Up to 37% in savings when you subscribe to hi-fi+

Begin typing your search above and press return to search. Press Esc to cancel.

Decca Sound – The Analogue Years

Decca Sound – The Analogue Years

54 albums from Decca’s golden years between 1954-1980, sensitively remastered onto CD and packaged with mock original jackets in a thick cardboard box, all for less than £100. How can it get any better than this?

This is the third of Decca’s big boxes, plundering its back catalogue; alongside The Analogue Years, there’s a broader 50 disc Decca Sound box from 2011 (which is now getting slightly hard to find) and another 50-disc box set published this year to celebrate a half century of Vladimir Ashkenazy playing for the label. The Analogue Years is a testament to a bygone age – a time when audio engineering was undergoing massive change, was run by electronics engineers and musicians, and classical music was a valued subject in its own right.

The choice of recordings is a bit “curate’s egg”, but I guess any 54-strong collection of discs will never be able to provide something for everyone. It covers everything from early experimental stereo recordings (discs 53 and 54 – a Rimsky-Korsakov, Antar, Glazunov, Stenka Razin set – are the same in ‘ffrr’ mono and ‘ffss’ stereo test from the early 1950s), and there are a couple of overlaps between the other two boxes, but this is a good overall set, not only showing just how good Decca were at recording, but also highlights that you could produce several 50+ disc sets from studios like Decca during this period, and still be far from scraping the barrel.

The vast majority of works are from the late Romantic, early Modern and Modern periods; there’s nothing wrong with Mozart’s Wind Serenades and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at all – and they are both outstanding recordings – but the vast majority of albums in the set are recordings of composers from 1840 and beyond.

What you do get in these sets is care. They are made at a time when cutting an album was placed in the hands of white-coated engineers who were prepared to spend time creating excellent recordings… and it shows. Striking examples of music and recording colliding perfectly include the wonderful Solti-Chicago SO/Bruckner 6, Münchinger-Vienna Phil/Schubert Rosamunde, the almost legendary 1964 Britten/Rostropovich meeting, the Curzon-Szell/Brahms Piano Concerto No 1 and more. These are a part of our British recorded musical heritage, and while no box set is perfect, this has a very good hit rate.

It’s worth remembering that many of these recordings were made for LP and are as a result short by CD standards. Decca makes up for the shortfall on many discs, with ‘fillers’ (Decca’s own words), and many of these are excellent in their own right. Not all fit well together; they are not intended as standalone recordings, but they are more than just space fillers. 

Finally, if you want new LP versions of the same, there is a very limited edition six-180g LP set of some of the highlights of the box. Given the originals are now hard to find without heavy wear, and the six-LP set of the original box now discontinued and command a small fortune, this could be a worthwhile investment. 

Read Next From Music

See all
Music Interview: Bringing Jack McDuff back to life
MUSIC

Music Interview: Bringing Jack McDuff back to life

Influential US organist Jack McDuff's 'Live at Parnell's' was a lost classic, until Claudio Passavanti of Doctor Mix and Christoph Härtwig of iZotope could bring the cassette masters back to life. They talk to Sean Hannam.

Max Cooper
MUSIC

Music Interview: Max Cooper

Sean Hannam speaks to the Belfast-born visionary artist and producer Max Cooper, who teamed up with the French spatial audio experts L-Acoustics to help create his latest album, Unspoken Words.

Music Interview: Michael Head
MUSIC

Music Interview: Michael Head

Michael Head (Pale Fountains, The Strands) is perhaps Liverpool’s great lost songwriter, but Sean Hannam found him and talked about The Red Elastic Band and their latest album, Dear Scott...

Music Interview: Swing Out Sister
MUSIC

Music Interview: Swing Out Sister

To celebrate 35 years since the formation of the band, in 2022 Swing Out Sister and their record company Cherry Red curated an eight-CD set: Blue Mood, Breakout And Beyond – The Early Years Part 1. Sean Hannam speaks to the 1980s perfect pop duo.

Sign Up To Our Newsletter