Capriccio Stravagante.

Capriccio Stravagante, Volume 1 (music by Carlo Farina, Girolamo Frescobaldi, Francesco Turini, and others). The Purcell Quartet and His Majesty's Sagbutts and Cornetts. Recorded in 1998 and 2000, at St. Judes Hall, Hampstead, London. Engineer: Ben Connellan. 68+ Minutes. Chandos 0651.

Small-group recordings like this can be very exciting to listen to, and this one was no exception. The sound was clean, vibrant, and transparent, as one might expect from Chandos, with a very good sense of depth and imaging. The listening position was close-up, as it should be. I tried this material with Dolby Pro Logic decoding (center level backed off -3 dB below the set-up reference), and the result was excellent localization of the performers from off-axis. As I have noted in the past, sticking to two-channel listening when sitting anywhere but the centered-up sweet spot tends to skew the soundstage, and using some kind of derived, center-steering system, with the center level set up properly, will usually solve the problem if the center speaker is a good one and set up at the right height. As was usually the case with my DSP-A1 surround processor, the Classical/Opera mode appeared to offer the best compromise between intimacy and surround-sound realism.