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LessLoss Recording #1: Soprano Solo with Grand Piano
This recording took place on September 2nd, 2007 in Kaunas, Lithuania. The hall is on the second floor directly above a restaurant. It has a rather large and bright accoustic, although this is very well compensated for when the hall is packed full of people. In this recording, the hall was completely empty except for some chairs and tables placed haphazardly on the parquet.
As you can see in the snapshots made during the recording session, the hall was in the process of being decorated for a banquet which was scheduled to take place the following day. We were alloted 2 hours to warm up and record. The soprano is Lina Moteka and the accompanist is Jonas Janulevicius. The grand piano is an old Steinway and Sons, but as you can clearly hear in the recording, it has not been properly taken care of and was in dire need of a complete mechanical overhaul. Years ago, the hammers had hardened, and somebody had taken the iniciative to 'fix' them by grinding off some of the outer layer of felt. The result is that the hammers weigh less than originally should, resulting in an awkward feel. Also, the contact area with the strings was thus reduced, resulting in a rather bright sound. Also, the strings were quite rusty.
The purpose of this recording was to provide a demonstration of the vocal capabilities of this singer. We figured that we might as well use this opportunity to present the capabilities of LessLoss technology as well.
The cables you see going from the microphones (Bruel & Kjaer model 4006 omnis with transformer outputs) are LessLoss balanced line cables of older make. Today, these cables are thinner. The quality is quite comparable. In this recording, we used 3 meters of this cable to a very special hand-made mic preamp and integrated A/D device which took about a year and a half to make. We made it using all of the known technology we had access to. Then we ran countless listening experiments to further probe into the unmarked territory where schematic and component integration begins giving results which only the ear can aptly interpret as being better or worse.
The DAC 2004 was used as monitor along with AKG 501 headphones using customized headphone cable based on LessLoss technology. The recording device makes use of several LessLoss Filtering Power Cables identical to the ones available from LessLoss for home use. The microphone preamp has an external power supply with a total of 5 independent transformers, each providing a separarate low-voltage power supply for each of the separate voltages needed throughout the recording device. Once the input gain is determined by the recording engineer using a SEIDEN gold-plated 21-position discreet switch of the same type found in the LessLoss DAC 2004, the device goes directly to the proprietary A/D converter chip used (it is out of production today). This converter chip has been determined to be the very best one in existence, and was manufactured before the dawn of 192 kHz recordings. It records at 96 kHz and runs very hot. Therefore, a special cooling method is used in this device to keep the performance at top-quality at all times. UV lighting is used to maintain an ozone-free atmosphere once the device has properly been in use for some time. No metal is used in the casing materials. Instead, high quality composite materials from Japan are employed, which do not reflect high frequency electromagnetic energy. Several other special features in this one-of-a-kind digital recording masterpiece are employed such as glavanic separation between the ADC schematic and the SPDIF stream generator schematic via four optical cables, special screening technology, short signal paths, silver wire internal wiring, amongst others.
We are very happy to have completed this special recording device and will be able to create some of the best sounding recordings ever made. There is no noise to speak of from the equipment. The microphones are old and the membranes themselves are in need of an overaul. Nevertheless, one can appreciate the lack of jitter in this recording and revel in the rich harmonics of the singer's voice and that of the piano's overtones.
What happened during the course of the two hours we had in which to record is that the wind picked up outdoors and a storm blew in. The wind was quite strong against the windows of the large walls of the hall, giving quite a lot of low-frequency rumble as the walls were resonating. We did not filter this out.
Pictures from the recording session:
Soundfiles: [Right-click and download to your hard drive.]
Go on to listen to Recording #2 (much better).
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