Dear Friends,
The 2024 Munich High End Show was a culmination in several ways. It was my first visit, and now that the show is moving to Vienna, my last. All the luminaries were there, including my friends Jared and Jonas Sacks and our NativeDSD marketing director David Hopkins (I met David in person for the first time in Munich). Jared demonstrated his truly ecumenical spirit by attending one of my presentations showing off Yarlung vinyl. Can you imagine the King of DSD coming to listen to vinyl? He did, and he was smiling.
The Munich High End Show meant much to me personally, as some of the music Yarlung has commissioned over the years (and I was able to showcase in various rooms) had actually secretly been commissioned and recorded with the High End Show in mind. If you want to know what I mean, check out the two Astral Mixtape tracks (tracks 6 and 7) on The Power of the Keyboard or Juego de Relojes by Diego Schissi (track 2 on Smoke & Mirrors: Vanish Vol 1.) Many thanks to Randy Bellous and to George Klissarov from exaSound for serving as the two album executive producers respectively.
Much as I would love to, I can’t claim credit for commissioning J. S. Bach to write any of his monumental keyboard works, but his “French Overture” in our recording with Orion Weiss on piano, featured prominently in the Rockport Technologies room. It was part of my three presentations for Josh Clark and Jon Zimmer at Rockport and Josh kept asking me to play Orion’s opening tracks again for him when he could really pay attention. The Rockport speakers, Absolare amplification and Nagra front end truly did Orion’s recording proud.
So when we were thinking what special recordings we might release in honor of Yarlung’s 20th Anniversary, Orion figured prominently. Our friend Rush Paul, well known to you at NativeDSD, kept asking for DSD tape transfers of some of Yarlung’s earlier recordings, and Orion seemed like the perfect fit after the success in Munich. I suspect some of you heard Orion in the Rockport Room, but now you can hear him perform for you in your very own listening room on your favorite equipment. I hope Orion gives you the same thrill our guests experienced in Munich. Don Saltzman, a listening buddy of mine in Los Angeles and a prominent but infrequent equipment reviewer for The Absolute Sound, offered to underwrite this release after I played it for him.
The ambiance in these Yarlung albums comes from the concert hall itself—from the air in the hall, the wood on the walls, and so forth. We add no reverb in mastering. In this case, Orion and I spent seven hours setting the two microphones, making many adjustments, half-centimeter at a time, driving quickly back and forth to check these changes with Elliot Midwood at Acoustic Image in Studio City, until we felt the sound was “just right.” Elliot was there with us in the Rockport room in Munich to enjoy the results of our efforts. For this recording we used two Neumann U47 microphones, our customized vacuum tube microphone preamplifiers, short (five feet) stranded Yarlung Audio silver interconnects, no mixer, and recorded directly to two tracks.
In addition to appreciating Orion Weiss and Don Saltzman for their outstanding contributions to the art form, we also want to thank Steinway & Sons (New York) and especially David Ida in Los Angeles for making available Steinway C&A 599 for this recording in Zipper Hall at Colburn School.
—Bob Attiyeh, producer
