Classical Music Course

Carl Smith, one of Transparent's founders, is teaching a classical music course in the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of Southern Maine. A unique feature of this course is that all the musical examples are from recordings of Portland (Maine) Symphony concerts made over the past 50 years. Carl restored and transferred to multiple digital formats tapes of more than 300 concerts featuring world famous soloists such as Van Cliburn, Emmanuel Ax, Byron Janis, Lorin Hollander, and Martha Argerich, pops concerts under the direction of Arthur Fiedler, and guest jazz and popular music artists like George Shearing and Peter Nero.


For use in his class Carl transferred many of the open reel tapes to a Tascam digital recorder in 192k/24 bit resolution and the resulting recordings are virtually indistinguishable from the original master tapes. The original tapes were made using Neumann microphones connected directly to top quality tape recorders without compression or processing of any kind. World famous mastering engineer, Bob Ludwig, whose Gateway Mastering Studio is located in Portland, worked with Carl on a 2 CD set of highlights from the collection and gave high praise to the sound quality of the best of these recordings.


The sound equipment used in the classroom must be stored in a small closet between class sessions, which ruled out the use of large speakers. Using very high quality amplifiers, Transparent cables, and a surprisingly synergistic combination of easily portable B & W speakers with a compact REL T9 subwoofer, the sound quality far exceeds what is customary in the typical classroom environment and the 31 students in the class have responded very enthusiastically. Many of them have said they have never heard such realistic sound outside of the concert hall and some have expressed interest in pursuing high quality audio themselves as a result of this experience.


The course has given Carl, who has also taught jazz music appreciation courses, an opportunity to combine his twin passions of sharing the music he loves and the experience of high quality sound reproduction.