What is your personal reference audiophile recording (best sound quality)?

[Milan]

I still think that the Sound Liaison recordings are the best to be had at the moment.

I have all the downloads from this little label and just a couple of days ago bought the latest, the

''After Silence'' by master trumpet player Andre Heuvelman.

It a stunningly beautiful album. These musicians dares to play with a deeply felt emotion.

 

The download has that typical Sound Liaison sound, deep black background and a vivid representation of the instruments,lush sounding room sound but without going over the top, as I find some audiophile recordings tend to do.

 

The label are giving away free tracks at the moment of this album and the now well known and often bespoken ''Thousand Shades of Blue'' from Carmen Gomes.

 

Highly recommended.

This is the link for the free tracks:

FREE TRACKS

 

[Milan]

excellent choices. Cantate Domino which recording is that?

[Milan]

+1

[video=youtube;u35c-p-tSqU]

[Milan]

Thank you for this suggestion. Hadouk Trio is new to me and and they are wonderful. Thanks to everyone that contributed to this thread. I returned from a day at the Capital Audio Fest and wanted some good new suggestions to test my home systems. Too much today was lacking dynamic variation. This thread is a great place for suggestions. Some tracks I heard today, and others in this thread are even better than what I heard.

 

Here are some of my recommendations:

Lalo Schifrin - Letters from Argentina

World Trio (Mino Cinelu, Dave Holland, Kevin Eubanks)

John Williams - The Magic Box

Ralph Towner - Time Line (solo guitar recorded in a church)

Slow Poke (Michael Blake, David Tronzo, Kenny Wollesen, Tony Scherr) - At Home

Sequentia - Lost Songs of the Rhineland Harper

Peter Erskine - As It Is

Erik Friedlander - Nothing on Earth

 

''As it Is '' that is still one of the best sounding albums that ECM has produced.

[Milan]

Though I absolutely love the music of this album I find the recording heavily and disappointingly compressed.

 

Album list - Dynamic Range Database

 

lowest is an 8, highest a 12, so Master compression is probably taking place. For sure compression has been used on the individual voices and instruments as a tool to shape their sound. But it is still a nice musical album. but to my ears and taste, not a reference audiophile recording.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSWe5SuqJKo

[Milan]

On 3/8/2016 at 7:17 PM, oso said:

testikhof has analyzed both downloads; technically After Silence is a notch above Road to Memphis

less ambient noise, but both albums have a superior SQ.

Still need testikhof to have a go at the ''One Mic'' recordings from the same label, but anyway the whole catalogue is on a 20% sale at the moment. https://www.soundliaison.com/

These albums shows the great variety but superb musician ship of the labels output. SQ is unsurpassed.