For a while now I’ve had a nagging feeling that I needed to write something new about classical music. I’ve not been sure what exactly, but something.

So far I’ve already written about how incredible some classical records can sound, and how incredibly useful they are in improving your turntable / tonearm / cartridge setup.

I’ve discussed just how much the right isolation product can improve the sound of your classical records, and how getting a great classical record to come to life might very well be the highest achievement possible in analog audio.

I even pulled out one of my favorite classical records during my one and only appearance on Steve Westman’s show to sing its praises, approbation that clearly fell on deaf ears and might well have doomed me for future appearances.

So, what more is there for me to say on this topic? Well, I need to come up with something, because one way or another I need to get more of you out there to embrace these marvelous golden age recordings and the soul-stirring performances on them, many of them mastered so skillfully and so beautifully as to make these records nothing short of a privilege to hear.

The best classical records are like a tonic for the spirit, brewed from the rarest and finest ingredients by alchemists whose knowledge and skill are of a lost art from a bygone era. When you manage to find the right copy of the right pressing of great classical record, you can relish its delicious blend of art, artistry and technical skill.

A few months ago I had the terrific fortune to hear Esa Pekka Salonen conduct the San Francisco Symphony in a performance of Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. It was a revelation. I was so elated for so long, I wondered if my heart might well up so high as to fall out of my open jaw.

Afterward, I needed some time to process it all. What was it exactly that could move me so much?

Reflection led to realization. It wasn’t just one thing that had wielded so much power over me, but rather a symbiosis of many. The performance, along with my experience of it, formed a near perfect harmony of parts that when brought together became an inimitable whole.

There was, of course, the piece itself. Rite of Spring is a towering achievement in musical composition with few peers, and one which I feel hopelessly ill-equipped to describe and do any justice to. Suffice it to say, it is not just one of my favorite classical pieces, but a favorite piece of music from any genre.

Then there was Salonen, whose command of the orchestra and musical choices made Stravinsky’s 1913 masterpiece sound so fresh and alive as to render it timeless. I was practically holding my breath the entire performance while Salonen and the orchestra seemed to breathe as one.

And what an orchestra it is! Every time I attend S.F. Symphony I think how the cost of my ticket is dwarfed by the quantity and quality of the musicians performing. The decades of skill and experience on offer from so many talented artists is impossible to calculate.

And let’s not forget the venue. I’ve sat in several places now at Davies Symphony Hall and the sound has been incredible at every one, with some parts of the orchestra shining even more brightly than others depending on where I’m sitting.

For Rite of Spring, I sat on the right side of the orchestra, as close to the center as I could get. At times it seemed I could hear the entire orchestra and each individual musician within it at the same time.

The sound was so clear, so tonally perfect and so intoxicatingly distortion free. It was an audiophile’s dream. Or at least this audiophile’s. To my ear, this was as close to perfection in hearing music as I may ever have.

I’m not in the habit of singing my own praises, but the ear I mentioned, the one attached to the side of my head, particularly the one on the right side, is a pretty good one. I can listen to a record playing on a system and hear many of that system’s problems, or the record’s, usually both.

It’s a blessing and a curse. It’s also the reason I’ve managed to build both a good sounding stereo, and an unbelievably great sounding collection of records to play on it. A good ear is an essential tool if one values a listening experience like the one I had at S.F. Symphony, and that I work tirelessly to realize from my records and my system at home.

Still, I have asked myself why someone who has heard Rite of Spring at S.F. Symphony and heard it the way I have, would bother to go home and try and play a record on his stereo? In a billion years, no record will ever convey what that performance did. It is simply not a possibility. What’s the point?

And yet, bother I do. Repeatedly in fact. The point being that if I can achieve at home something even approaching the experience of a live performance, I’m most certainly going to try and do that.

I don’t often reference Michael Fremer on this site, but occasionally, when extolling the virtues of analog audio, he uses an analogy that I do find compelling. He likens the experience to drinking a fine wine.

You can, of course, drink cheap wine, or even just decent wine, but once you’ve tasted just how good a great wine can taste, it’s very hard to go back. And why would you want to?

But then again, we do go back. Don’t we? I mean, do you crack open a $100 bottle of wine with dinner every night? Maybe you do. Who’s to say.

It just so happens I don’t, and not just because I can’t afford to. I happen to find a lot of different wines interesting, and each of those different and interesting wines happen to be sold for different prices.

Every wine has the potential to teach us something different about wine and about winemaking, and I find that fascinating and a lot of fun to explore.

And played on the right system, every record can do the same thing. Especially the records that do so much right that they leave us wanting more.

What exactly is it that we audiophiles are striving for above all else in audio? I suppose many of us want different things from this hobby, so let me just speak for myself.

I want to play a record and have the experience I had hearing Rite of Spring at S.F. Symphony, or at least one that’s as close to that as I can get short of going there and hearing it again. On some rare occasions I feel I’ve gotten close to that.

But to get there, I’ve had to play a lot of records, most of which have fallen woefully short of the high-water mark of sounding like a great live performance.

And I don’t mind that in the least. Those records were and are necessary to have any chance of reaching that mark.

To hear what we ultimately want to hear when we play a record, we need to spend a lot of time hearing what we don’t. Records educate our ears and often point in the direction of what we’re aiming for, or away from it. If we follow their lead, we can make a lot of progress toward hearing music the way it ought to, no, needs to be heard.

In this regard, the very best classical records are the polestars of analog audio. When they’re done right, the records themselves show us how they need to be played. Then we can get on with the business of figuring out what we need to do to play them that way, and experience the joy and exhilaration that comes with that.