I was so surprised when I first saw…
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Pollock, Rothko, Amperex, and Sylvania? Last spring I went to a contemporary art show out on Chicago's Navy Pier. I wanted to get away from things with wires and knobs—you know, rub elbows with Chicago's better-dressed, sip some wine, maybe practice talking about artistic creations that I usually don't understand ("It's so brutally honest...yet, somehow, still deceptive"). But there's no rest for the weary, confused audiophile. Along with artists, paintings, and sculptures from all over the world, thousands of vacuum tubes had descended on the Pier.
Maybe this is what Dieter meant about ambivalenz. On the one hand, tubes represent a kinder, gentler technology. Looking so fragile and delicate, they're the technological emblem of better, simpler days: Norman Rockwell paintings, evenings spent around the old radio. In fact, not too far from Navy Pier, this very idea was at work in the display case of Chicago's Hammacher Schlemmer store on Michigan Avenue. They were selling a transistor radio inside a nice wooden case with analog dials and a row of faux tubes on top—just like Grandma and Grandpa's!
Tubes are relatively brain-friendly.…
As a piece of art, the Krell looks appropriately threatening. Hollywood has been cultivating this big, dark, take-no-prisoners look for a while now. First there was the mysterious monolith in Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Then came the dusty, post-apocalyptic look of things in Road Warrior. The KSA-250 would be right at home on those sets. In fact, Krell takes its name from the advanced race of creatures in the old sci-fi movie Forbidden Planet.
But the real analogy here is to Star Trek. If my chromed and twinkling Mark IIIs are a couple of Federation starships bringing justice and…
Stereophile is devoted to getting the best sound from a home audio system. But as I have written before, audiophiles don't have access to an absolute sound, only to what has been captured in the pits or grooves of their discs, which is itself the result of a creative process. The playing back and the making of recordings are therefore two sides of the same coin. This is why I get actively involved in recording projects and why I publish articles about those projects, the most recent of which appears on p.50. "Project K622" describes the making of a new recording of Mozart's Clarinet Concerto…
"All of them?!"
I had just agreed to record Robert Silverman, who is featured on three of the Stereophile CDs (footnote 1) performing Beethoven piano sonatas, and, naturally, had asked which of these 32 masterworks he would be playing.
"All of them."
I blanched. This was an enormous task: 32 sonatas; 103 individual movements; more than 11 hours of music—11 hours, 26 minutes, and 25 seconds, as it turned out—a good 10 CDs' worth. I was also puzzled.
"How long did you say we had the hall booked for?"
"A long weekend. If you can arrive on Friday, we can start…
Gremlins & Formats
So we had an agreement. Once Bob and Jim had prepared the masters for all 32 sonatas, I would drive out with my recording gear to the Maestro Foundation's recital hall in Santa Monica. Bob would bite his nails, Jim would feed the Bösendorfer's control PC with floppies, I would feed my Nagra and Tascam recorders with tape, and, other than retakes to cover takes spoiled by that bane of classical location recording, traffic and airplane noise, we would capture all of Beethoven's piano masterpieces in as best a sound quality as I could manage in as short a time as…
So we had an agreement. Once Bob and Jim had prepared the masters for all 32 sonatas, I would drive out with my recording gear to the Maestro Foundation's recital hall in Santa Monica. Bob would bite his nails, Jim would feed the Bösendorfer's control PC with floppies, I would feed my Nagra and Tascam recorders with tape, and, other than retakes to cover takes spoiled by that bane of classical location recording, traffic and airplane noise, we would capture all of Beethoven's piano masterpieces in as best a sound quality as I could manage in as short a time as…
I couldn't move the piano. I therefore immediately abandoned any idea of recording either in surround or in 192kHz-sampled stereo. The challenge was going to be to use four mikes and channels and mix them down after the editing to get a two-channel balance on the CD that would sound sufficiently realistic to serve the music but without the early reflections making the sound too "bathroomy." On the bright side, with four channels I could still record at 24-bits/88.2kHz, making possible an eventual two-channel hi-rez release.
Session Time
I set up my gear (see sidebar 2) in the…
At sessions, I always record a few minutes of the room sound, to splice between individual movements so that the music doesn't fade disconcertingly to black. For interest's sake, fig.1 shows an FFT-derived spectrum of the 24-bit room sound. You can see that almost all the lower-frequency FFT "bins" are below -96dBFS, with all the noise components above 2kHz below -120dB.
Fig.1 FFT-derived spectrum of the background silence of the Maestro Foundation recital hall. Sample rate of original data, 88.2kHz; word length, 24 bits (12dB/vertical division).
However, you can also see…
Sidebar 1: Who Was Who...
Cast of Characters
Robert Silverman, pianist
Jim Turner, producer
John Atkinson, engineer & editor
Mike Kemper, piano technician
Aaron Mendelsohn (The Maestro Foundation), sponsor
David Lemon (OrpheumMasters)
Piano: Bösendorfer 290SE 9' Reproducing Piano
Venue: The Maestro Foundation Recital Hall, Santa Monica, CA
Recording Dates: January 21-24, 2000
Sidebar 2: Equipment
Two DPA (B&K) 4011 ½" cardioids arranged in an ORTF pair, mounted on a Manley Starbird stand, connected via 75' Cardas 300 balanced cables to a Millennia Media HV3B low-noise, transformerless two-channel microphone preamplifier. This, in turn, was connected via 1m lengths of AudioQuest Lapis x3 balanced cable to a dCS 904 two-channel A/D converter operating at 88.2kHz. The two channels of 24-bit audio data were taken via 1m lengths of AudioQuest Digital 2 AES/EBU cable to an open-reel Nagra-D digital tape recorder, with each 88.2kHz-sampled, 24-bit channel stored…