Scoping Software.

Good-Sounding Jazz -- Old and New Releases/Hot and Cool Presentations: Part One

The John Basile Quartet: The Desmond Project (with Payton Crossley, David Finck, and Allen Mezquida). Recorded in 1996, at St. Peter's Episcopal Church, New York City. Engineer: Barry Wolifson. 58+ minutes. Chesky JD156. Small recording companies are in a bind. In order to survive, they must attract the attention of high-end enthusiasts, who are mostly on a never-ending quest for the ultimate in recorded sound quality. Appealing to such people often requires more than simply using top-grade conventional digital recorders and certifiably excellent microphones placed with textbook accuracy.

Indeed, because some high-end systems are really not all that capable of "reproducing" sound, excellent recordings are often not heard with the fidelity they should be -- meaning that their owners may sometimes not be able to tell a good transcription from one that is not so good. Consequently, smaller companies often employ truly exotic technology: Super oversampling, special wire, custom consoles, custom microphones, etc., and list those materials in a conspicuous place on their CD-box inserts. Now, there is nothing wrong with exoticism, provided it does not screw up the sound, and Chesky has continuously proven that their particular brand of esoterica can sometimes work to good effect.

This particular release is dean indeed, with the kind of close-up articulation that jazz buffs can get serious about. Imaging and focus is particularly good and even when sitting off axis, the left-right spread holds up nicely. This is hard to accomplish with any two-channel recording. The drum set is done the way I like it also, with little in the way of stage-dominating lateral spread. There is also a nice balance between the direct sound and the recorded space (a church, yet! -- although admittedly Chesky has used this place before to good effect) and the only problematical artifact was an occasional intrusion of low-bass thumping, possibly the result of maybe a microphone being just a bit too close to the bass player's instrument.

Pro Logic decoding partially collapsed the soundstage into the center, and although I did not particularly like the effect, those who favor the more distant seats at their favorite nightclub might prefer the result. In spite of the contributions of the surround channel, the sense of spaciousness was actually reduced by the decoding, no doubt because the stereo-reproducing (and therefore ambience-reproducing) left and right main speakers were no longer contributing a great deal to the overall sound. Synthesized ambience, as produced by my recently purchased Yamaha DSP-A3090, was really quite good, but only with the smaller jazz-club room simulation: Cellar Club. The processor's Village Gate simulation works better with big-band-sound material and tended to reverberate things excessively.

MacLeod, Doug: Come To Find (with Charlie Musselwhite, Bill Stuve, Jimi Bott, and Black Cherry). Recorded in 1994, at Ocean Way Recording, Hollywood, California. Engineer: Michael Ross. Microphones: A large number of Neumann, AKG, and Sony cardioid, omni, and adjustable models. 52+ minutes. AudioQuest 1027. AudioQuest has made a name for itself as a producer of high-end speaker wire and shielded interconnect cable for home-playback systems and this release, according to the flyer that accompanies the album, was engineered with the company's top-of-the-line wire linking nearly everything in the recording studio to nearly everything else. This is certainly a selling point in some circles (I tend to be a "wire-is-wire" kind of guy),but I believe that the microphones chosen, their positioning, and the balances set at the mixing console -- not to mention the acoustics of the studio itself -- had lot more to do with sound quality of this disc than the cables. Indeed, any commercially decent shielded microphone cable should work as well as the best AudioQuest stuff.

The flyer also indicated that the recording was recorded "pure analog," by means of a professional-grade, conventional reel-to-reel deck running at 30 inches per second. While this kind of hardware would have been anything but chopped liver in the old days, I should note that any decent digital recorder, including DAT (and under some conditions, possibly even DCC) can surpass even the best analog recorder's measured specifications handily. Indeed, bragging about being pure analog indicates that the flyer was designed, in part at least, to get the attention of digital-paranoid enthusiasts who received their audio training from "alternative-press" publications and/or semi-wacky audio salesmen. This kind of posturing strikes me as being a bit peculiar, given that the final product is still a 16-bit, digital disc. In any case, the audible differences between a recorder of the calibre used here and a decent digital model, discounting speed irregularities inherent with even the best analog gear, will be small enough with music like this to not really matter.

