Bluesy May [Pure DSD]

Carmen Gomes Inc plays songs on Bluesy May that have been part of their repertoire for years, supplemented with new and personal work.

The album offers a layered musical journey through diverse atmospheres and styles, ranging from dark, subdued shuffle and Scandinavian-tinged melancholy to gospel, blues and romantic jazz. Well-known songs and personal stories are interspersed and reinterpreted, with themes such as love, loss, longing and betrayal. Despite this diversity, the album forms a close-knit whole, in which each track contributes to a coherent emotional and musical tension that manages to convey intimacy.

This One Microphone Recording documents the performance of the tracks in a wonderfully transparent and true-to-life way. As mentioned earlier, the recording was realized with one centrally placed Josephson C700S stereo microphone and recorded in DSD 256, without the use of electronic interventions for balance or placement. The sound image was determined by the physical positioning and movement of the musicians within the acoustic field. A limited reverberation, added via a TC Electronic System 6000 and a Studer 961 mixing console, supports the spatial reproduction. The result is a cohesive recording that captures both the musical performance and the acoustics of the space.

So buy. Your ears and collection will thank you.

A Great New Release From Sound Liaison in Pure DSD 256

Oh yes! I am excited about this. I am in love with this. Why? Because this is what audio should be.

Sound Liaison has released a stunning new album in Pure DSD 256 with Carmen Gomes Inc. It is phenomenal. It is clarity, purity and utter transparency at its most compelling. The sound is authentic, it is real, it is utterly transparent with a timbral accuracy rarely heard.

Some months ago, Frans de Rond, co-founder and recording engineer at Sound Liaison posted on his blog that he'd realized just how amazingly good and natural and true to music recording in Pure DSD 256 is. (Not could be, "IS".)

The album Bluesy May is in Pure DSD 256 - Analog Mixed. And it sounds incredible. I need to tell you more about it.

First, the music... It is that sensuous, slow, bluesy sound that Carmen Gomes is so well known for. She uses her rich, sensual, flexible voice to render that most well inflected, highly communicative, songs of any jazz/blues singer today. And when she sings, she wraps a warm embrace around her band and her audience in some of the most intimate sharing of music I know. Just listen to her empathetic rendering of Blind Willie Johnson's "Nobody's Fault But Mine."

This is an album of music to savor. Sit quietly and enjoy this just as the audience during this live recording must have savored it.

And then there is the sound quality... Frans applies his single microphone recording technique to place his Josephson C700S three-capsule stereo microphone in just the right position relative to the musicians and the room, also moving the musicians around to achieve that perfect balance of room and instruments.

What comes next, however, is new. The microphone feed is tracked to DSD 256 via a Merging Technologies Horus Analog to Digital Converter. No longer is it tracked to DXD. And then, the DSD 256 tracks are mixed via a high-end analog chain, with just a subtle touch of reverberation from the TC Electronic 6000 via a fully refurbished Studer 961 analog mixing desk (vintagetools.de). And then from the analog mixed signal to DSD 256.

And the result? Oh yes, indeed. The result is just gorgeous. It is an utter joy to hear.

Frans describes this well: "DSD 256 has a character reminiscent of the finest analog tape: rich, dimensional, and organic, yet free from hiss or noise. Recorded from a single point, the session maintains complete phase coherence, preserving the natural relationships between instruments and voices, with no crosstalk to disturb the precise imaging. DSD captures every transient and harmonic nuance, making equalization and compression almost unnecessary. The music reveals its own place in the room, unfolding with the authenticity, warmth and presence of a live performance. What you hear is not a construction of sound, but the music in its truest, most honest form."

The overall process is "Pure DSD 256-Analog Mixed," applying the terminology developed by Tom Caulfield (NativeDSD's mastering engineer) that we have discussed in recent articles. Tom does the DSD mastering, including any required DSD mixing with HQP Pro, producing the various Pure DSD and PCM deliverable formats. You will see him credited for the DSD mastering on Pure DSD releases from Eudora Records, Yarlung Records, Hunnia Records, Cobra Records (their recent 25th Anniversary Producer's Choice release to which you need to be listening), Channel Classics, Pelle D'oca, Just Listen Records, and now Sound Liaison.

Fran de Rond wrote a very interest post for Sound Liaison's Blog discussing his rediscovery of analog mastering in combination with DSD 256. To read his comments about returning to his analog roots after spending so much of his professional career immersed in PCM digital sound processing was a gratifying experience for me.