is far from the most critical consideration. In other words, the communicative qualities of the performance are more important than whether or not you like the music itself. That scenario plays out when it comes to system set-up, where the recordings are very definitely tools rather than entertainment. Like any tool, each recording has a specific purpose or range of functions – and just like any other tool, its specific qualities are reflected in just how easy it makes the job. As a reviewer I spend a fair amount of time listening to equipment. What most people don’t realise is that I spend just as much (or possibly more) time setting-up the equipment I listen to! Like anybody who works with systems on a daily basis, that has led to an extensive toolkit. But like anybody with such a toolkit, there are certain key items that you just can’t work without and one of those key items is the recordings I use, day-in and day-out, for set-up.
All of which got me wondering about an interesting variation on the Desert Island Discs theme: If I was about to be cast away, not on a desert island, but in an audiophile community where I was going to have to set-up multiple speakers/systems, which few discs would I make sure to take – and why?
The three indispensable discs I use for set-up
Different systems demand different approaches and different discs. Different systems also use different formats, be that CD, SACD or LP. These days, some systems use exclusively file replay or streaming, a situation that introduces another set of problems. Over time, the discs that feature in my set-up regime change, depending on new arrivals, new discoveries or new directions in musical investigation. But over the last twenty years, there have been three discs (actually, three tracks) that have not just been ever-present, they’ve been the starting point for pretty-much every set-up I’ve done…
Track 1 – ‘Do Nothin’ Till You Hear From Me’
Duke Ellington and Ray Brown – This One’s For Blanton
Pablo Records 2310 721/Analogue Productions CAPJ 015 ((24K Gold CD), APJ 015 (180g LP), AJAZ 2310-721 (2x 200g 45RPM)
Available in both optical and vinyl formats (as well as a 16/44.1 download – although sadly, not as an SACD) Blanton covers all of the bases. As a recording, it is also uniquely revealing when it comes to bass linearity and rhythmic coherence. Part of that critical nature is down to the brutally unforgiving tonality, especially when it comes to the Duke’s piano, which has a shrill glassiness to it unless you’ve got pretty much all aspects of speaker position and attitude dialled in.
