10 Best: Home Entertainment editors pick the best of Chesky Records.

"Call us biased, call us fixated, call us fanatics. We don't care. When the editors of Home Entertainment magazine think of great music recordings, we think first of Chesky Records - and our thoughts often stop there.

Most CDs are recorded with multiple microphones in a dead-sounding studio, with reverb and overdubs added in the mix. Chesky's approach is purer: It records in the natural reverberance of St. Peter's Church in Manhattan, using custom-made vacuum-tube recording gear, a single microphone (in most cases), and no audio processing or overdubbing. The result is a spacious, natural sound you simply cannot hear in ordinary commercial recordings. Other audiophile labels do great recordings, too, but few capture the full-bodied tonality that Chesky achieves. And fewer still have signed such an eclectic array of artists. Luckily for us, the company caught wind of our enthusiasm and offered to produce a limited-edition CD of our 10 all-time-favorite Chesky recordings. East Coast Editor Dennis Burger, Contributing Editor Steve Guttenberg, and I selected these cuts in part for selfish reasons - so we'd have the perfect test CD to use in our product evaluations. We encourage you to use it the same way. Compare the descriptions below to the way the music sounds on your system. Then try it on your neighbor's system. And use it in the store the next time you choose a set of speakers. If you don't hear a lush, ambient sound, with instruments seeming to come from several feet behind the speakers, you're not listening to a particularly good system." - Brent Butterworth, editor-in-chief, Home Entertainment magazine