Those Bachs

I received the cd set I ordered a few days ago, Christine Schornsheim playing J.S.Bach's Well Tempered Clavier or "Das Wohltemperirte Clavier" as it says on the cover. Sound is awesome playing on my system, though I was surprised that the sound engineers boosted up the volume unnecessarily. The harpsichord is a soft instrument. There is no need to make the volume higher than normal; that's what amplifiers are for, if someone wants to play it louder than it actually would be live. This recording's inflated volume is probably part of the "loudness wars" that some audiophiles complain of. It does harm the music, in my opinion. It tends to compress the dynamic range of music. There is a site that rates popular cd's for dynamic range. 

Here is a good discussion about how new technology could anticipate the end of the loudness wars. 

Here is a very good description with images showing the damage that loudness wars do to music.

That the music on the Schornsheim Bach was made louder is kind of silly. The harpsichord is basically a one-loudness instrument. There's no loud or soft, the strings are plucked. It's why the piano was invented, to permit the musician to change the dynamic range of each key hit and allow more expression in music. I suppose the sound engineer made this cd louder just to "compete" with other loud music. Kind of dumb, especially for the expected audience of this music. 

I think it's likely that the music was not damaged by having the recording be so loud. It could be that the engineers placed the mic's inside the harpsichord. I don't notice any room reverberation. But because it is louder than it should be you must turn down the volume to have it sound realistic.

In any event Christine Schornsheim plays wonderfully and the cd is very very good. The instrument she is playing on was built in Antwerp in 1624, 61 years before Bach was born. It has a pure sound. I hope to play the cd's many times until I know everything well. I am already quite familiar with book 1, less so with book 2. Just wish I didn't have to turn down the volume so much.

I listened to almost the whole of Book 1 before I tired of the harpsichord sound. Since I was playing Bach I decided to give his son, CPE Bach, another try. Yesterday I gave up on CPE's Fantasia in F#-, H.300, Wq.67 played by Danae Dorken so I gave it another go today. It was a relief after the harpsichord sound and after the strictly baroque sound of the father. And it is amazing how good the streaming music sounds through my system with it's new DirectStream DAC. This album may be one that I want to buy. But is it necessary? The sound streamed through the DAC is already terrific.

It's hard to believe that this Fantasia was written by Bach's son. It's so different from his music. You can hear something of the baroque, but with romanticism added. I understand that Mozart and Beethoven and others were influenced by him.

I also listened to the last cut on the same album, Schubert's Fantasy in C, D.760, Op.15 ("Wanderer"). Enjoyed that too. 

Choices

Finished The Art Forger: A Novel by B.A. Shapiro last night. Enjoyed it, read most of the second half while listening to music in the den. Never did that before. Fun.

This morning I started off trying to listen to more of an album I began last night, Fantasy by pianist Danae Dorken. I chose Fantasia in F#-, H.300, Wq.67 by Carl Philipp Emanuael Bach. I thought it would be baroque and high spirited but it was slowish and brooding, not the best to get you going first thing, so I turned it off. I really don't know much music from this second surviving son of J.S. Bach. I should learn more:

Stylistically distant from his father's rigorous polyphony, C.P.E. Bach was something of a proto-Romantic; he was the master of Empfindsamkeit, or "intimate expressiveness." The dark, dramatic, improvisation-like passages that appear in some of Mozart's and Haydn's works are due in part to his influence; his music in time became known all over Europe. His impulsive works for solo keyboard, which lurch into unexpected keys, change tempo and dynamics abruptly, and fly along with wide-ranging themes, are especially compelling. One account of Bach's after-dinner improvisations described the sweaty, glazed-eyed musician as "possessed," an adjective that would be applied to equally intense and idiosyncratic musicians in the Romantic age. Many of his symphonies are as audacious as his keyboard pieces.

-- This from the biography of the composer on ClassicalArchives, (c) James Reel, All Music Guide.

Next I tried the father, J.S. Can't go wrong there. Continued with Glenn Gould playing the French Overture (Partita) in B-, BWV831, playing from the cd set that I own. This is the last piece on the album. So I finally finished. I'm sure it won't be the last time I visit this set.

Next up was a Mozart string quintet played by the Guarneri String Quartet plus an extra 2nd violin. I own this set, but it's not available on ClassicalArchives. Here is a very good set for you to listen to by the Grumiaux Trio ensemble. I heard the String Quartet No.2 in C-, K.406. The trouble with the Guarneri set is that the sound is not as good as I'd hoped. It's a live recording; maybe the mic's weren't set up properly. There's not enough bass and the violins sound a bit shrill. I love these quintets so much, I may have to purchase another set, maybe the Grumiaux.

A Good Night

An unusual night last night. I sat or lied on the couch for almost three hours, reading a book while listening to music. Usually I can do one or the other, but not both at the same time. 

The book: The Art Forger by B.A. Shapiro. 

