[78-L] CBS Great Performances

[Stewart, Joseph R]

Don Chichester asked:
For years I've been picking up these CBS LPs at thrift shops.  What is the opinion of their sound?  Are they well processed?

I think they'd be excellent buys at thrift-shop prices.  We had tons of 'em at KSMU in the pre-CD era, and they always seemed to be decent enough remaster jobs and pretty well pressed--often better quality than CBS's lowest-price reissue series, Odyssey, at any rate.  The Great Performances series may not have the "collectability" of original "6-eye" and "2-eye" Columbia Masterworks gray-label pressings of the same recordings, but I honestly doubt most of the original LPs actually sounded all that much better.  (It IS Columbia we're talking about, after all.) Needless to say, the performances (Bernstein, Szell, Ormandy, Walter, Stern, Gould et al.) are top-notch.  

Randy Stewart
Arts Producer
KSMU
901 S. National
Springfield MO 65897