Returning to Music Matters 33 rpm series: GRANT GREEN Idle Moments, TINA BROOKS True Blue:

I think my position on the new Music Matters Blue Note series at 33 rpm has been pretty clear. These are the gold standard of Blue Note, and a significant step ahead from the (magnificent) 45 rpm series.

Quite bluntly, it seems to me that, despite the angst of a minority online who have chastised Music Matters for issuing titles that have previously been available on the Analogue Productions 45 rpm series (and the odd duck that Music Matters themselves issued at 45 rpm), Music Matters have done a real service to lovers of this incredible music by this select 33 rpm series. The sound is simply mind boggling.

Idle Moments was done at the AP 45 rpm series and screwed up by Hoffman. It sounds dull, muted, the timing is all off. Tempo Di Hoochie Koo, for whatever weird reason, Hoffman cut the top end, sucked out the upper mids, and completely messed up the inner timing. Music Matters get it right - more than right.

Just like the new MM Blue Train, this record just roars out of the speakers. It is immediately propulsive and powerful. The bass is strong and deep, but more importantly, has a sense of organic inner timing, of inner rhythm. Bobby Hutcherson is completely different than on the Hoffman incarnation - metallic, percussive, rich with overtones. Swinging, completely in the pocket. Joe Henderson's tone is deep, full of wood and spit. Green himself is just amazing - subtle, swinging, in a groove. This is hypnotic, dark, beautiful music that for once - maybe the first time since the original RVG (which it exceeds by a wide margin, by the way) this great music is presented as exactly what it was in the studio - a masterpiece of dark, understated, yet subversive 3 am soul.

Forget 45rpm, the Music Matters 33 rpm gets it right. My copy is a perfect pressing and worth every penny, it knocks the socks right off the Analogue Productions 45 rpm and costs $15 bucks less.

On to Tina Brooks - True Blue. If there ever was a national anthem of Blue Note, True Blue is it. The story of how Music Matters recreated the incredibly complex variations of the color blue on the front cover would be a book on it's own - the attention to detail in recreating this brilliant record, and the abandonment of any notion of cost efficiency in getting there, shows just how deep a love and commitment to Blue Note these fanatics have. This would be worth the $35 just for the cover, but on to the music.

Here, we have Music Matters own 45 rpm version to compare to. The first thing that hits me is the bass - the 45 sounds hollowed out, but on the new 33, it sound full, tuneful, and driving. Where on the 45, which in its own way sounds quite good, Tina's tone sounds like a weak Hank Mobley, here is sounds like it should - coming out of Bird, rich, urgent, insistent, swinging - and Freddie Hubbard no less so. While on the earlier MM Freddie, in comparison, was much less brash and brassy, here he is opened up and sounds huge, bright, right out front. As with the other Music Matters 33's, the soundstaging and complete disappearance of the room is astonishing - this just leaps right out in front, a massive three dimensional sound, so very alive that you can just reach out to the sound in front of you. You can literally see the ceiling on this record, and hear Freddie's wide open, big sound bouncing off.

Alfred Lion messed Tina Brooks around and never really gave him his due. He recorded Tina, and held stuff back to effectively starve him out and keep him out of the limelight. He was a problematic guy for sure, but so were half the artists on Blue Note, and Tina should have and could have been bigger than Hank Mobley.

Music Matters finally give Tina Brooks the tribute he is long overdue. This music has the street in it, and a joy that the previous Music Matters only hinted at. This is 'the' True Blue.

Rounding up some DSD - MOFI SACD, Japanese SHM-SACD, some recent SACD titles:

I never bought into SACD as a format, believing (correctly) that as a physical format it was going to be short lived, even as a niche, as it was inevitable that physical formats were on the way out. Besides, I have had an awesome redbook setup, and SACD, maybe due to the players themselves, just sounded to me like a CD with better bass and smoother, muffled highs.

However, having entered the hi-res arena full blast, I started to become interested in seeing what the DSD capablilities of my Chord DAC might be - and, with the assistance of a 'ripping partner', I started out by having every dual-layer SACD on hand ripped, extracting the DSD ISO file and converting them to .dsf files.