The recordings jazz-blues sound, in addition to being funky and fun to listen to, is remarkably dean, particularly the vocals and the guitar. The blend is exceptionally smooth and unstressed, with excellent size/positioning relationships between the performers. The ambience simulates a nice nightclub-like environment effectively. There were also some nice (and surprising) dynamic contrasts at times and the recording displayed impressive deep-bass drum punch on a few tracks.

In spite of the nice sense of layering up front and ambience, this release does not have a particularly wide soundstage and Pro Logic decoding collapsed what there was to near monophonic proportions. The phantom-center mode is mandatory if Dolby decoding is your best or only surround-sound option, unless you plan to do your serious listening from well off the central axis. Synthesized ambience was good, however, at least with the smaller of the two jazz-dub settings available from either of my processors.

Mintzer, Bob: Big Band Trane (with Lawrence Feldman, Randy Brecker, Mike Davis, John Riley, and many others). Recorded in 1995, at Ambient Recording, Stamford, Connecticut. Engineer Tom Jung. 61+ minutes. Digital Music Products 515. (Note: I know how to spell train but trane is the way it was spelled on the album). [Uh, Howard, you're doing jazz reviews but don't recognize the word "Trane," the standard jazz shorthand reference to saxophone legend John Coltrane? Has too much exposure to home theater finally taken its toll? --KWN] This jewel, like a number of others Jung has recorded in recent times, has been mastered by means of the "Circle Surround" recording process, which kind of resembles Dolby Surround, in that it is a matrixing system. While the disc is supposed to sound better than straight stereo with normal, two-channel playback (this is not unusual for recordings having out-of-phase material encoded for matrix decoding of some kind), and is also said to be compatible with "other" surround-decoding processors (no doubt Dolby is mean), it supposedly works best with a Circle Surround decoder. I do not have one of those, and neither do most of our readers, I assume, so I only could sample its advantages by means of the two formerly noted playback modes.

One thing that the disc's flyer notes is that the system supposedly produces stereo surround channels To the best of my knowledge, this is impossible with an ambience-extraction system, because the surround data has to be recorded as identical, 180-degree-out-of-phase signals, and then extracted, summed, and reproduced as a monophonic signal. Maybe the Circle Surround decoder has some features in it that I have not heard of, such as a bit of surround-channel comb filtering or de-correlation (similar to TI-IX processing) to improve surround-channel ambience. However, I see no way for a matrixed surround signal to itself to exist in stereophonic form right after extraction.

In any case, this particular release is very nice indeed. As one might expect, the straight-stereo spaciousness is quite good (due to the out-of-phase encoding of some of the ambience), and yet the focus is also excellent, with top-quality imaging evident at all times -- all the way across the soundstage. Two instruments typically made too diffuse and phasey sounding (whether with a group or operating solo) are given proper treatment here: The piano sounds like a real piano on a nightclub stage and the drams are sized properly and are where they are supposed to be in relation to the rest of the ensemble. While the recorded ambience is nice, this is dearly not a really reverberant sounding recording, and those who prefer rather "wet" acoustics (think Reference Recordings and HDCD) may miss the large-room sound. This is a very realistic-sounding transcription that was marred only by the pan-pot fades at the end -- which popped the bubble and let you know that you were listening to, well, a recording. Why couldn't the performers just be allowed to end the music on each track the natural way?

Pro Logic decoding got along with the encoded surround material quite well. With the center steering engaged, the soundstage was only moderately narrowed (moving us back a bit, subjectively) and the frontal image when experienced from well off axis was improved substantially. There was some loss of frontal reverb, due to the extraction and rerouting to the surround speakers of the +/-90 degree surround (ambience) signals. Nevertheless, the overall sound picked up some solidity when the Dolby circuitry was employed. Synthesized ambience was spectacular when using either of the jazz-dub simulations available from both of my surround processors. My DSP-A3090's "Classical/ Opera" function (which combines DSP room synthesis with center steering) also worked exceptionally well -- better, indeed, than the Pro Logic, center-steered function.

