My 20 Best Sounding Albums (all formats)

[Pau]

It says on the site that the ''one to one copy of the master file'' (Sound Liaisons old slogan) is the PCM file, so that is the one I got.
Interestingly it also says that the DSD transfer was done with, let me qoute;

The recording was done in 96kHz-24bit PCM. The DSD tranfers were done using a dCS DAC going into the Tascam DSD-recorder.

Sound Liaison Music Shop

Those dCS DACs cost something like 35.000$ maybe that explain the extra cost of the DSD.
But anyway I personally buy native when possible.

[Weirdcuba]

I think this is my favorite Carmen Gomes album, by far.

I saw someone ask several posts back about my musing of going to Amsterdam and listening in on one of their "live" recording sessions. It's just musing at this point - I've never seen them say anything on the website about another session and making that available to the public, etc. One probably has to be cool and hip and in the know to be invited, which would exclude me without a doubt . . .

Just fabulous recordings from SL though. I now own them all.

[Pau]

Originally Posted by Weirdcuba

I think this is my favorite Carmen Gomes album, by far.

I saw someone ask several posts back about my musing of going to Amsterdam and listening in on one of their "live" recording sessions. It's just musing at this point - I've never seen them say anything on the website about another session and making that available to the public, etc. One probably has to be cool and hip and in the know to be invited, which would exclude me without a doubt . . .

Just fabulous recordings from SL though. I now own them all.

Well looking at the crowd from another live recording session in the Sound Liaison studio, the Batik recording session, they look like your standard audiophile crowd, but hip in an audiophile way
[ame="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJVtFRjqSnE"]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJVtFRjqSnE[/ame]

Great album too btw;Sound Liaison Music Shop

[Weirdcuba]

Great album. Pretty quiet, but interesting. I definitely have to be in the mood and have a quiet household - it's not something you put on when you're washing dishes. Like all of the sl stuff though, awesome recording.

Listening to Bach Reflections from sl as we speak.

[Pau]

With the Batik album it quiet an experience to read the book while listening or just look up the part which the song is about i.e. ''the Old man''

here is a link to the PDF of Hemingway's ''the Old Man and the Sea''
https://la.utexas.edu/users/jmciver/...20Sea_1952.pdf

The old man was thin and gaunt with deep wrinkles in the back of his neck. The brown
blotches of the benevolent skin cancer the sun brings from its [9] reflection on the tropic sea were
on his cheeks. The blotches ran well down the sides of his face and his hands had the deep-creased
scars from handling heavy fish on the cords. But none of these scars were fresh. They were as old as
erosions in a fishless desert.
Everything about him w

it really ads to the experience when listening to a tune like ''the Old Man''
[ame="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u35c-p-tSqU"]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u35c-p-tSqU[/ame]

[Pau]

You could write and ask, Frans de Rond has a reputation for answering questions very rapidly.

Originally Posted by Weirdcuba

I think this is my favorite Carmen Gomes album, by far.

I saw someone ask several posts back about my musing of going to Amsterdam and listening in on one of their "live" recording sessions. It's just musing at this point - I've never seen them say anything on the website about another session and making that available to the public, etc. One probably has to be cool and hip and in the know to be invited, which would exclude me without a doubt . . .

Just fabulous recordings from SL though. I now own them all.

[Weirdcuba]

You remind me. Going to visit some folks at end of January in the netherlands. I'll email them and see if I can get lightning to strike.

[audio bill]

Some additional information about this latest Carmen Gomes mastering which you may find of interest. A participant in another forum noticed that when he analyzed the output of 'Little Blue' with Audacity there was some high frequency noise which is not present on earlier releases from Sound Liaison. I suggested that he contact Frans de Rond directly to inquire about the issue, since he's always been very responsive to my previous inquiries. Here is an excerpt of his response explaining the source of the "noise":

About the 'noise' you see in the spectrum in the fade out of the songs of the later albums.

We are recording this moment in the PCM 96/24 format. And during the mixing we stay what we called in the box. So the audio signal never leaves the digital domain to avoid extra D/A and A/D conversions. The only exception is the DSD format because we do a 'analogue' transfer to a DSD recorder.
It's absolute not dithering noise what you see because we never use dithering during the mixing because we stay in the original format of 96/24

During the mixing we use some plugin's to manipulate the audio signal in a way you also do when you mix on a analog console. Mainly we use some EQ and Reverb, we try to avoid compression as much as possible. We always listen very carefully to the plugin's we use to keep the mix sounding as natural as possible.

Over the years more and more plugin's have been developed. Some are very well made and are simulating the real analog equipment very well.

One of these plugin's we use is a virtual tape machine. This plugin is simulating the use of a 2 track analog Studer A80 machine running a 1/4" tape.
This plugin gives a little magic to the final mix. But one of the things it also do is generating a bit of tape noise like a real machine with tape does.
And I'm quite sure this is what you see in the fade out. The fade out is made in the mixing session within the separate tracks. So when a plugin like the tape simulation is on the master buss it keeps generating this (very little) noise.
And we only use this plugin for the last few albums because it's a quite new one.

So perhaps that's part of the reason why it sounds so good!

[Weirdcuba]

Wow - I'll have to listen for that. Tape hiss from something pretending to be tape!

For the life of me, I'm not able to get dsd to play out of my bryston bdp-2 and my c-2500. It's making me nuts. Thinking about ditching this portion of the rig so that I can get dsd reliably.

I'm going to flip on Little Blue right now and see if I can hear it.

[Mingus]

Originally Posted by Weirdcuba

I think this is my favorite Carmen Gomes album, by far.

I saw someone ask several posts back about my musing of going to Amsterdam and listening in on one of their "live" recording sessions. It's just musing at this point - I've never seen them say anything on the website about another session and making that available to the public, etc. One probably has to be cool and hip and in the know to be invited, which would exclude me without a doubt . . .

Just fabulous recordings from SL though. I now own them all.

the Sound Liaison winter sale is on at the moment. All downloads are $11/€10.
I will complete my collection.Sound Liaison Music Shop