A Charlie Brown Christmas — Vince Guaraldi Trio
The follow-up, not as well recorded as its predecessor, and with so little between the SACD and CD layers that I wondered whether they share a master.
This is a review I wrote for SA-CD.net and published there on the 7th of January 2006. SA-CD.net has since become hraudio.net and the old review pages went with it, so this is reproduced from the Internet Archive’s capture. It ran as a site review, and carries a joint copyright line with SA-CD.net.
The review is reproduced as it stood. Only the site’s own furniture around it — the star graphics, the “was this review helpful?” footer — has been dropped, and the ratings it carried are restated as numbers below.
Fantasy · FSA-8431-6 · hybrid disc · stereo only
Performance 4/5 · Sonics 3/5
This is the follow up album to “A Boy Named Charlie Brown”, used in the CBS Television special of the same name.
If you are used to the previous album, then this album will contain no surprises, featuring a selection of traditional and original light-hearted and whimsical pieces performed by Vince Guaraldi and his trio. Two of the songs (track 6: “Christmas Time Is Here” and track 8: “Hark, The Herald Angels Sing”) are vocal pieces sung by children’s voices (uncredited).
Interestingly, there are two distinct trios featured in the album - the trio featured in the first album (with Monty Budwig on bass and Colin Bailey on drums) on the song “Greensleeves”, plus another trio with Fred Marshall on bass and Jerry Granelli on drums for the rest of the album.
The soundstage has hard panning typical of early stereo recordings: the drums are on the left, the piano in the middle, and the bass on the right.
The sound quality does not seem as good as the SA-CD version of the previous album. Although the overall sound is still quite nice, the cymbals seem a bit more subdued on the this recording, plus the hiss noticeably louder. The sonics on this album also sound slightly more recessed, with less “presence” than on the previous album. Finally, there isn’t much of a difference between the SA-CD and CD layers on this Hybrid Stereo album, which leads me to wonder whether the SA-CD version may perhaps have been derived from the master used for the CD.