Excellent performance and sonics!
There’s GOT to be a good story behind “bootzilla”.
Thanks for the suggestion, as I really like both Houston Person and Ron Carter. I’m a huge fan of pianist Emmet Cohen and he did, as part of his Masters Legacy Series, an album featuring Person (Qobuz / Apple). It has a fantastic piano sound to my ears - great guts!
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Oh, by the way, I’m a Mac guy and noticed the app in your screenshot - Conductor, so I looked it up and the first thing I got was something that multitasks AI’s Claude system - my best friend uses that a lot. So I assumed that’s NOT the Conductor you’re using. I looked further - is it the Aurender system? If so, how do you like it? Their website sure makes it look expensive!
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Yes, it is the Aurender “Conductor” app running on an M1 Pro MacBook Pro and driving an Aurender N20 streamer. (Aurender variously refers to the N20 as a “music server,” a “streamer” and (semi-pretentiously) a “Digital Output Network Transport.”)
I picked up the N20 within the past few months and I continue to be impressed with its sound quality, build quality and ergonomics.
The Conductor app is fantastic … it is feature-rich, intuitive and virtually glitch-free in my setup (any minor glitches I may have experienced may be down to my network and/or hardware as opposed to the app itself).
Regarding cost, Aurender has streamers and DAC-streamers at various price points starting at $3,850 USD for the newish A1000, which is getting great reviews and which, unlike the N20, has a built-in DAC and analog outputs.
As for my forum user name, let’s just say I am a fan of bass player William Earl “Bootsy” Collins as well as a collector of audio recordings of independent origin, a/k/a ROIO’s, a/k/a bootlegs.
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I’m about 99.9% certain the two Lillie Huddlestons are the same woman. Their CVs show the same colleges and at least one common degree (Masters in Education w focus on Music).
I’ll look for Noga, and check out Chesky’s deal, too. I know exactly what you mean about the music sometimes falling short of the recording quality. I used to get that more often than I liked with discs from Mapleshade.
Boy does the name Bootsy Collins take me back! I went to high school from 1975 - 78 in a small Southern town in North Carolina. Our schools were integrated, but it was still a time when black students and white students, with the exception of band and sports, kept pretty much to their own groups. But there was one guy - not just white, but LILLY white, who came from a prominent family of the highest-powered attorneys in the area. So you’d think he’d have been into classical music or perhaps something crazy like Led Zeppelin, but NO, he was obsessed with Parliament Funkadelics and anything else along those lines. Neither the black nor white kids (nor faculty) had any idea what to do with him. He’d go to dances and get out there and dance even worse than the typical white kids, but didn’t care at all. Last I heard, he went right into the law firm, but boy, did he take a detour!
So it doesn’t sound like the Aurender stuff is astonomically priced. I have been a Mac user - both for home and work - since 1990. So I cut my teeth on Apple music products. I still use iTunes (now Apple Music) to manage my library on my Mac, then update the files on my NAS drive for Roon to work with. Does your Aurender streamer also pull from your Conductor-managed library to play through the DAC? Im assuming yes. I would really love if the Roon system were as robust as Apple, but Roon offers some advantages, like the ability to connect directly to my PS Audio Airlens, to pull information from other sources, run Qobuz, etc. I’m still an Apple Music subscriber, mainly to find things not on Qobuz, but I have to play them through USB to my Stellar Gold DAC. I think Roon is probably the most flexible high-end system out there, but it does leave some things to desire. Will the Conductor system use room-correction DSP convolution filters?
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You are clearly better at finding stuff than I am, with the Lillie Huddlestons. But hey, I was a budding jazz trumpeter until I found out how mediocre I was, then ended up in marketing communications for an industrial electrical manufacturer (Siemens).
Let me know if you do the Audiophile Society subscription and I’ll pass along my favorites. So far NOGA has topped the list as far as both sound and music. There’s actually one called Retratos featuring a Brazillian bassonist doing jazz, and it’s better than you would probably think.
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Found the Noga one on Qobuz; added to my Playlist, thanks for the suggestion. Another artist that apparently you may or may not have trouble searching, i.e. same artist’s different albums under 2 different “Noga” artist headings, I think!
Thanks. I guess Qobuz’s and my brain are often out-of-sync. I’m serious that I often have a hard time finding stuff.
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Where is good old Ted Smith? Did I miss something?
Ted is off doing other things now. He was only a “consultant” to PS Audio and when Paul decided to take a different path for the new PMG series Ted’s services were no longer needed. He has not been on the forum for over a year. Came as a shock to most of us. I have no idea if the split was cordial, I recall Paul saying it was, but Ted apparently chose a hard break.
