Reviews / Comments
Percussion Test Album!
Just got this and popped it in. A must own for anyone looking for a good test
album for their system! Its like having the musician playing in your living room! Very natural sounding and can help you tweak your system until
perfect. My friend came over while I was downstairs and he thought I bought a drum set and put it in my basement!
Scott Luu (PSB_Paradigm_HSU from forum.blu-ray.com)
The recoding has great sound staging and clean dynamics. The percussion decay is very nice on all the tracks. The sense of the recording space is nice... The last drum test record I heard was the Sheffield Track and Drum record and this recording has more instruments that what I remember of the classic. I can see this being very useful for system setup to help get the sound stage setting for speakers dialed in. The dynamics will give a system a work out with the later tracks. The dynamic range is large so be careful on first playback.
Having fun with it!
Rich Hollis (member of AudioCircle discussion board)
I have been a proponent of uncompressed hi-rez/hi-quality recording for many years and am always vigilant for truly excellent recordings not only to enjoy but also to use for system evaluation as a tool in the design process. I have just downloaded the new 24 bit @ 96 kHz recording
THTST by Steven R. Rochlin and I am delighted to say this ticks all the right boxes. It is a simple recording using very high quality battery powered electronics together with high quality and matched microphones. The sound quality is supremely realistic and natural and genuinely can be used to evaluate the resolution and performance of the new generation of audio streaming hardware. I used the Linn Klimax fed to a simple analogue gain control stage and an LFD power amplifier driving a pair of Audio Physic Tempo loudspeakers enhanced with a pair of servo controlled subwoofers.
THTST is how recordings should be made and in terms of sound quality puts much of factory produced music to shame. The percussion is delicate, immediate and natural with a fantastic sense of space and perspective. However, a major achievement can be heard in the sustained periods of decaying sound which sink deep into the dark yet somehow retain an uncanny sense of pressure within the listening space while still being reproduced at absurdly low volume
levels. So the extreme resolution of the Klimax is exposed by this extremely clean recording devoid of the unusual
"grunge" that often creeps into the recording chain because of excessive system complexity and invasive signal processing. As I learnt years ago when designing the LFD MC battery disc preamplifier, isolating mains and maintaining clean supplies in delicate and minimalist electronics can provide massive benefits in terms of clarity and resolution. Well done Steven, a remarkable achievement.
Malcolm Omar Hawksford
Audio Engineering Society (AES) Award Winner
Longtime And Highly Respected Audiophile Technical Reviewer
Dear Mr. Rochlin,
Today I had downloaded the 24-bit files from HD Tracks.... the dynamics and impact are sublime, put together with
accurate tonality, timbre and extension. Well done for doing a hard task properly. I have sent your website and
HDtracks link to the Queensland Audio Club (Australia). Keep up the good work.
Campbell Hicks
Principal, The Audiophile Workshop
Thank you for the interesting album. Taking into account the diversity of tracks included in it, most probably it will be considered as an album suitable for testing purposes. I did read at your website that you plan also to release other percussion and drums albums with narrower chose of styles.
Therefore I have a proposal regarding narrower choices of styles' directions. From the tracks of the first album I very much liked the first three with their meditative way (maybe because I practice Chinese qigong). I'd say you could release a whole album with compositions of a like style.
Metallic instruments have a very wide spectrum. From tracks of your first album it can be seen that it reaches at least up to 48 kHz. In the research of Japanese scientists, published under the title "Inaudible High-Frequency Sounds Affect Brain Activity: Hypersonic Effect", there is described a special experiment. The results of it shows that listening to music, spectrum of which contains both diapason of audible frequencies, as well as high frequency spectrum, after some time causes stable increased alpha wave activity in brains of the audience (more
information is at: this
link). In turn another researches show that alpha waves are characteristic to meditative state of the mind. Taking into account all mentioned above, it could make indeed a unique album!
Regards,
Valdis Skesters
Hi-Rez Files
