Misha - New Jazz DSD 256 Recording from Yarlung's Andelain Records

[bmoura]

This looks very interesting. A new Jazz DSD 256 stereo recording by Misha Bigos, the pianist of the Sophisticated Lady jazz quartet.
It's Yarlung's first Native DSD 256 recording. It is a DSD Exclusive, Never Available on SACD.

Buyers of the DSD 256 and DSD 128 editions of the album receive the lower DSD bit rate editions at no cost.

"Misha is a character. It is hard to have a conversation with him without holding one’s sides after he gets you laughing so hard you can’t stop. Underneath this jocularity lies a warm heart and the soul and technique of a serious jazz pianist.

We recorded Misha in 256fs DSD, Yarlung’s first album not transferred to DSD from analog tape. Tom Caulfield had been twisting my arm to record directly in DSD for some time, and we are happy to have finally taken the leap. Our booklet contains notes on the microphones of course, but I am happy to report that our HAPI and Pyramix software (picture below) from Merging Technologies in Switzerland once again did its fabulous work. We did not have a single hiccup or reboot during our sessions, testament to the quality of what Merging Technologies creates. We are grateful to Ken Salkin, Misha’s executive producer, Merging Technologies, of course, and Salesforce.com as our corporate underwriter for this recording.

Yarlung Records made its first two jazz albums with Misha in Cammilleri Hall at the Brain and Creativity Institute at USC. Misha played piano as a member of Sophisticated Lady jazz quartet. Dr. Antonio Damasio invited us back to Cammilleri Hall for these microphone tests and Misha spent a long session improvising on the piano for us as we tried myriad microphones and a few additional microphone preamplifiers as well.

Yarlung has often been approached by engineers, producers, musicians and composers to release albums which have already been recorded. Yarlung is a small label, but thanks to Naxos Global Logistics, our worldwide physical distributor in Munich, our relationship with NativeDSD which is clearly one of the very finest download companies in the world, and superb manufacturing plants in Europe, Yarlung is proudly positioned to reach the widest possible audience for our musicians. In order to harness this ability for more musicians and recording projects than Yarlung can record itself in any given year, Yarlung founded Andelain, a sister record label designed to release high quality albums recorded by other people. Andelain will also be able to re-release musical treasures from prior eras that have become hard to find. Please reach out to us if you have a project you think might be appropriate for release on Andelain.

Our recording engineers for Misha were Ted Ancona, Jacob Horowitz, Philip Richards and Dan Schwartz. And with their help, Misha Bigos does us the honor of creating the first album for Andelain.

–Bob Attiyeh, producer"

http://blog.nativedsd.com/misha-recorded-in-dsd-256fs-by-yarlung-records/
https://yarlungrecords.nativedsd.com/albums/YAR99438DSD-misha

 

[jfrech]

I read about this one...I plan to buy it...I've liked the Yarlung recordings so far...will be curious what their sound is like direct to dsd vs tape first...

 

[amirm]

The music sounded really good to me. So likely I will buy it too. THanks.

 

[marslo]

I like the music very much, how big is 256 fs album?

 

[Yarlung Records]

Good morning Marslo. As with "all things DSD," the files themselves are on the large size. Fortunately, NativeDSD's Amazon server does a good job packaging files for us and delivering them with as few hitches as possible. I think Jonas Sacks is the architect behind this success. Kudos to him. But to answer your question directly, the 256fs files are about 10G before packaging. Please let me know what you think! Bob

 

[amirm]

Hi Bob. Struggling to pay for the album. Direct credit card transaction got refused and so did Paypal version of the same. Will be calling my credit card issuer to see if they blocked it (they usually do so when they see overseas charges). Would be great to have credit card clearing houses that don't trigger fraud detection on the US side.

 

[amirm]

Called my bank and they said the alert went off because the requesting agent did not provide the three digit security code even though I had entered it. They unblocked it and transaction went through. The download size is reported at 6.6 gigabytes. Download time on my end is estimated at 49 minutes. This translates to 19 mbit/sec which is decent but far slower than my download speed which is clocking at 160 mbit/sec as I type this.

 

[amirm]

OK, downloaded the dsd 256 stereo and there are some serious problems here. Initially I was having Roon resample the file to 88 Khz on the fly to drive my PCM-only DAC. Upon reaching track three, just a handful of seconds into it there were a couple of pops and both of my amps went into protection mode and shut down. This usually indicates corrupt bit stream being fed to the DAC resulting in DC output, causing the amp protection circuit to shut down.

Figuring this may be a bug in the resampler in Roon, I played the same track using my iFi iDAC2 DSD/PCM DAC. This is using "Native" DSD mode so no resampling. Exact same glitches and pops at 0.06 to 0.07 seconds. Roon plays other DSD 256 files I have fine and it handled the first two tracks OK just the same.

Outside of these, I find the fidelity of the album very much lacking to these rusty ears. The piano sound is recessed/muted with no sense of space. It is centered like a mono recording.

Overall disappointing.

Anyone else download the music and can comment on these issues?