I'm reading it on Scribd.com. It's about a woman that is hired to copy a Degas painting that was stolen many years before. So far it's a good read.

The music: First I finished listening to Bach Well Tempered Clavier, Book 1 performed by Christine Schornsheim. I heard Preludes and Fugues numbers 15 through 24. I wanted to keep going and play Book 2, but decided to change performers. I wanted to stay with the harpsichord, was having such a good time listening to the plucking and ear-tickling sound of the instrument, so I chose Peter Watchorn on the Music Omnia label, a different sounding instrument, still thrilling, perhaps deeper.

Book 2 kept playing for about an hour, I kept reading. When I'm on the green couch I'm only a few feet from the speakers, but it was fine. Quality music being reproduced magnificently.

I stopped the Bach, wanted something different. So I put on a recent release, Through Time with bassoonist Rui Lopez. The overtones of the bassoon are so much fun to hear. Lopez plays Villa-Lobos, Jean Francaix, Mozart, Vivaldi and Elgar. Heard the complete album.

I wanted to keep reading so I chose another new release, Gabriel Faure's Nocturnes performed by Sally Pinkas. I heard the first nine before finally turning off the music and closing the book (turning off the iPad). 

An almost average morning

Yes the morning could be considered average. I listened to Gould playing another of the French Suites BWV 813 on cd, then wanted to hear Bach's Well Tempered Clavier. I have Gould playing it on an LP, on a piano of course, but wanted to try something new so listened to Christine Schornsheim playing on a very old harpsichord from 1624. The old instrument still sounds good.

Watch video

Next I listened to the Beethoven String Trio Op. 9 No. 1 in G major. Sweet sound. High def file.

But everything seems high def since the DirectStream DAC appeared. And that's why it was an almost average Monday morning.

44,100

44,100 cycles per second must not be enough. That's how many pieces engineers decided to break sound into, when the cd was invented. Sound was sampled 44,100 times per second and a number represents the wave form at each moment in time. Seems like a lot, and since people supposedly can only hear tones up to around 20,000 cycles per second, doubling that seemed safe. Surely that was enough to represent sound - music - completely. Nothing would be missing. Even though the waveform was broken into pieces they would be so small, almost infinitesimally small, that nobody would be able to tell the difference.

But they were wrong. 44,100 is pretty good. But it turns out that it's not just that people can't hear above 20,000 cycles per second. And this is my own conjecture: People are sensitive to more than just the tone itself. They sense how the tone is created. Something in the person can tell if something is continuous, like analog sound - never digitized or "broken into pieces", or the digitized sound we have gotten use to.  

That's why the DirectStream DAC sounds like real music. The software / hardware solution promotes 44,100 and every other sample rate to 10 times the DSD sample rate. In doing so it "fills in the blanks", that is, (I assume, I don't actually know this as fact) it mathematically figures what the intermediate steps would be if the music was sampled at this much higher rate. The resulting set of bits is then used to reconstruct the analog waveform that the music must have had originally. That's why the sound coming out of this DAC is so much more realistic and sounds more like real music. The missing bits are filled in at such a high rate that when the bit representation is converted to analog there's no "jumpiness". The human ear and body (for we do listen with our bodies, too) is satisfied that the sound is real. The engineers of 44,100 had the right idea. They just didn't go far enough. What is amazing is that we can take the cd format and reconstruct to a much higher degree what the original sound must have been.

Is this streaming?

Last evening, the first full evening I had with the new DAC, I started with listening to Harold in Italy by Berlioz, streamed from ClassicalArchives. It was wonderful. I hadn't heard the piece since college, when I did a paper on program music.

The piece is 40 minutes long. I listened all the way through, undistracted. I didn't read, or look at magazines or the web. I just listened. It was easy to do because it really sounded like music. Yes it was a compressed mp3 stream, some of the highs were chopped off. But the DAC made it sound like real music, soft, loud, and no brittle sound in the loud parts, everything flowed like music. I was still stunned at the quality of the sound. I wouldn't say it rivaled cd's, I would say it was better than the cd's I'm used to hearing, that is, before this DAC.

Later I started Pandora and typed in "James Taylor". Pandora started a string of Taylor and other mostly male singers. I only clicked off a couple of songs, one by the Eagles. Again the sound was fantastic. I didn't get that tired feeling you get after listening to mp3 streams after a while. The music sounded "musical". 

I know this sounds repetitive, but I don't know how else to put it. The DirectStream DAC takes in what you give it, whether it be mp3 streams, cd's or high definition files and puts out what sounds like music. No digital artifacts, no compressed icky sounds, no tiring imitation of what could be music. This is the real thing. 

I was able to sit close to the speakers during Harold in Italy, something I usually can't do because the digital streaming usually hurts my ears. Not so anymore. The music sounds sweet, and I want more.

