Telarc recording quality

Your ears aren't screwed up, but there is some disagreement among listeners as to the sound quality of Telarc releases. In their classical recordings, their general practice has been to record principally using spaced omnis, which results in a spacious sound but loses some immediacy and pinpoint imaging that a lot of audiophiles like. I also find that some of their recordings can sound a little muddy unless the volume is turned up a bit. And there is something I recall about some of their earlier recordings that they were recorded in inverse polarity and sounded better (less bright) if you reversed the phase on your DAC. All that said, I find them to be one of the better recording companies out there on a consistent basis, and like most of their releases--they do seem to take better care than others in their recordings in not screwing around with the microphone feed.

Brauser, are you referring to their jazz recordings (which I haven't listened to)? With full scale orchestral recordings the balances are generally quite natural as, other than for soloists, Telarc rarely uses any spot mikes, as I understand it. The one exception is from their earliest recordings, where the bass drums were generally overblown, but their recent recordings have toned that down to where it sounds quite natural.

In answer to Kana's question, while I don't have an EMM Labs player, my heavily modded Sony is plenty good enough for me to note that the SACD versions of Telarc's recent releases are superior to the redbook versions. A lot of that muddiness I noted is pretty much gone in the SACD layer, inner detail becomes more apparent and the sense of space vastly improves. I also have noted that the CD versions recorded in DSD are a little less "clean" than earlier Telarc recordings, for whatever reason; again, some of the problems in that area go away when the volume level is raised. In the end, Cpdunn, Tonyp54's advice is absolutely correct--enjoy the music!