In this last part Peter Lyngdorf talks about his feelings towards the immersive sound formats versus good old stereo.
Peter Lyngdorf – CEO Steinway Lyngdorf: I still love good old stereo. At home I have a Steinway Lyngdorf S based system, from the principal that the least expensive Steinway Lyngdorf system should be absolutely able to make me happy. If it’s not making me happy, I’m not going to make it. So it has to be fantastic. I only have a 5 channel system. I haven’t gone to 7 channels yet. I will go -in the next year or so, when I have the time- to full 3D surround with the height speakers and everything. I think that going from stereo to multichannel is extremely enjoyable for live concerts. There are a lot of very nice recordings in blu-ray, fantastic dynamic range, fantastic performance. You see the picture and have the sound at the same time. It offers a fantastic experience. When I do a demo of my home theatre, I always start in stereo. I tell people it’s surround, but it’s in fact only stereo. Most people say that it’s the best surround they have ever heard. And it’s only still stereo! Then I switch over to surround and it gets a little better. It’s more immersive.
If you have a limited budget, I would always look for really good stereo. Evaluate carefully what a multichannel system brings you. Unfortunately, a lot of the complicated home theatre systems can be very good for movies. In terms of purity of the signal, the fidelity of the signal, they are lacking compared to really good stereo. With our digital technology and the way that we structure the products, we make sure that there is no sacrifice when we go to multichannel. If you take a Steinway Lyngdorf Model D versus our multichannel system with 78 channels, all of the 78 channels with have identical performance to the Model D. There’s not a grain of degradation to the signal. The purity of the signal comes always first. I don’t want another 62 channels, if they are slightly worse then the 2 front channels. The purity of the signal is the most important thing. I do enjoy immersive sound. If you have the budget for it, I would say go for it. There’s so much good material out there. A lot of blu-rays with tremendous dynamic range and fantastic performances. I can enjoy that a lot. If I had 2 versions of a song -one is in multichannel and one in stereo- I would prefer the multichannel version.
Pentatone has fantastic sounding multichannel SACD’s. One of our clients is the composer Gordon Getty, the grandson of Paul Getty. He makes music. Some of his work at Pentatone is just phenomenal, in multichannel. When you cut back to 2 channels, you’re loosing quiet a bit.
I love multichannel, but it has to be done right. Don’t go for something where you would have a processor with EQ and make everything to complicated. At the end of the day the sound quality will suffer if you aren’t making sure that everything is perfect. We have a multichannel processor, but isn’t just a box. We don’t just do the aluminum part, we do everything because I want everything to be perfect. We don’t let anybody into our systems. It’s not something where you take the lit of and find another receiver part inside.
Visit the Steinway Lyngdorf website.
