AS Disc

1)Are they still in business

2)Did their other CDs suffer from the problems of the Cantelli releases

3)What did people dislike about the Cantelli releases. I never compared them to my tapes from the NE Brown archive. I was so happy just to hear these musical performances. Was it the source tapes or the eq?

And regarding another thread 4)Who is the real pirate, using the real connotation of the word. AS Disc , N.E .Brown, or Walter Toscanini who buried the Cantelli broadcasts in the Yale University Library. Obviously he did not bury them deep enough. Or the Toscanini family who tried to deprive us of Musical treasures because of a few imperfections which they thought would blemish the reputation of Toscanini. Really now. Even the train wreck in the first mvt of the 1954 Pathetique is surrounded by supreme music making. Is it Toscanini's fault if an orchestra member misses?. Even as bad as the trombonist in the 1939 Bolero. The Bolero deserves to be released from the NBC/RCA masters regardless. One or two or even a dozen lesser performances cannot tarnish the reputation of someone like Toscanini. People are judged by their best work. You cannot hit a home run every time. A great baseball player fails 70% of the time. I think Toscanini's batting average is a tad higher than that. I just wonder if the grandchildren and great granchildren are more perceptive than the children of AT.

Why did the 1933 Beethoven Fifth never receive an official RCA(or should it be Columbia) release after the death of Toscanini? Thank god for the 'Pirates' .

Sorry to digress angrily, but Anti-Musical behavior is something I have little tolerance for. I spoke of how I feel about the disbandment of the NBC Symphony last week. My business partner's Father worked for RCA and was responsible for going to the Sarnoff home every weekend to make sure his RCA TVs worked properly so he would not be embarrassed in front of his friends. His disbandment and the firing of AT is just par for the course of this bazillionaire with no class. I have heard amazing stories.

BTW Mrs. Sarnoff was a very nice person

On Sun, 02 Mar 2003 00:55:43 GMT, 'Ansermetniac'

Thanks for the reponse. The original post never made my own server. Strange!!

Abbedd

And as I recall, most (all?) of them were practically unlistenable.

Some guy on ebay seems to have 'stumbled' upon a cache of them and is trying to hawk them at, what seem to me, rather high prices. I have the Arkadia release of Cantelli's Tchaikovsky 4-6 and I was curious as the the sound quality of the AS Disc set. This answers my question.

They're not exactly 'unlistenable'; but I have the idea that ASDisc was a label which tended to issue stuff that other private labels (you know which ones) had rejected on the basis of sound.

That's not my experience at all - well, not uniformly, anyway. At their worst, theirs combine what seems to be a poor source with terrible surfaces (e.g. that Walter Missa Solemnis). However, they never seemed to engage in any sort of noise reduction, which meant that when they had a decent source the results were often excellent (within the context of live mono recordings, of course). Sometimes they would release a studio recording which had a subsequent 'official' release which sounded better (e.g. Dutton's Walter Haydn 92, which has less background noise and less strident treble, among other improvements), but many of their releases have no rivals at all as far as I can tell.

Not that it matters much any more....

In what sense is Dutton 'official'?

Tony Movshon

Maybe none. Doesn't he sometimes have (legitimate) access to inside sources?

Sure it does. Given the frequency with which these turn up on E-bay, it would be nice to know which ones to avoid.

Why don't you post a question about those that interest you as they show up on ebay?