Mild Artistic Gripe

Hey, listen to this...

WQXR-FM in New York has evidently added to their enormous collection a CD where Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff is heard playing his own work on the piano. In and of itself, it's quite a find. But something about the sound quality of what was heard in Jaguars and BMWs up and down New York City at 9:15AM this morning eats at me, as it should most purists.

I found out after the piece was aired that the CD of Rachmaninoff playing his own work is actually a Zenph Sound "Re-Performance". It is marketed and sold to make you think you're actually sitting in on the other side of the glass in the studio marveling while Rachmaninoff's supposedly extra-long fingers negotiate the keyboard. It sounds incredible on the face of it. But...

Apparently what the Zenph company, based in North Carolina, does is this: An archival recording (Rachmaninoff, in this case) is scanned into a computer and analyzed by a highly sophisticated computer program, It looks for how the notes are specifically played, how the measures and notes are struck on the keyboard, and the findings are saved. The computer is then connected to a Synclavier (Streisand owns one, and you find them at piano stores and such), and the Synclavier begins to play the recording exactly as Sergei Rachmaninoff played them in the early part of the twentieth century.

I realize I am incurring the wrath of many an audiophile by saying this, but this sounds vaguely like what Ted Turner used to do with black-and-white movies in the late Eighties. For those of you not old enough to remember, Turner's company would get hold of the rights to The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca and many others and colorize them--artificially adding color. And they were the most peculiar colors--I doubt Bogart's suits and hats were ever royal blue. My stance on colorization is the same as "Re-Performances." If it's not actionable fraud, it's damn close. And most assuredly, it is artistic fraud. If Sergei Rachmaninoff, Glenn Gould and Art Tatum were to peek down from heaven and see what the Zenph Corporation was doing to their recordings to please finicky audiophiles with expensive sound systems, they'd never stop throwing up.

So my suggestion to the good folks at Zenph is this: Go to Borders. If you look closely enough, you know what you'll see at Borders? LP's. Vinyl. Not very many, but they're there all right. God alone knows the Zenph people have enough LP's in what must be a prodigious collection. I think they should just start issuing LP's and take sledgehammers to their ridiculous computers and Synclaviers. Besides which, I hear LP's sound better.