Back in November of 2019 I started enthusing about my experience of listening to 78 transfers made by Anatoly Markovich Likhnitsky while visiting Peter Qvortrup of Audio Note (UK) fame in Brighton, England. 

Peter Qvortrup (Audio Note (UK)) in his home listening room.

Little did I expect it, but listening to Peter's 78 transfers by Anatoly turned out to be quite literally a life changing experience for me, as I had no idea about the magnificence of the performances that could be found in those earliest periods of recording from our recorded music canon.

Some of the greatest musical performances ever recorded come from those early acoustic and electric eras of recording, and once I had heard some of them, there was no going back - I was smitten.

Peter's home listening room.

Today, premium audiophile reissue labels, like Chad Kassem's Analogue Productions, reissue recordings popular with audiophiles on 45 RPM vinyl.

Why 45 RPM? As the RPM goes up so does the amount of recorded information that gets laid down in a record groove.

When you listen to identical tracks of 33 RPM vs. 45 RPM program material, it is immediately obvious that 45 RPM provides greater fidelity than 33 RPM. 

The same sort of analogy holds true for 78 RPM recordings from earlier recording eras, and it turns out there's a lot more musical information in those ancient grooves than one might expect. 

Audiophiles also have a special reverence for direct-to-disc recordings, as they bypass generations of master tapes, mix downs, tape hiss, and other sorts of manipulations and limitations that decrease the fidelity of recorded performances.

Those direct-to-disc recordings provided enhanced fidelity and a deeper glimpse into the music, something that audiophiles were eager to learn about and hear, and continue to cherish to this day.

What we audiophiles don't often consider is the direct-to-disc aspect of many of those early recording eras. Before the 1950s, before magnetic tape came onto the recording scene, those 78s were direct-to-disc recordings. 

Ponder that for a moment. Those recordings of music from the earliest recording eras were 78RPM direct-to-disc analog masters, and there was a lot of musical information stored in those grooves.

Granted, the frequency bandwidth recorded during the earliest recording eras was less than those during the magnetic or digital recording eras (i.e. there's less information above 6000Hz), but what is there contains a rather impressive amount of musical information. 

There's also surface noise from the 78s, but on the best of them, the noise is no more intrusive than the tape hiss one hears on the recordings from the magnetic era.

The surface noise - like tape hiss - exists in a different plane from the music, so after a few moments of listening I tend to tune it out and not notice it. I predict that many of you will have the same sort of experience.

In February of 2020 I told you about my first experiences listening to Anatoly's 78 transfers on CD-Rs that Peter sent me.

I was truly gobsmacked by the musical performances I heard from Anatoly's transfers, and within their frequency / noise boundaries, their fidelity was remarkable, giving a time-travel like listening experience that I found to be very alluring and thrilling. 

After those listening sessions, I started a series of posts titled The 78 Experience - Feeling the Music to share my impressions of music sourced from 78 transfers:

• The 78 Experience: Feeling the music instead of listening to the sound - a matter of the art & the heart! (HERE)
• The 78 Experience - Feeling the Music: Serge Koussevitzky conducts Beethoven and Prokofiev! (HERE)
• The 78 Experience - Feeling the Music: Treasures from the Musical Archives of St. Petersburg! (HERE)
• The 78 Experience - Feeling the Music: Feodor Shalyapin - Dubinuska - Folk and Prisoner Songs! (HERE)
• The 78 Experience - Feeling the Music: Alfred Cortot - Victor Recordings of 1919-1926! (HERE)

I have been telling you about the musical treasures of the early recording eras, knowing full well that for most of you these albums are nearly impossible to find. Sorry to tease you with the unobtainable like that, but you deserve to know about them!

I've had the good fortune to listen to the performances Peter has sent me, and I've played detective searching for Anatoly's transfers on commercial releases, which are difficult to find, as well as searching for other sources of 78 transfers to CD. 

I've been scouring the literature for 78 transfers, and came across an Alfred Cortot compilation while reading Gramophone’s “250 greatest recordings of all time: chosen by 35 of the world's leading musicians” by Rob Cowan (HERE), for example.

The Cortot compilation was on the UK's Pearl record label, now out of business, that specialized in "historical reissues". 

To my knowledge there isn't a current record label that specializes in the greatest performances from the earliest recording eras, but there is going to be one in the future, and that is good news for all of us!

Peter Qvortrup is preparing to release Anatoly's transfers of 78s to a wider audience, so you will be able experience what I've been listening to more easily.

Peter Qvortrup, Audio Note (UK).

Peter and I were trading emails back and forth catching up on the latest goings ons in our lives, and Peter mentioned to me he is in the very early stages of preparing to release important musical performances from the 78 eras of recording, which of course I am thrilled about.

Here's a couple of snippets from our conversations:

"As I said to you at the beginning of our musical journey together, a vast and important treasury of music and performances lie buried in the 78 catalogue, and the fact that the High End industry pretty much completely dismisses this as of no importance is to its eternal shame, what it really tells us is that High End Audio is about selling equipment, not to serve any real purpose in terms of honoring our musical heritage, and I find that quite unacceptable.

"... the idea ... was always to, rather than present recordings that flatter bad sounding systems, present listeners with what really matters in a recording, the quality of the performance itself, voices from a bygone age before commerciality started interfering with the art the way it does today.

"... we are working on issuing a catalogue of these recordings, the ones that I/we feel represent important contributions to the music catalogue.

"This is not a venture that will make money, it will always be a question of trying to educate customers, dealers, reviewers, etc., to understand why good quality reproduction is essential to appreciate the important music performances of the past."

You can imagine I jumped for joy when I heard this news from Peter!

As a first step, Peter has a very literate musician friend who he is trying to convince "... to go through all the CD-Rs and hard discs I have (of Anatoly's 78 transfers - Jeff), to help build a catalogue, which we can then start releasing, with some proper sleeve notes, etc."

Peter is in the very preliminary stages of getting all of this ready to go, so it is going to be a while before the first CDs (and maybe LPs?) of these performances become available.

I really think this is an exciting development. Peter will be introducing us to important musical performances from the earliest recording eras that are largely unknown in the West, so you will be able to hear some amazing performances of music that you've never heard before, provided to you in the highest fidelity possible with the AML+ transfers.

Also, in due time, I want to tell you more about the AML+ technology used for the transfers. "AML" are the initials of recording engineer Anatoly Markovich Likhnitsky from Russia, who developed a special method of digitizing 78s, which you'll see on album covers as "AML+".

These AML+ 78 transfers are amazing to hear, bringing out the full glory of those 78 RPM direct-to-disc analogue recordings, which are in a different league from the other 78 transfers I have listened to from more mainstream reissues.  

Given this is a breaking news story, I don't have all of the information about what is going on behind the scenes yet, but as I find out more from Peter I'll be sharing the news with all of you.

As always, thanks for stopping by, and may the tone be with you!