To some extent, now bypassing the physical limitations of a disc player, my opinion of SACD changed quite a bit.I generally prefer hi-res PCM - the higher the sampling rate, the better, and starting at 24/96 and moving up, PCM hi-res to me sounds more open and more transparent, and comparably DSD sounds ever so slightly veiled, or softer, or less three dimensional. But regardless, I am quite happy to have both, and enjoy direct DSD tremendously.

For sure, there is a fair bit of DSD I just consider to be a complete botch. I have the Analogue Productions John Coltrane - Standard Coltrane, for example, remastered by Steve Hoffman - and it is a complete botch job. Hoffman insisted on reducing gain by a whopping 6 dB on this one, digitally, and that is a whopping amount of resolution chopped off, completely defeating the purpose of higher resolution audio. He did it so his acolytes will all swoon, chanting about how 'dynamic' it is and how 'smooth' it is - because he has taught them that anything louder than a whisper 'fatigues' the ear and is a result of that nasty 'compression'. Stupid.

Similarly, Hoffman's Blue Note titles for Analogue Productions were digitally volume reduced also, by 2 to 4dB in most cases. Again here, that is shaving off resolution in favor of some artificial notion of 'smooth' - and in extreme cases, like Jimmy Smith's Back At The Chicken Shack, the cut is so severe that it renders the music at the level of a bad CD (truth is, on the AP Blue Notes, the CD layer sounds better than the SACD layer). For Blue Note, avoid these like the plague and get the 24/192 PCM if available - they sound hugely better, even though I am not completely convinced that Bernie Grundman's studio has the best 24/192 mastering chain.

When AP got rid of Hoffman, sound quality went up dramatically. There were mis-steps - the original mastering of Cat Stevens' Tea For The Tillerman, by Kevin Grey, was rejected by AP as too 'bright' (another convenient tag for Hoffmanites) and it was then done by the late George Marino, and although very good, it does have that 'audiophile' tinkering to mute the top end and punch up the bottom-mids.

Marino's DSD of titles from the Verve catalog apparently derive from 20 bit PCM, which is very strange, but they sound very, very good. Even better are Grey's remasterings from the Prestige catalog. The choices of titles are for the most part either bland (Verve) or downright weird (Prestige), indicating that Chad really doesn't know this music very well. But there are gems - Tommy Flanagan's Overseas is a major classic, if not generally well known.

The king of DSD right now must be Mobile Fidelity.  A few titles are lame - Chicago VI?? Doobie Brothers? But the Sinatra series has been sublime, and the sound is exceptional. I was never big on Sinatra - I was more a King Crimson type myself. Great sound can be a door opener to new discoveries, though, and my appreciation of Sinatra increases by leaps and bounds through the MOFI series.

Better yet, and more in line with my taste - Carole King's Tapestry on MOFI is downright amazing in the DSD incarnation. Superbly organic, natural sound with not the slightest hint of digital. A model of how good hi-res can be.

Even more where I come from - the Miles Davis MOFI remasterings. Awesome! Tonally, these are just so golden, burnished - the tone of Miles and Coltrane so filled with copper and brass, alive. Absolutely the best these have ever sounded - particularly Round About Midnight, which sounds like the curtain has been pulled back, with a wide plank wood floor, and the band playing trough the roof. Milestones is just as good. In A Silent Way is somewhat less of a revelation, but still superior, and the ugly edit on the first track is proof of the analog provenance! The Japanese SACD remasterings are excellent all around, but these have a tonal edge that surpasses them. Bring on more!

On MOFI as well - The Pixies, the last title released being Trompe Le Monde, and this is simply a fantastic remastering - it loses none of the power of the original, but has a greater tonal range and presence. And it is a fantastic record. If you have not discovered The Pixies yet, you have been missing one of the greatest bands of the 20th century.

The Billy Joel MOFI are somewhat less spectacular. They are solidly good, but have a slightly 'soft' sound overall, lacking some element of 'punch' or 'rock' to them. Very good, but not mind blowing - although far better than the 24/96 transfers starting to appear, which are needlessly compressed.

