Falling Sales mean No New Recordings That’s why it’s become more or less impossible for record companies to make new classical recordings. Certainly, the big-budget productions – major operatic projects or big symphonic cycles – are now (almost) a thing of the past. It’s sad. But really you can’t blame the record companies for not […]
Author: Jimmy Hughes
Found 15 results
Jimmy’s Black Vinyl Pension Fund… One Saturday, as I walked out with maybe 20 or 30 LPs, the manager said to me ‘That’s your pension fund…’ His words struck a chord. Although I bought my records to love keep and cherish forever, the prospect of a day dawning sometime in the future when I’d be […]
Prices Only Go One Way – Don’t They? If you’re of a certain age, you may still have a misguided notion that price is a one-way street. Since the end of the Second World War, we’ve lived through a long period of near constant inflation. Prices only ever went one way – up! You were […]
Madness – Welcome to the House of Vinyl As a collector myself, I’ve long believed that ‘collecting’ (like any addiction) is a sort of madness. For some unfathomable reason, you become convinced that certain things are worth far more than they really are. It’s not helped by idiot reviewers raving over certain discs as though […]
Hi-Fi Nerds have long been the butt of jokes. Our obsession with sound quality is seen as something suspect and even perhaps slightly unhealthy. Almost fifty years ago the comedy due Flanders and Swann wrote A Song of Reproduction which affectionately (?) ridiculed the man whose sole interest was high fidelity sound, and ‘…never did […]
Worthless As I look around my house and view vast number of shelves, all heaving with ‘worthless’ LPs and CDs, I can see the benefit of such an approach. You’re freer and less shackled. I sometimes think about moving house, but can’t face the prospect of shifting all those records. It’s not just a question […]
I was shocked! I mean, as anyone who heard the Perlman/Ashkenazy Decca LP when it was first released has to agree, this recording set new standards at the time. When I first encountered it, it quite literally blew my socks off. A new era in recorded sound had arrived. At least, that’s how it seemed. […]
Back in the ‘70s, when I worked in hi-fi retail, I bought the EMI 3LP reissue of Otto Klemperer’s mono Beethoven recordings from the 1950s. I then made the mistake of playing one of the discs in the shop. Bad move. Customers and staff started pulling faces at the ‘poor’ quality of the sound. And, […]
Reassuringly Expensive. The Solti Decca Wagner Ring cycle in the big wooden presentation box (Ring 1-22) was like that. In the mid ‘70s it retailed for about £49 – at a time when I earned around £30 a week before tax. There it was, this magnificent edifice – ‘The Greatest Achievement in the History of […]
The Keen Collector (RIP). As a species, the ‘collector’ is, I think, a dying breed. This is not only reflected in the reduced sales of classical LPs and CDs, but also things like Cameras, Books, and other collectibles. My wife notices it with vintage Jewellery. People don’t collect the way they once did. The ‘value’ […]
The Bargain that Never Was. Back in the early 1990s I bought the Philips Mozart Edition on subscription from Britannia at £6.99 per disc. At the time, I thought £6.99 per disc was a keen price. All told, the complete edition cost me well over £1,000. And now? Today, the Philips Mozart edition can be […]
Every Classical Tune You’ll Ever Want. Why fill your house with LPs, CDs, or DVDs when you can have all you might ever want to listen to or watch at the touch of a button? Indeed, if you believe the title of one classical compilation disc, all the classical tunes you’ll ever want can be […]
A few days ago I compared Itzhak Perlman’s 1975 Decca recording of Beethoven’s Kreutzer violin sonata with the 1961 set on DG played by Wolfgang Schneiderhan – both on CD. As always, the Perlman recording sounded fabulous; big and full, with beautiful depth and spaciousness, yet plenty of body and presence. The piano tone was […]
Despite a few dissenting voices, Valves were History. Indeed, the ‘comeback’ of the valve amplifier (which in the UK started with the Michaelson and Austin TVA-1 integrated) was something quite remarkable and virtually without precedent. For while there were a few diehard listeners who preferred 78s to LPs, or Mono to Stereo, there was never […]
Today’s Hi-Fi is Better than Yesterday’s. (Possibly) If I may be permitted a dangerously broad and rather sweeping generalisation, most hi-fi systems today – from the pretty basic, to state of the art – give far more evenly-balanced results than those of (say) twenty or thirty years ago. That’s certainly so in my case. For […]