While I maintain that the SACD medium is far and away the best out there, a disc that's an SACD isn't any guarantee that it's going to be the best simply because it's an SACD. If the recording engineer(s) don't properly utilize good mikes, and place them carefully, the result is still going to be fair to mediocre, regardless of the vast potential of the recording medium, no matter which one is used.

One of the very first CD's I purchased (in 1984) was Tchaikovsky's 1st and 3rd piano concertos played by Victoria Postnikova along with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra conducted by her husband Gennadi Rozhdestvensky on London. Everything about the disc is first rate, despite its being an early CD, many of which were characterized by excessive midrange glare, steely sounding strings, and little or no depth. Unfortunately, the finale of the 3rd concerto is marred by annoying ticks, and skipping. No CD player I've ever owned has been able to play this piece without trouble (including my newest, the Marantz SA-8001). The disc is no longer available anywhere (believe me, I checked !), so I had to try another tactic.

I looked up SACD's of the 3rd concerto, and found one on Naxos, featuring an entirely Russian ensemble and ordered it. As soon as it started playing, I was disappointed - very disappointed. While the performers are all uniformly excellent, I can only wonder what the recording engineers were thinking when they placed the orchestra seemingly behind, and only to the left of the piano - just about nothing comes out of the right speaker! There are little dynamics, and the orchestra is never loud enough. The result would have earned the recording engineer a solid "F" if rated by his peers.

While I can finally hear the 3rd concerto to its conclusion, without any skipping, the sound of this recording, and the truly odd and genuinely lousy imaging makes it a less than wholly pleasant experience. When I took the 24 year-old CD and put it in my player, it was as if everything suddenly became alive, putting the Naxos SACD to shame - hardly an enthusiastic endorsement for a Naxos SACD.

One can only wonder how much better this SACD could have sounded had one, or several, of Telarc's highly respected engineers done the engineering for Naxos. Since that didn't happen, one can only guess.