If there is another series strongly worth acquiring, it is the Japanese SHM-SACD series that was revived late last fall. The SHM part is meaningless to me as I rip the discs and play the DSD directly. The Cram - Disraeli Gears easily supersedes the earlier Mobile Fidelity gold CD. It is remarkably clear, dynamic, and powerful. There is not the sense of bloat present on the MOFI, and it sounds far better than original pressings - particularly the rather dull sounding original U.S. Atco pressings. Ditto, by the way, on the Japanese Wheels Of Fire of a few years ago, which easily surpasses the early DCC which had excessive tape hiss. The Supertramp Breakfast In America is very close, but somewhat better than the 24/96 available on a recent Blu-Ray Audio disc. I prefer the Caravan In The Land Of Grey And Pink (a favorite band and album of mine) to the Steven Wilson remix of a acouple of years ago. The recent Sex Pistols titles, particularly Rock & Roll Swindle, are a revelation.

There has been no temptation to make the Japanese SHM-SACDs sound 'audiophile' or to cater to the American audiophile demographic. They are generally exquisite flat transfers from original tapes. There are misses. Rainbow Rising is ear bleedingly atrocious. But The Police - Regatta De Blanc easily sounds much better and alive than earlier SACD incarnations, and there are great titles to come. 

Led Zeppelin and the Future of Hi-Res Audio Downloads:

You heard it here first.

Have you noticed lately that the stream of titles appearing on HD Tracks has been declining?

It isn't just because they screwed up their business by creating the most backward, customer unfriendly website, which they did. It is almost impossible to find new releases, other than the 'featured' titles on their home page. The search function is absolutely inept.

No, despite HD Tracks committing hare-kiri by  web design incompetence, it is much more than that. Warners catalog isn't being added to, those great Atlantic Soul and Jazz titles. Blue Note, despite their anniversary year, has slowed to a trickle. And so on. I just don't find much to buy at HD Tracks anymore - and I was a big customer.

Here's why.

In two months or so - beginning of June - the first three Led Zeppelin remasters will be available. They are essentially available on iTunes in low-res form already.

For several years, Apple have been insisting that labels provide files for iTunes in 24 bit format - preferably 96k or 192k sampling rate. So they have undeniably the biggest catalog of hi-res audio in the world.

And the Led Zeppelin remasters in high resolution will be the kick off event - to coincide with Led Zep in hi-res, Apple will flip the switch and launch their hi-res store via iTunes - and apparently, it will be priced a buck above the typical current file prices.

That's right - Apple will launch hi-res iTunes in two months.

And at that point, you can say goodbye to HD Tracks, Acoustic Sounds Hi-Res store, and ProStudioMasters, and probably all the other hi-res audio online stores. Apple will kill them, straight out of the box.

I'm not sure I feel good about Apple entering hi-res - I hate monopolies, and I sure am not an Apple fan overall. The reason labels will instantly migrate to Apple, despite business practices that are...well...not exactly consumer friendly, is that it is virtually certain there will be watermarking involved. That SHOULD be a deal breaker - for music fans at least - but the reality is, labels will hungrily embrace it.

But it is what it is. Apple is going hi-res, and will dominate the market, squeezing out everyone else. In some ways, HD Tracks did themselves in by their inept new website - but really, they never stood a chance. Chad and Acoustic Sounds entered in with a big splash, claiming they were going to be different - but the fact is, they were not, offering a lot of the same stuff everyone else does at the same prices, and also offering the DSD files of their own label productions - many of which, in particular the Blue Note titles remastered by Hoffman, are unexceptional sounding. (Side note - in remastering those Blue Note titles for SACD, Hoffman demanded that the volume level be reduced by at least 2dB - in some cases up to 4dB. Digitally reducing gain is done at the expense of resolution - digital gain reduction shaves off resolution, and in the case of the Blue Notes, they sound pretty dull as a result - in fact, the CD layer sounds better.)