(Note: this was originally posted on Audio Asylum a few minutes ago.)
Also present were our ever patient wives, Madeline and Shirley. I say "ever patient" because most of the evening was spent listening to music and/or talking about audio! Big B had brought along one of the volumes from the Naxos CD collection of Ignaz Friedman performances - we listened to the Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2, a performance I'm embarrassed to say I had forgotten about. But my previous experience with this recording had been on the Pearl complete set, which I used to own and where the transfers were not nearly as well managed as on the Naxos set. In any case, it was an incredible performance in terms of "flying without a net", i.e., Friedman took a lot of risks which caused a few wrong notes which, this being the era of 78's, could not be corrected with edits. They were of little consequence however, given Friedman's overall sweep and derring-do. We also listened to the Friedman/Huberman performance of the last movement of the Kreutzer Sonata. This performance could be used as prime evidence by HIPster academicians that older generation violinists used little or no vibrato - it was an exciting performance nevertheless! (And of course other violinists from that time did play with vibrato.) I wanted to play the Repin/Argerich or (for the babe violinist perspective) the Ibragimova/Tiberghien performances for comparison, but I thought better of it.
BTW, this post is kind of stream of consciousness, so if you're losing patience, please feel free to skip as much of it as you want!
Next, I wanted to show Brian some of the hi-res recordings I've been downloading over the past month or so, so we listened to a performance of the last movement of the Mahler Fifth by Jonathan Darlington and the Duisburg Philharmonic on the German Acousence label. There are a couple of interesting aspects to this recording. First, Madeline and I have "consumed" over 70 different recorded performances of this work over the years, mostly in an attempt to find one that satisfies Madeline's expectations. Well, to make a long story short, this is the one!
It was recorded in-concert, so not every note is in place and there are some (very minor) lapses in ensemble. But, as with the Friedman performance of the Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody, this performance has a sweep and a direction which is truly amazing and leaves many of the more "note perfect" performances of this work in the dust. The second interesting thing about this recording (and the whole company) is that the principal and chief producer/engineer, Ralf Koschnicke, is a big believer in PCM digital, preferring it to DSD, of which, if I'm reading the verbiage on the Acousence web site correctly, he feels that the supersonic noise interacts with the musical signal in a way that's detrimental to reproducing the overtones properly. Whatever - but in any case, this is a REAL audiophile recording: the clarity and power of the bass lines are impressive indeed! Koschnicke is not an absolutist when it comes to minimum microphone use - I believe I read on his site that he often uses seven microphones in his recording set-up. But his seven microphones produce a level of coherency that is rarely if ever achieved by engineers who favor massively multiple microphone use! (BTW, My download was of the 24/96 FLAC on the Linn Records site - they also offer a 24/192 download for the same price - $24 - but I opted for 24/96 because I don't believe iTunes can output higher resolution than that at the present time, at least not without some additional third-party software.) I must also say how amazingly well played the performance is - by an orchestra with which I was totally unfamiliar until I started doing these hi-res downloads a couple of months ago. I've download seven Acousence recordings from the Linn site so far, and every one of them is outstanding from the sonic point of view.
Our next selection was also an Acousence 24/96 download, played back via my Mac Mini: the Immolation Scene from Götterdämmerung (from Wagner's Ring Cycle), also with the Duisburg Philharmonic and Darlington.
This is one of those "Symphonic Ring" compilations, similar to the Blu-ray video by the Berlin Philharmonic and Maazel. However, and I hope this won't come across as blasphemy, I thought the Darlington/Duisburg performance was WAY better than the Maazel/Berlin performance in terms of passion and commitment - not to mention the engineering. This is just a super recording, if you go in for this kind of "Reader's Digest" approach to the Ring Cycle.
Brian used this selection as the basis for "tuning" a modification he made to my front left and right speakers on the spot. He had brought along a set of CDWG's for which, as most of you on this board already know, he was awarded a patent. What these do is to disperse the mid and high frequencies (produced by the ribbon elements in his line of VMPS speakers) over a much wider area - 180 degrees in fact, up to 20 KHz.
After Brian had finished his modification, we re-listened to the Immolation Scene. The improvements seemed subtle at first, but there was no doubt that the sound achieved greater coherency than prior to the mods. After Brian and Shirley left, I tested out the sound on yet another Acousence download, the Jolivet Piano Concerto - a wild piece if there ever was one!
Once again, there was the same improvement in coherency, but there was also a greater sense that the piano was really centered and was not sixteen feet long (as is the case so often in concerto recordings!).
Over the next few days, I put the CDWG-modified speakers through their paces, and what had seemed a subtle improvement at first now appeared to be quite substantial. I started listening to some of my multi-channel recordings, such as the Mendelssohn Lobgesang Symphony on the Nishimura label, some Chabrier and Ravel selections with Sado/Orchestre Lamoureux on the Erato label (one of the first - and best - DVD-A's ever released), a couple of Mercury 3-channel SACD's with Paray and the Detroit Symphony, as well as some regular old CD's, including a Boris Berezovsky piano recital on Teldec, and some other hi-rez downloads on the Chandos and Reference Recordings labels. I can now say that I heard only upsides from Brian's installation of the CDWG's, and no downsides:
- the CDWG RM-2's now integrated more naturally with my center speaker (a Magnapan MGCC2)
- the general frequency distribution seemed more smoothed out
- older recordings, such as the Paray/Detroit performance of Berlioz Roman Carnival Overture (surely the greatest performance of this work on record - and I used to own the Munch/Boston recording too!) now sounded more up to date
- the bass sounded better defined - I can't explain this, since there were no mods done to the bass - maybe it was the overtones which were better defined
In all, this turned out to be quite an improvement for my speakers and for my whole system. Of course, you never know with subjective listening how much is real and how much is psychological - but over a few days of listening now, with many different recordings that I like to feel I know well, I'm certainly convinced that Big B wrought a pretty substantial improvement with these modifications. So. . .
Brian, thank you VERY much! I can't say enough good things about the CDWG's on my RM-2's!
