2L - The Nordic Sound

Morten Lindberg of The Nordic Sound (2L) makes some of the highest quality recordings currently available, and releases them in an incredible variety of high resolution formats to suit your needs. One of my personal favorites is Ole Bull Violin Concertos.  This album is an Aladdin's cave of little-known but captivating Nordic works, finely performed, and expertly captured in luscious, pristine detail.  It also has, interestingly enough, some of the deeeeepest yet tightest bass content I have yet heard.  Highly recommended.

http://www.klicktrack.com/2l/releases/folleso-kork-ruud/

Another unusual feature of the 2L catalog is that the cover art is made available for (free!) download, in extraordinarily high resolution. Personally, I really appreciate that!...

Also on 2L's web site, they feature an extraordinary selection of free tracks that you can download in all sorts of ultra-high resolution formats for you to compare.  These are a serious resource for those of us with a keen interest in ultra-high resolution audio playback.  It should be noted that the 'DXD' format (24-bit 325.8kHz) is the native recorded format for these files, and all of the others are derived from it by conversion.

Finally, a big Thank You to Morton for providing BitPerfect with a 24-bit 352.8kHz studio master of his Souvenir I album for us to demonstrate BitPerfect's capability to seamlessly handle ultra-high sample rate files at the Montreal Salon de Son et Image.

http://www.2l.no/pages/album/090.html

Quadrophenia - The Director's Cut

Quadrophenia is in my opinion the finest album of many fine albums by the classic rock band The Who.  In 1969 they released "Tommy", hailed as the first and finest Rock Opera.  Tommy achieved huge commercial and critical success, both as an album and in movie and stage formats.  But in 1973 The Who released another rock opera project Quadrophenia, which is arguably the musically superior work.  As an opera fan, Quadrophenia strikes me as the more accomplished, more truly operatic work of the two, yet it is fundamentally a hard rock album.  Far more so than Tommy.

Tommy always makes me think I'm listening to a soundtrack album.  Quadrophenia is a WHO album. But you decide.

Late last year, a completely new remastered version was released under the title "The Director's Cut". Primarily an LP project - and, despite BitPerfect being a digital audio company I am a vinyl freak - this is a completely new remastering.  However, there is a Japanese CD release that is also available under import.  Comparing the Director's Cut to the original vinyl, the new version has a more visceral impact, more immediate presence, more obvious detail and clarity.  But it also has a hint of an edginess that is not evident on the original LP, which is still a reference rock recording.  However, if you love Quadrophenia as I do, it is a must-have recording.  And unlike many re-release projects, the additional material makes for fascinating listening.

The McGurk Effect

The McGurk Effect is a fascinating auditory illusion where you can be fooled by what you are seeing into hearing something different. A remarkable property of the McGurk Effect is that even though you know you are being fooled, you still hear the wrong thing!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-lN8vWm3m0

What's going on here is that when the brain tries to process a complex sound - and virtually all interesting sounds are indeed very complex - it tries first to create a model for what it thinks it is going to hear, and adapts what it actually hears to best match with the model. Since humans are primarily visually-driven beings, the brain will above all else try to match what we hear to what we see. This has some profound implications for listening to high-end audio, and understanding what it is you think you can hear.

Ivan Fischer conducts Mahler's 4th

At BitPerfect, we love our Mahler, and one of the finest Mahler recordings available is - in our opinion - Ivan Fischer's wonderful account of the 4th Symphony with the Budapest Festival Orchestra released by Channel Classics. Thanks to Linn Records, this magnificent recording is available for download in your choice of high-resolution formats, up to 24bit 192kHz.

http://www.linnrecords.com/recording-gustav-mahler-budapest-festival-orchestra.aspx

On my system, I find that this recording needs to be played with the the absolute polarity inverted. With BitPerfect, just edit the iTunes comment field for each track and insert the word 'invertpolarity' (no quote marks required) anywhere in the comments field, and BitPerfect will take care of this for you.

I remember Miles

I thought I would share with you a reference track I like to use for bass articulation and definition.

I remember Miles.

Track 8 (My Man's Gone Now) is underpinned by a tasty combination of acoustic and electric basses, playing a simple, yet captivating ostinato. How well a system can resolve the two, both sonically and spatially, is a great tool to assess musicality in the bass.

Music Recommendations

Those of who who have been to our FaceBook page (see the link on the right) and "Like" us will have been enjoying regular posts containing music-related recommendations and observations.  I am going to start duplicating them here.  For the next couple of weeks I will be re-posting the older ones from FaceBook, and then when we catch up, the posting rate will slow down again.

I hope you find these both stimulating and interesting!

New Version (1.0.3)

BitPerfect 1.0.3 has been released to the App Store. This version includes new features for volume adjustment and managing of the iTunes comments.

• Add volume adjustment iTunes comment  (see Manual for details).
• Respect iTunes track start/stop times.
• Allow device volume adjustments when not playing.
• Add option to globally apply'fixedindexing' comment. 
• Add option to globally apply 'invertpolarity' comment. 
• Disable playback of CDs in BitPerfect.
• Fix clicking noises during Integer Mode playback for certain DACs.

Please contact us if you have any questions, comments or bug reports!