Opinion

For months and years now, as I write this, pearls from one of the more amazing record collections of our time have been quietly trickling out on eBay. Well, not so quietly.

They’ve been plucked from the 30,000 albums amassed by Classic Records founder Michael Hobson, who ran the respected audiophile label from 1994 until 2010, when he sold it to Chad Kassem of Acoustic Sounds. Anyone on the Classic Records mailing list will have received weekly bulletins listing the latest albums to look for.

This ‘thinning’ of the ‘Michael Hobson Private Collection’ follows earlier sales from his archive that offered the carefully graded first-stamper copies of Classic Records titles that Hobson had kept for himself. Finally, in 2021, Hobson auctioned the best of these, his #1 copies, as a complete collection.

Must-own music

Classic Records had its origins in the New York scene of the early 1990s, when Hobson was running his high-end hi-fi store, Hobson Ultimate Sound.

At that time, Compact Disc had yet to win the hearts and minds of audiophiles, and in America high-end audio was still firmly based on vinyl. Back then, audiophiles were persuaded that they had to own certain peerless classical LPs, put out years earlier by Mercury and RCA. But with vinyl virtually discarded by the music industry as far as classical music was concerned, those iconic recordings were hard to come by.

Hence the impetus for Classic Records. Hobson’s original business partner was fellow enthusiast Ying Tan, but Ying left after a time to establish his own Groove Note label, with a focus on original music rather than reissues.

In the 2021 YouTube video Hobson Meets Kassem..., Hobson explains that though he wasn’t the first to offer classical audiophile reissues, he did it in a way that hadn’t been done before. One inspiration, he says, was Athena’s release of Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances by the Dallas Symphony, a Vox recording. And Chesky Records had produced audiophile issues of RCA’s Scheherazade and Pines Of Rome with Reiner and the Chicago Symphony. But what collectors and audiophiles wanted (and didn’t get with the Chesky releases) was the original artwork. Says Hobson: ‘They wanted to think that they were buying something in 1961 or 1962 as an original’.

So Hobson struck a deal with RCA for a programme of 20 titles, resplendent in their original ‘Living Stereo’ sleeve art, and of course mastered from the original tapes. The first two, launched at the Las Vegas CES in 1994, were Reiner’s Also Sprach Zarathustra and Gaîté Parisienne with Fiedler and the Boston Pops.

Classic went on to reissue hundreds of titles covering other genres as well as classical, introducing 45rpm versions and new vinyl formulations along the way.

Stamp collecting

One of Hobson’s RCA favourites is the Royal Ballet Gala Performances double album, recorded with Ansermet in London in 1959. He’d sold his original of this ‘to a nice German guy’ for $1800 to help fund the start-up of Classic Records. As with other Classic titles, Acoustic Sounds’ Analogue Productions label now offers its own version, in this case making new stampers from Classic’s metal mothers. Even so, a recent eBay listing asked $2000 for a Classic Records original.

As for Scheherazade, if you want to find out what all the fuss is about without investing too much, HDTT (High Definition Tape Transfers) will sell you its Scheherazade ‘needle drop’, a DSD256 transcription of an original RCA ‘White Dog’ vinyl. I don’t own any RCA ‘White Dogs’ or ‘Shaded Dogs’. But I do have lots of the Victrolas, RCA’s own budget reissues of the hallowed ‘Living Stereo’ titles. I won’t be parting with those.