"Historic" recordings of now defunct Philips HT system

Just to mention that there are now 3 recordings of a Philips Home Theatre in a box, that I used as a test bed for a number of years, on my YouTube channel, https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzkx85ez3DVxRAnpkbQEA2w. These recordings are over 2 years old, made on a very limited quality Fuji camera, noisy and highly prone to having the recording circuit overloading - but they give some idea of how that system performed.

There's a solo blues guitar effort, some choral work, and just today added a pipe organ piece, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZ9LQh3UbWU - the latter I was motivated to do because there was discussion in an audio forum about such instruments, which I believe should convey majesty and richness in the sound, irrespective of the bass response of the playback system.

Some history of where I've been so far ...

For a bit of fun, I've uploaded a clip of what I was getting some 3 years ago or so - this was from a well made Philips Home Theatre all-in-one system - internal quality about that of NAD units - which was discarded by a member of the family. Unfortunately, my recording setup was very primitive, a Fuji camera with poor signal to noise ratio, bad automatic gain control that overloaded far too easily - I tried to get a flavour on how the system sounded many times, but the recording was usually unsatisfactory.

Anyway, I just went through listening again to some of those attempts, which make sense to my ears - here is one that conveys the ability of that configuration to project a "full" soundstage, from well outside the playback room: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3b9bk2Gj6o ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yhR_fYQbbg (clip was tidied up a bit ...)

Update: for those not into classical, here's a grab of a bit of blues guitar playing through that system during the same period: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MSE90cOni4 - where the recorder was in the same room. I had major problems minimising any overloading of the mic and recording mechanism, always - getting a balance between that and noise was hard.

Recordings of system behaviour for evaluation - Part 1

Finally! I've threatened to put up something of "better" quality on YouTube for awhile, and finally got around to it! This is something that probably more people will tune into, a combination of violin and piano, from a Decca recording with Perlman and Ashkenazy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfhJII7PNRM. This was just done, the system is in better shape than the first posted efforts, and the recording procedure was more carefully carried out.

The microphone is now in a "correct" position - centred in front of the speakers - so the sound more directly matches the ambience of the actual recording, and, of course the level of the raw capture was significantly higher - only 3dB of gain was needed to bring the peak level to within 1dB of the maximum. The playback system overall was not in a fully optimised state, I just wanted to get this recording out of the way, but it does give a decent sense of what the current status of the, A More Ambitious Upgrade (NAD based), system is.

The details of the previous Takes can be found in the blog entry, A More Ambitious Upgrade - Part 10 ...

A More Ambitious Upgrade - Part 10

Hooray! I recorded a couple of instances of the NAD system playing, in a pretty bad position: single mic, about 3 metres behind the right hand speaker, no attempts to optimise the recording quality at all, just to see how the sound came across ... a bit of The Faces and some old Blues from an el cheapo CD. Not bad methinks, gives a pretty good idea of what it sounds like ... so, as a pure, first experiment uploaded The Faces take on YouTube ...

Now, believe it or not, this is my very first attempt to put anything on YouTube, and I didn't get the settings right - only relatively low quality settings come up on playing ... so, plenty to do to get a far better experience for a viewer. But, I feel the essence of the replay largely working right comes through even in this first miserable go - check it out ... https://youtu.be/-R_mju7q7Z8   .
Have uploaded a new version, with multiple resolutions, and a couple of things fixed,  The Art of Audio Conjuring - Take 4 ... https://youtu.be/acfeJyUFnLM

Starts part way through "Too Bad" of the CD, and then the complete "That's All You Need" with me announcing at beginning of the latter - head about 1 metre away from mic.

And a bit later ... uploaded the Blues combo, The Art of Audio Conjuring - Take 3, https://youtu.be/oWkBJ1v1XTM ... this starts during "Crying", Jimmy Witherspoon, followed by "Everybody Rock", Jimmy McCracklin - this is in HD, which may or may not help the replay quality ...