Listening to this really fun and interesting Gershwin stuff - hearing the Concerto in F in the smaller orchestration is great - beautifully played, too. Really enjoying it.
And I tried out my first four SACD discs. A bit of a scare when using the newer Oppo - the receiver would not lock to the SACD encoder and I couldn't get any sound. So, I put it in the older Oppo and that worked fine. And holy moley on rye they sound absolutely amazing. The first was the Howard Hanson symphony one and two disc, one of those Mercury Living Presence CDs - well, it blew me away - absolutely stunning sounding. Same with the three Living Stereo releases from RCA - stunning clarity spread across three channels. Now, interestingly, these SACD things have two layers - one for the SACD encode and the other for standard playback on a CD player. In the case of the three Living Stereo SACD discs, the CD layer sounded much better than the previous CDs. Whereas on the Hanson, the CD layer sounded exactly like the older CD and NOTHING like the SACD, which was disappointing. The SACD has spacious sound, not too dry as some of these Mercury things are - whereas the CD is dry as a bone.
