Can you imagine what it would be like to have a Steinway piano and violin in your listening room? ...Both made of the wood from this earth and free of the parasitic contamination of transistors, microprocessors, plastics and electricity and amplification?  



Such an experience transcends even the live event because the illusion of reality is so overwhelmingly strong that even though it is being reproduced in your listening room, it is somehow still completely real.  How, you ask?

Well, if you've been following the steady upgrades to the UltraAnalogue recording and playback process you know that a new level of fidelity has been achieved.

Some new tapes from UltraAnalogue now featuring this ultra refined level of playback are now available on their website!

These new recordings have become my personal reference for absolute purity in analogue recordings. No other LP or Tape that I own from a technical sound quality perspective is this refined, therefor it raises the benchmark to a new level.  

Make no mistake about the fact that having such refinement and perfection of recording is a complete waste of time without musicians that are equally exceptional. No one wants a holy grail recording of something that's not impressive sounding to begin with. It only makes sense to match the worlds best live 2 channel direct to tape recording chain with some of the world's best musicians.  While I have never shaken their hands, Tatsuki Narita & Yun-Yang Lee are simply mind numbingly good at what they do.  I feel like I know them both because their presence was felt during the playback of the tape.

As a result of this type of refinement, the emotion of the music is communicated in a way that moves well beyond what is possible when watching the videos! That's correct, the powerful visual of seeing these performances on video can not compete emotionally with hearing only the sound from our tape machines... and that is saying a lot because we all know that video will make mid-fi sound much better than it actually is and a YouTube digital compressed video is mid-fi..


The first of these new tapes I had the pleasure of experiencing contained Beethoven Violin Sonata #8 and Sararsate Zapateado & Meditation.  Playful, Dynamic, Delicate.  I had to listen to this tape three times back to back, then took a break to let it sink in and then spun it one more time before bed. It's that good.

The second tape I enjoyed was Zigeunerweisen and Brahms Hungarian Dances, specifically Zigeunerweisen is paired with Beethoven Violin Sonata #3 and Brahms Dances is paired with Beethoven Violin Sonata #5 (Spring).

These are fun pieces to listen to and exceptional for anyone with a short classical attention span. Again, I have listened to this reel 6 times so far, and just beginning to remember the music on it having been so completely distracted by the fidelity.  I mean, when something sounds REAL in your listening room and it's not there, well, that's pretty distracting so you have to listen to the tapes many many many times and it's certain to be the most fun you've ever had when that happens.

These recordings are so over the top good, with the blackest inky backgrounds that when the violin goes soft and subtle it does so in such a contrast to the black background that it's power is increased not diminished. It's a new experience in stereo playback and I look forward to a lot more of it.

You can see these recordings as they happened in these 3 videos on Youtube...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HE7UCBf_9v4&t=242s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5rAXnnrJTo&t=556s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eid2NfmPdYo&t=508s

These tapes can be ordered from UltraAnalgue Recordings web site at this link:

http://ultraanaloguerecordings.com/wpsite/store/?cat_product=tatsuki-narita-yun-...

Steve

Not to get weird on you, but the sound quality of these tapes inspired the following revelations:

As a species that was created from, by and of music we now have the technology and the ability to capture it in its whole (which would be a wonderful gesture to humanity), yet so many of us are completely distracted by consumer technologies and money that we end up with only a small part.

In my fantasy world no recorded music could ever be published without meeting strict sound quality guidelines which of course would start with being 100% analog. Don't worry... in the near future there will be analog technologies that will replace digital on every level so there will be no more reason to molest the music format for convince or profit.

Sound will be captured at millions of times the resolution of CD's into things like Biological cells, crystals, fluids.  Image a single drop of water containing the library of congress and you can start to get what I'm talking about.  The technology is here now, just highly guarded to maintain military superiority and greed.

Years after storing music in liquid water humanity will rediscover "the cloud" but this time rather than uploading the compressed digitized music to a computer over a world wide network that relays on electricity, we will simply offload it to a higher dimension where it will exist without time and without distance to any device tuned to the carrier frequency of that offload.

Imagine walking into your listening room and setting a small round sphere the size of a grape onto a quartz plinth and then simply by intent have the music play.  There are no wires, everything is tuned... even you.

Ed,

I grew up with classical music and a 300 year old pipe organ imported from Germany which I spent many magical hours with. My parents were as far away from Rock and Roll as is possible to be...  it was a non-stop diet of Classical music and Leave it to Beaver, the Walton's and Little House on the Prairie where I grew up...

My problem with classical music has never been with the music.  I know what it sounds like live and what it sounds like in comparison when you hear it on the radio, in the car, on a CD, and even on a cheap tape with the average radios and stereos of the 60's and 70's (which were probably on the whole quite a bit better than what has replaced it today) and it just sounds ridiculous.

When I listen to your tapes, it sounds like it's supposed to.  I wish your recording process was able to be moved to locations other than your studio, as I would love to hear a full orchestra recorded with 2 mikes on your system.

The truth is I love classical music in an acoustical space that supports it. Nothing is really better because A) it's HUGE and B) it's complex, C) it's nature... no amplification needed. So, yes, you might make me a classical music lover on my playback system if you keep this up, indeed.

Thanks for the great work you've done so far, I can't wait for people to hear these tapes!

Steve