Old favourites of the Classical catalogue

We're looking backwards this week with things that changed expectations and one lies in recording.

In the beginning there was a horn, a great big one that artists performed into, cutting their record and by the mid 1920's the horn was replaced by electronic recording of the session to an acetate to make the discs from using microphones.

While shallac 78 rpm records tended to be noisy thanks to the harsh abrasive used in making them, the Decca Record company in England worked throughout the 1940's in increasing the range of low and high frequency sounds that could be captured on to them.

That with a combination of the new quieter plastic records, finer grooves and the introduction of 33 1/3 and 45 rpm speeds created the High Fidelity Full Frequency Range Recording in the early 1950's improving the quality of recorded sound in the home.

This lead to an interest in obtaining the best possible sound and the hobby of High Fidelity audio we know today.

Nothing stands still and so work continued as the new HiFi discs became the norm to enable spacial information to be recorded to records in the way tapes, developed from the late 1940's had shown adding realism to recordings of orchestras and groups of musicians.

Decca played a great part in pushing the new stereophonic record system that could play the original mono discs making many new recordings often to great acclaim and issuing demonstration records to show what what it offered.

The long playing record era had started an passion for making full recordings of classical music, some unheard outside of concert halls, some falling out of favour too that music fans embraced.

In the mid to late 1950's Decca recorded a number of popular works for the very first time in stereophonic sound that to this day are highly regarded with original lps being much sought after.

Those two lps and others featuring the works of Igor Stravinsky were compiled from the original tapes to this specially priced double compact set.

The same orchestra and conductor recorded many of the works of Rimsky-Korsakov in that early set of stereo lp releases which were equally loved and rounded up in cd sets.

They were amongst the earliest records I listened to on the Ace Of Diamonds and Eclipse reissues on record so it was nice to recently acquire these cd versions.