Wow DAC

Wow I got a new DAC, the most expensive piece of equipment I ever bought. It arrived yesterday, I plugged it into the system (with difficulty because the RCA interconnect cable I bought didn't work with it -- the Left and Right outputs were too far apart to fit the Audioquest cable), and away we went.

It's the PSaudio Directstream DAC, which just started shipping in May. It's unbelievable!! I never heard a really really good DAC before, and I was actually quite happy with my Schiit BiFrost DAC, but the DirectStream is amazing. Even with streaming audio, the presence of the music is uncanny. I played the Beethoven piano sonata No. 23 in F-, Op. 57, "Appassionata" piano sonata performed by Andras Schiff, streaming from ClassicalArchives. Hot dog, it's like the piano is in the room!

It's a case of you don't know what you're missing until you try something new. I really loved my BiFrost DAC. It's reasonable in price (cheap, actually) and is small and simple, user upgradeable and nice looking, well built. The sound was a big step up when I got it.

The DirectStream is something else entirely. It's really expensive, big and heavy, with fancy touchscreen controls and even a remote. But to me the sound is everything, and that's where it is undeniably great. My first reaction after hearing it for the first time was that at last I could play orchestral music that didn't get all "flubby" when it got loud. The sound stayed clear and not confused. The problem with reproducing orchestral music on cd and streaming sources, even high def files, is that when everyone plays at once it sounds kind of like a mish mash. You can't pick up the individual instruments, it sounds cluttered, not really like music. This is probably partly why I've always preferred listening to chamber music, piano music and other solo instrumentals. I love the Bach solo violin sonatas and partitas and solo cello suites. These sound very good, even on lesser equipment. 

But orchestral music just doesn't work in recordings, not very well anyway. Until I heard the DirectStream. When the orchestra plays loud it still sounds good, the music remains clear, and it gets more exciting. But that's what the loud part of a piece is supposed to do: wake you up, become the high point of the music. With DirectStream this works.

I've got a lot of listening to do, because I have to listen to everything over again, to enjoy it even more. Hot dog.

I think I've settled on using Pure Music. It sounds the best of the audio software I've tried.

I played one cut of an Anna Netrebko: Opera Arias, high def download, the aria from Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor, Act 1: Ancor non giunse!...Regnava nel silenzio. When she hits the loud high note at the end of the aria, I thought I was going to faint, it was so beautiful and stunning. That never happened to me before. Thanks DirectStream! And Brava, Ms. Netrebko.

Even the sound coming from my cd's of Glenn Gould playing the Bach English and French Suites was excellent. One of the amazing things this DAC does is "promote" a cd's sound to a higher more defined sense of accuracy. How it does this is very technical; some of the details are on PSaudio's web site. But the point is that all cd's, even streaming sources, sound much much better than before. There's much less of a difference between high definition audio and regular cd's because of this. Wow!

Pure Music

I mentioned the software Audirvana Plus a few times in past posts, notably yesterday when I turned off the "direct" button to go back to using Apple's CoreAudio which (strangely) improved the sound. Before I got Audirvana I used software called Pure Music from the company Channel D. I liked Pure Music a lot, but there were bugs. About six weeks ago they announced version 2, and offered customers a 1/2 off discount to the upgrade price, but only for a week or two. I missed the time. I emailed them a couple of days after the discount expired to see if I could still get the deal, but never heard back. That's when I looked into Audirvana. That software worked better; it didn't have the bugs that Pure Music had.

Last night I tried Pure Music again. After the episode of improving the sound coming out of Audirvana with the "direct" change, I thought maybe I should check Pure Music again to see how the sound compares. I did, and it did seem better. It seems more alive, the Glenn Gould Bach I've been going through seems even more alive. I keep saying "seems" because I can't be absolutely sure without an "A B" test, switching quickly between the two setups. It's hard to do, and I haven't. But it sure "seems" like Pure Music sounds better. The Gould went from dull (Audirvana using direct mode) to good (direct mode off) to the old Glenn Gould that I know from the Mozart piano sonatas -- the best at being alive and exciting. It was the music was back the way it was supposed to be. 

Again, I can't be sure, but I know I turned the volume up and listened to more of the Gould Bach than I did before, and listened more closely. 

There was an upgrade to the new version 2 from Channel D which squashed the bugs that were appearing before, so I decided to go back to Pure Music and bought the upgrade. I'm happy.

After breakfast I listened to Mozart String Quintet No. 3 in C, K 515 performed by the Guarneri String Quartet. I love this piece perhaps more than any other Mozart. I said this out loud and my wife asked why. "Because of the interplay between the violin and the cello is so wonderful, and the melody so sweet and pure" (we were listening to the beginning of the first movement). I first heard the quintets as a teenager and fell in love with them. I think that is when I decided I liked chamber music more than orchestral music, a preference I still have today.

The Guarneri is not available on ClassicalArchives. Here is a link to their recordings of the quintet.