All of the Dead Can Dance albums are very well recorded except the first self-titled one. The MoFi SACD versions are great and I’m glad to own them, but, honestly, they’re unnecessary. As are the redbook CD remasters. The original CDs and LPs sound fantastic, and while the remastered and MoFi version are fine, they really bring nothing good or bad to the table. For the curious, the MoFi versions have a bit more detail and deeper bass, but aren’t the sonic mind blowing experience I expected given the sonic joy of Spleen & Ideal and Within the Realm of a Dying Sun.
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Agreed. I have a mix for most of their work of standard RBCDs, SACDs and a couple of MoFi LPs (Into the Labyrinth and Spiritchaser). The LPs IMO are especially good.
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Indeed! I confess as a CD guy, the LPs are especially good. If I recall correctly, the UK import original LPs were pressed by MPO France.
I’ve heard a lot of good things about Dead Can Dance, but I’ve never listened for myself. Given your familiarity with their music, and what you’ve said about their albums’ sonic virtues, which would you suggest for someone getting into them for the first time?
Into the Labyrinth and Spiritchaser are their most popular. I much prefer their sound on Spleen & Ideal, and Within the Realm of a Dying sun, with a slight nod to Spleen & Ideal. Spleen strikes a good balance between their gothier post punk roots and the world music that would come later. On a good system, you can even hear sheet music being turned by musicians.
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Ordered!
Thanks for the tip.
Cheers
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Just mentioned two really great recordings on the comments of a Paul’s Post about Texture, and wanted to make sure they got into this discussion.
Last night I listened to a remarkable recording - The Original David Grisman Quintet - Live in Dawg’s Living Room (Qobus / Apple Music). I’m piecing together the history of the recording, but basically it really was made at Grisman’s home and was rehearsal material, never intended to be issued. But man, it is the most intimate and realistic sound, with a phenomenally rich and deep soundstage, but only deep enough to me in the same living room. It’s all about textures - of how the individual instruments are captured, how the overall ensemble combines, and I guess the intimacy itself is a kind of texture - soft and sharp at the same time, so quiet in spots to be almost inaudible, and hugely “orchestral” in others. And there’s a lot of variety too. Two versions of “Dawg’s Rag” bookend the album and they are both quite different in my ears.
Then contrast and compare that to the range of textures in what I heard next - Holly Cole’s 1992 album Don’t Smoke in Bed (Qobuz / Apple). This also has a level of intimacy, but more like a “stage” intimacy than being in the same room. I really like how each piece is really quite different than the others.
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Hey Craig, still working my way through your list o’ ladies and over the past two nights I’ve been listening to Natalie Merchant’s Leave Your Sleep. Not only is it great for capturing her voice - which I find to be even better suited for this project than others - but the entire recording is phenomenal. Then I see it came out on Nonesuch, and said OF COURSE it’s a good recording. Maybe it’s just how consistently their STYLE of recording resonates with me, but even back to when when I first encountered them in the late 1970s, as a “budget” classical label, I have always loved what they’re all about. The track that really blew me away last night was “The Peppery Man” (Qobuz). Not only is her voice so realistically done, but also the role and vocal reality of members of The Fairfield Four add so much to the piece. The only quibble I had was how the strings were mixed on “maggie and millie and molly and may” - way too forward and closed in to my ears, and you’d think having been a classical label - shame on them!
While I’m at it, and speaking of record labels with a great history of good recording quality, I’m going to suggest another recording I heard yesterday, one that I’ve listened to many times, but for the first time on an advanced system. And I listened on vinyl and my turntable and cartridge are certainly not what you’d call Super High-End. The album is Joe Jackson’s 1983 recording Body & Soul (Qobuz / Apple Music). There is a lot more going on in this recording than I thought, typical of so many A&M releases. I wasn’t crazy about how his voice was rendered, but it was very consistent with pop vocals in that era. Overall, the power of the soundstage and instrumental detail is great - maybe a touch overproduced, but also consistent with 1983. I found it to have a big dynamic range - likely trying to boast about the advantages of digital in the early years of CDs. Something I really liked was how the the album cover was designed to emulate Blue Note recordings of the late 50s. But not just the design - like any good BN recording, it had real liner notes on the back with great information on what went into making the recording. What a treat!
Funny you should mention Nonesuch - just now, before sitting down to check goings-on here, I put a 1974 Nonesuch album on the turntable that I’m going to post about in the classical section.
Re: Jackson’s Body and Soul, I came across a copy several years ago reissued by Intervention Records on SACD, and it’s a lot of fun to listen to. And I’m continually amazed by his Big World album - not just the sound quality, but the fact that it was recorded live in front of an audience that had been instructed to remain quiet while recording. And then for just plain fun, it’s hard to beat his Joe Jackson’s Jumpin’ Jive.