 

[jfrech]

Called my bank and they said the alert went off because the requesting agent did not provide the three digit security code even though I had entered it. They unblocked it and transaction went through. The download size is reported at 6.6 gigabytes. Download time on my end is estimated at 49 minutes. This translates to 19 mbit/sec which is decent but far slower than my download speed which is clocking at 160 mbit/sec as I type this.

i had the same credit card issue on my first transaction at native dsd. Seems fine ever since.

 

[bmoura]

OK, downloaded the dsd 256 stereo and there are some serious problems here. Initially I was having Roon resample the file to 88 Khz on the fly to drive my PCM-only DAC. Upon reaching track three, just a handful of seconds into it there were a couple of pops and both of my amps went into protection mode and shut down. This usually indicates corrupt bit stream being fed to the DAC resulting in DC output, causing the amp protection circuit to shut down.

There's definitely a problem with Track 3 on the DSD 256 version of the tracks.
Suggest trying the DSD 128 tracks - Track 3 is OK there and the sound quality is better on my system than the DSD 256 now available.

Notified Native DSD that the DSD 256 tracks need to be reposted.

 

[marslo]

Good morning Marslo. As with "all things DSD," the files themselves are on the large size. Fortunately, NativeDSD's Amazon server does a good job packaging files for us and delivering them with as few hitches as possible. I think Jonas Sacks is the architect behind this success. Kudos to him. But to answer your question directly, the 256fs files are about 10G before packaging. Please let me know what you think! Bob

Thank you Bob, will try probably 128 fs and let you konw. I realized I have no 256 fs engine in my lampi B7.

Until now, no problem with paypal payments for downloads from nativedsd.

 

[Yarlung Records]

Amir, thank you very much for bringing the pop problem to our attention. Tom in recording in Europe but he and Jared have already tackled the issue in the 256 files and are reloading them. It is terrific to work with such a responsive team, I can tell you. I do apologize for the initial problem.

I have never had a challenge paying for a NativeDSD album, but I am glad the issue is now resolved successfully.

Thank you!

Sincerely,

Bob

 

[amirm]

Hi Bob. I am glad the problem is resolved. Will you let us know when the upload is complete so that I can re-download?

 

[bmoura]

Hi Bob. I am glad the problem is resolved. Will you let us know when the upload is complete so that I can re-download?

The corrected ZIP of Misha in DSD 256 is now on the Native DSD web site, ready for downloading.

 

[Yarlung Records]

The corrected ZIP of Misha in DSD 256 is now on the Native DSD web site, ready for downloading.

Thank you so much Brian. Much appreciated!

 

[MadFloyd]

Would like to hear some impressions about sound quality, some of the Yarlung titles are too bright for me.

 

[amirm]

I will re-download and listen again today and report back. For now it is definitely not too bright.

 

[Yarlung Records]

I will re-download and listen again today and report back. For now it is definitely not too bright.

Thank you kindly, Amir. I look forward to your thoughts. Hopefully this time the zip files will do their job without destroying the music they contain!

This album, Misha, is a lot of fun because of the nature of the music we recorded and because of the number of microphones we used. However, this is not an album intended to be indicative of the "Yarlung Sound," or our brightness or darkness as a label. Better examples of the sound from our label can be found on our recordings with Sasha Cooke, or Antonio Lysy, or Smoke & Mirrors percussion ensemble, or Janaki String Trio.

Here is a note from our Misha album booklet: "A caveat! Using minimal equipment as we normally do at Yarlung, we take great care to place each microphone in “the spot” we want, depending on repertoire, instrument or instruments we are recording, intimacy of the recording and tonal balance. As you can see from our session photographs, not one of our microphones wound up in the spot we would have chosen had the engineers been working with a single stereo mic in our sessions with Misha. Rather than enabling final adjustments within a fraction of an inch, we got within “a foot or two” of where we would want these mics. Nevertheless, our engineering team was able to capture the beauty of Misha’s playing in the glorious acoustics of Cammilleri Hall, while revealing significant differences between the various microphones. Please let me know how they sound to you. I look forward to your thoughts." Here is the whole booklet: goo.gl/yyY2OO

I really do look forward to your thoughts.

Thanks!

Bob

 

[MadFloyd]

Bob,

Was there only 1 microphone employed on the Janaki Trio recording?

 

[Yarlung Records]

Bob,

Was there only 1 microphone employed on the Janaki Trio recording?

Thanks for your question. Most of our recordings, except for full orchestra where we use four microphones, are either one stereo or two mono microphones. For Janaki we used one AKG C-24, similar to Ted Ancona's mic we used for some of the Misha tracks. We used Ted's microphone with a different new old stock tube outfitted and calibrated by David Bock in our later sessions for the Matheson project in November of 2015. This mic with the special tube is spectacular, and I look forward to releasing the Matheson recordings. (Currently scheduled for September, 2016, by the way). We're hoping we can release the CD and 3 45rpm vinyl records at the same time. Fingers crossed for success at the pressing plant. Test pressings will be on their way to me in three weeks. I'm eager to hear them!

--Bob.