Soundlab Audiophile G9-7c: a 30-year odyssey fulfilled

[godofwealth]

Roon’s latest update has screwed up my system, so what’s new? This has been happening for at least five years, I’ve given up assuming Roon will ever get its act together. My Mola Mola Makua no longer shows up on the device list. Go figure.

Meanwhile we can enjoy good old Redbook CD’s which will outlive Roon. Here’s a beautiful old Chesky Jazz CD featuring Phil Woods. Beautifully recorded in the Chesky fashion with wide soundstage exceeding the speaker width. On the big SL’s, the sound is exquisite. I’m playing this through my ARC Reference CD8 player, a warhorse if there ever was one.

Roon may be here and gone, but Redbook CDs will last forever. Thank heaven for that.

 

[godofwealth]

This is a very oddly recorded CD because the musicians are gathered in a circle and the single point microphone is placed in the center. Needless to say, very few jazz recordings are made this way. Phil Wood’s clarinet sounds a bit out of phase because of the extreme width. Because SL’s are true phase loudspeakers that lack any crossover the effect is magnified. But a high quality recording in all other aspects. The double bass is for once recorded right. It sounds natural, not bloated. The piano is for once recorded correctly as an almost mono sound source on the extreme right and your head is not buried inside the piano’s mouth as most jazz recordings of late do (and classical piano recordings as well). One has to wonder if recording engineers ever attend live concerts when they are in the audience? Who hears a piano with their head buried inside it?

 

[godofwealth]

Another Chesky Jazz CD from the Cuban born saxophonist Paquito D’Riveria. This is a large ensemble recording that’s nonetheless recorded at a fairly low level. This may initially sound a bit lifeless but when the crescendos hit, you get realistic dynamics and not the usual compressed MP3 garden variety stuff. Recorded in the legendary RCA studios in New York City like the Phil Woods release. These recordings were made in the late 1980s but have aged well largely because they used premium microphones with no compression.

It’s interesting how dynamics sound on large panels. It’s not like the bass heavy sluggish box loudspeakers sound that seems to always have a phase lag to it. Here bass transients are lightning fast. The percussion sounds natural and all the intricate details come out. Paquito’s alto sounds gorgeous on solo portions. The guitar portions sound delicate and intimate and soft. The strings of the guitar sound like nylon strings. A beautiful recording as you’d expect from Chesky.

 

[godofwealth]

Jacques Offenbach is well-known as the composer of gaudy French operas and can-can music for vaudeville shows. He was also a highly accomplished as a cellist, impressive enough to earn the nickname “Liszt of the Cello”. He wrote a tutorial handbook of a set of pieces for two cellos in 1839, six of whom are featured on this beautifully recorded album. If you’ve never heard these pieces, you’ll be blown away by their depth and melodic beauty. On the big SL’s, the cello is reproduced with both body and harmonic integrity, so it doesn’t sound like a quivering mass of protoplasm as it sounds on my Harbeth Monitor 40.1’s, which is prone to resonate on bass heavy instruments. Subwoofers are a disaster for reproducing the cello, so turn off your subs before listening to these delightful pieces.

 

[godofwealth]

We move now to the music of another French composer, Francis Poulenc, especially his quirky but delightful wind music of which he composed a lot. Poulenc seemed to oscillate between writing melodically and irreverently. He seems to be constantly pulling your leg in some ways. But his chamber music is often full of profound insights. Played here beautifully by the Ensemble Arabesques. The recording is closely balanced. The liner notes helpfully gives you the microphone arrangement. For my taste, too many microphones and placed too closely to the instruments. There’s not much ambience. But the big SL’s capture the wonderful finality of all the woodwinds and the piano, which sounds quite percussive in contrast.

 

[godofwealth]

Incidentally I did find a workaround for my Roon problem, when it failed to find the Mola Mola preamp as an endpoint. I’m going through the Lampizator DasKomputer server to the USB port on the MAKUA preamp. If you’re expecting me to dwell on the sonic differences between the two, you’re reading the wrong thread. I’m not a big believer in huge differences between digital media servers. Theoretically one should not expect much if any. The mathematics of bit transport ensures error-free and jitter-free transmission. That’s how it sounds to me. I’d rather focus on the real problems in high end, which have always been around the choice of speakers and the design of the listening room. USB jitter on the Mola Mola is around -140 dB. That’s at the level of thermal noise of electrons moving across a resistor. There’s just no point wasting time on irrelevant problems. Back to the discussion of speakers and the sound of the big SL’s!

 

[godofwealth]

We return to the music of Claudio Monteverdi, his famous and legendary 1610 Mass that he wrote as his calling card for the dream job of Choirmaster at the world famous Basilica of St. Mark in Venice. If you have visited this site, you might know that Napoleon Bonaparte called it the drawing room of the world, the most beautiful courtyard he’d ever seen. For once he was not exaggerating. It’s so resplendent that it was shamelessly copied in Las Vegas at the Venetian. Skip that pale imitation and see the original. This beautiful recording by Harry Christopher and The Sixteen, a world famous early music group in Britain uses a much smaller chamber sized group for a chiral piece that’s usually performed by much larger ensembles. What you get in return is a much cleaner rendition. The recording was made in a church and has plenty of natural ambience. The voices and instruments sound magnificent on the big SL’s.

 

[Lee]

This is a very oddly recorded CD because the musicians are gathered in a circle and the single point microphone is placed in the center. Needless to say, very few jazz recordings are made this way. Phil Wood’s clarinet sounds a bit out of phase because of the extreme width. Because SL’s are true phase loudspeakers that lack any crossover the effect is magnified. But a high quality recording in all other aspects. The double bass is for once recorded right. It sounds natural, not bloated. The piano is for once recorded correctly as an almost mono sound source on the extreme right and your head is not buried inside the piano’s mouth as most jazz recordings of late do (and classical piano recordings as well). One has to wonder if recording engineers ever attend live concerts when they are in the audience? Who hears a piano with their head buried inside it?

View attachment 140051

I started working at Chesky as a production assistant just a little bit after this recording was made in BMG Studio A. Bob Katz and Jeremy Kipnis kept refining the technique fairly quickly but the reason for this was to use as few mics as possible for better sound. Eventually we moved the drum kit farther out and improved the mics, mic cables, and electronics. A better example of sound quality is McCoy Tyner’s New York Reunion album which came out in 1991and rose to #4 on the Billboard Jazz chart.

 

[Lee]

Another Chesky Jazz CD from the Cuban born saxophonist Paquito D’Riveria. This is a large ensemble recording that’s nonetheless recorded at a fairly low level. This may initially sound a bit lifeless but when the crescendos hit, you get realistic dynamics and not the usual compressed MP3 garden variety stuff. Recorded in the legendary RCA studios in New York City like the Phil Woods release. These recordings were made in the late 1980s but have aged well largely because they used premium microphones with no compression.

It’s interesting how dynamics sound on large panels. It’s not like the bass heavy sluggish box loudspeakers sound that seems to always have a phase lag to it. Here bass transients are lightning fast. The percussion sounds natural and all the intricate details come out. Paquito’s alto sounds gorgeous on solo portions. The guitar portions sound delicate and intimate and soft. The strings of the guitar sound like nylon strings. A beautiful recording as you’d expect from Chesky.

View attachment 140057

Paquito’s guest appearance on Clark Terry’s Live at the Village Gate is not to be missed either. That was my first recording session and I had to ask smokers to stop smoking as it interfered with the AKG C24 custom mics.

 

[godofwealth]

I think I have the original Live at the Village Gate CD as well. I’ll try to find it to listen to it tonight. Great to hear of your connection to Chesky Records!