In 981103 MMDigest Julian Dyer said in passing:

> In general, it is now agreed that the distortions and inaccuracies
> of the CD are less unpleasant than those of the LP, although it
> took some refinement to get that far.

Just when digital audio tape was around, which used the same sampling
technique as CD, I bought from a audio shop sale an analog/digital
converter.  I was experimenting with ways of measuring keyboard
dynamics from a piano recording (it can't be done from mere level,
because of the power compression, but there's a chance it can be done
from the harmonic spread).  I needed to freeze a chunk of piano sound
just after each strike to feed it into a wave analyser and digital
manipulation allows this.

I remember finding in recordings of the Schumann Op 11 sonata that
Imogen Cooper achieved three Duo-Art levels at once in the final chord
and Maurizio Pollini six or seven !  Each analysis took about 20
minutes.  For a whole roll, the job would be impossible without
automating it somehow.  This was 20 years ago and I've done nothing
about it since.

Anyway, this converter gave you the choice of hearing the music sampled
at 60 kHz (a bit faster than CD) or 120 kHz (nearly three times as
fast).  The only conversion I found at all acceptable was the 120 kHz
rate -- 120 thousand samples per second -- and I immediately lost and
have never regained any enthusiasm I might have had about CDs.

The human ear is non-linear and creates supporting sounds from the
ultrasonic components in music, so it's illusory to suppose the usual
200-20,000 Hz bandwidth is enough.  A real piano disposes of this
problem once and for all !

I wasn't going to say anything about Wayne Stahnke's Rachmaninov CD
because I only have a ghetto-blaster CD player I picked up off a market
stall to make tapes for the car, but had a chance to hear it properly
after all, when visiting "old-recording guru" and Duo-Art maniac Denis
Hall just the other day, who has loudspeakers with grand piano prices.

He made the same points about roll speed that Julian has reported and
then said: "Of course, that needs to be said, and there are things in
the old 78s the rolls do miss out, but at the end of the day all you
find you want to do with this CD is just sit back and listen to the
music."

From Denis, that means he was very impressed indeed !  So was I !
I think I said something like, "With a piano and recording kit like
this, you could get away with anything.  Even a beginner on a pushup
would sound pretty slick !"  I mean, a $50,000 Boesendorfer-Ampico is
over-egging the cake !

Dan Wilson, London