Audiophilepure

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“Talking of subtlety, there’s as much fine detail as you could wish for, including those vital ambience cues. It’s not a smooth, airbrushed presentation – any beauty is entirely down to the music. Unlike some more analytical amplifiers, detail isn’t pushed at you for its own sake; it is layered but not separated or highlighted, so the Accuphase seems to trigger the ‘music appreciation’ part of my brain more than the ‘music analytical’ part. You perceive the music as a gestalt rather than as a collection of elements, which is closer to what happens in a live experience. It’s that ‘rightness’ thing again. Key musical touch points: timing, pitch, tonal colour, dynamics, and no doubt a myriad of other parameters such as phase relationships, all rendered just a little bit more convincingly, so the brain has less work to do in maintaining a ‘willing suspension of disbelief’. So, I now find I have the capacity to notice that when Tord Gustavsen plays piano on ‘At Home’ from Being There [ECM], while this is unquestionably jazz, his precision of touch has much in common with classical technique, for example V.kingur .lafsson’s exquisite rendering of Philip Glass Piano Pieces [DG]. And that’s not me getting all analytical again, it’s just the sort of thing I’d notice in a live gig, when I’m engrossed and not having to process the signal just to make sense of it. Dave Brubeck, ‘Unsquare Dance’ from Time Further Out [Columbia] and the little miracle of how everything comes to an end ‘just so’, is even more miraculous when you can hear how the quartet plays with the timing without ever letting it get away from them.”

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“Of all things, I wrapped up my review by listening to some digital music from my computer—a brave new world for me. I’m working on an informational piece about Yarlung Records, a small company with which some of you may be familiar. Yarlung takes that bold step beyond reissuing older recordings: they make new recordings of interesting music with outstanding musicians. They are to be applauded for the effort alone. I have been to a few of their recording sessions and can report that along with the quality of the performance, they take recording and sound quality as their highest priorities. Many of their recordings are available on vinyl and CD, while all of them are available as high-resolution digital downloads. I downloaded many of their recordings to my computer, but for now I listened primarily to a new recording provided to me by Yarlung called Lifeline. Lifeline is a collection of beautiful spirituals recorded by Yarlung at Segerstrom Hall in Costa Mesa, California. The songs are performed by the Lifeline Quartet and feature spirituals from the Civil War era and earlier. The singers are spectacular; in particular, the power and range of Michelle Mayne-Graves will give you goosebumps. On this recording, the Atlas Eclipse monos were able to reproduce the full dynamic range of the singers, each in their individual space, with power and finesse and with no sense of strain or compression. On my Maggie 20.7s, the only other amplifiers that have exhibited the same effortless ability have been much larger all-tube amplifiers, at considerably greater cost than the Atlas. ”