Audiophiles are often accused of being interested in the gear first, and in music a distant second. Yes, we all love our audio systems, but owning such a system would be pretty pointless if we didn't have music to play on it. Something that Stereophile's reviewers have in common is that, no matter how expensive their audio systems, their collections of recorded music are worth more. So at the beginning of each of the last 25 years, this magazine has celebrated its love of music by publishing "Records to Die For," aka R2D4: a list of the two albums that each reviewer, whether of equipment or of music, could not, that year, bear the thought of leaving behind.
Available on newsstands and the Stereophile online Shop this week is a special 148-page "Collector's Edition" of Stereophile, in which we have compiled all of the reviews comprising the past 10 years' worth of R2D4—some 500 albums selected by 46 writers, organized by musical genre and listed alphabetically. Along with six short essays on recorded music by the magazine's music editor, Robert Baird, there are: 48 pages of Rock reviews, 20 pages of Jazz reviews, 15 pages of Opera & Vocal reviews, 14 pages of Classical Orchestral & Film Score reviews, 9 pages of Chamber Music & Instrumental reviews, and 10 pages of Folk, Blues & World Music reviews. If you bought every one of these 500 albums, you would have an extraordinary record collection.
Stereophile: 10 Years of Records to Die For costs $7.99 and can be found at your newsstand and bookstore. (We regret that the economics of publishing do not allow this special issue to be mailed free of charge to subscribers.)