Oregon: Beyond Words (with Ralph Towner, Glen Moore, and Paul McCandless). Recorded in 1995, at St. Peter's Episcopal Church, New York City. Engineer: Bob Katz. 71+ minutes. Chesky JD130. Before moving into the sound-quality analysis, I should point out here that the music on this disc runs the gamut from mellow jazz to, well, experimental. Indeed, some of the pieces remind me of what typical music-school faculty members might cook up to get everybody's attention. That disclaimer out of the way, I can note that Chesky seems to be getting a lot of mileage out of their relationship with St. Peter's Episcopal, and that is a good thing, because the acoustic qualities of the place are thoroughly respectable. This particular release is dean and smooth in the extreme, with excelling instrumental positioning, a nice degree of focus, and with a agreeable sizing of the drum set, something that I must admit is a bit of an obsession with me. The bass (instrument) is also very well handled, with the kind of emissions that one actually hears at a live, up-close performance.

Pro Logic was surprisingly good. Some squeezing was evident, but that happens even on Dolby-encoded music recordings. The separation on the disc was decent enough to sustain the steering and kept the soundstage reasonably stereo like. Off-axis imaging, in particular, was enhanced by the steering. Synthesized ambience was quite good when utilizing the smaller-room Cellar Club simulation available from my Yamaha processor, but the larger ones (even the Village Gate, the other sub-setting of jazz dub) were just too bloated and reverberant. This group is too small to perform effectively in a room that large and reflective. The DSP-A3090 processor has a "Concert Video" mode and one of its sub-settings, "Recital," employs DSP reverberation synthesis with center steering. (It tends to be more reverberant than the other sub-setting, "Classical/Opera"). It worked very well indeed (surprising, in light of this program's usual resemblance to the non-center-channel, Village Gate simulation), and I preferred it to straight DPL decoding by a wide margin if off-center listening mandated an improved soundstage and spread.

Rankin, Kenny: Because of You (with George Young, Danilo Perez, David Finck, Dave Ratajczak, and Steve Kroon). Recorded in 1991, at BMG Studio A, New York City. Engineer:. Bob Katz. 46+ minutes. Chesky JD63. The high point in this mellow-jazz presentation are the vocals, which are very well rendered: Smooth, well focused, and not oversized. The piano and drum set are also well displayed, with none of the usual fuzziness in the former or overly wide spread with the latter. The room ambience is just right for this kind of music.

Pro Logic center steering resulted in an very complete collapse into the center area when listening from on axis and I recommend that the phantom-center mode be employed for sweet-spot listening if an extracted ambience is desired from the surround speakers. However, when listening from off axis, the steering worked near wonders: Very effectively re-centering the soundstage, properly placing the soloist, and also restoring the frontal depth that usually results when listening to two-channel from a position away from the prime center seat. Synthesized ambience was good, particularly with the jazz, Cellar Club settings from either of my Yamaha processors. With larger room simulations, namely the Village Gate settings, Mr. Rankin grew to proportions and took on a degree of reverberation that only individuals who prefer live-performance sound after it has been run through microphones and amplifiers will appreciate.

Yellow Jackets: Greenhouse (with Russell Ferrante, Jimmy Hazlip, William Kennedy, Bob Mintzer, Bill Gable, Alex Acuna, Steve Croes, and even, of all things, a mellow-sounding string section). Recorded ca. 1991, at Bill Schnee Studio, North Hollywood, CA. Engineer: Erik Kongshaug. 60+ minutes. GRP 9630. This is an interesting mix. The recording was made at the Schnee's Studio, just like one or two other Y-J releases I have had a chance to audition, but had a different engineer, Erik Kongshaug, who previously oversaw one of their technically lesser (but still technically respectable) recordings made at Rainbow Studio, in Oslo, Norway. On top of that, it was not released by MCA, the band's long-time producer. In any case, the overall sound is more top-drawer "GRP-like" than MCA-like (and better than a later GRP release by the same group, and definitely better than a release they did for Warner some time back), with a full, rich sound, nice spread, plenty of studio (and synthesized) ambience, and decent close-up detail. It is also not-quite jazz at times, with a string section that displays an unusually good sheen and blend (classical engineers take note)--almost new-age like.

Pro Logic decoding approached mono, which is typical of its interaction with studio multimiking work designed for two-channel playback, and if you opt for this brand of decoding, see to it that you engage the phantom-center function. Synthesized ambience was surprisingly good, with the recorded blend dovetailing very well with both of the jazz-club simulations available from my two Yamaha processors. -- HF