Recordings that trounce your system?

I have the Telarc pressing and it is a VERY demanding recording. Only the very finest systems will be able to do it justice. I too, prefer music over cannonshots, but it is a good demo disc when auditioning new analog gear.

A point of interest: My copy (I bought it used) contains a letter to the previous owner of the lp from Telarc's President giving advice on cartridge selection, tracking force, alignment, VTA, etc. in order to play the record without error. If anyone is interested, I'd be glad to post it here.

Detlof and Gthrush1: Your posts made me think of an amusing incident that I thought I'd pass along. In the early 1990's, I was overseas teaching graduate courses for Chapman University (Orange, CA) on US military installations in the western Pacific. Since I taught in the evening, my days were mostly free, and I decided to take a part-time job selling audio equipment for the Navy Exchange System at Yokosuka Naval Base in Japan. We carried a moderately broad range of brands, and among the various lines were Adcom and Klipsch. The sales on most of the gear in the "high-end" room had been really slow, because no one was there to demo the equipment for prospective buyers.

About a month after I started with the Exchange, I was doing a demo of a pair of Klipsch K-Horns (the big corner units), driving them with a pair of Adcom GFP 565 monoblock amps (talk about complete amplifier overkill for horns with 104 db efficiency). A pair of young sailors came in one afternoon and asked me to play the Telarc version of the 1812 Overture - they particularly wanted to hear the cannon shots at the end. So, we cranked up the Adcom/Klipsch combo. The system was being played at fairly high volume, and when the cannot shots went off, people came running from other parts of the Exchange building to see if something had blown up. Then, about 5 minutes later, the base fire department showed up, saying there had been a report of an explosion. I thought all of this was hysterically funny, although the Exchange Manager failed to see the humor in the situation.

The bottom line to the story? I sold a pair of K-horns and Adcom GFP-565 monoblock amps to BOTH sailors. Where they eventually put this stuff in their barracks was beyond me, but they seemed pleased as hell with their new gear. Apparently word got around among the younger enlisted guys that the Exchange had some "awesome" audio gear, because over the next 2 months, I sold virtually every item that had been in inventory for nearly a year (over $30,000 of Adcom gear alone -- and that was the Exchange price, which was 45%-55% below MSRP).

So, out there somewhere, there may still be a bunch of Navy guys groovin' to the sounds of the Telarc 1812. Never underestimate what sells audio gear .

That's a GREAT story!! I almost fell out of my chair when I read it! Did anyone experience tinnitis after that event?!

I've gotta imagine the SPL in that room must've been unbearable...

Great story, SD! I have the old Stakatto! disc, which has recordings of a number of instruments and other things (the breaking glass cut was enough to have my wife come running into the living room to stop me from throwing our crystal into the fireplace!), including a Boeing 737 taking off at an airport. One day I was playing this at a very high volume when the whole system went silent. Turns out that the amplifiers (at that time a pair of ARC M300s) had a tube saver circuit that prevents the amps from blowing up when too much low frequency signal appears at the input, thereby shutting them down. So that one beat my system, I guess. Musically, any DG digital CD from the early 80s will also trounce my system, in that it'll get me running to the preamp to turn the thing off before my ears start to bleed.

Yet another Telarc 1812 story: I was sitting in my dimly lit living room with an Adcom 545 amp driving my old Ohm H speakers. As the cannons went off, I thought I saw a swarm of bugs flying through the room. Turns out that chunks of the foam surrounds on the 8 inch drivers were getting blown out. By the way, I re-did the surrounds and those H's are still happily playing at my dad's.