Audiophile based recording studios

gidrah

Has anybody heard of such an animal? I mean Conrad Johnson, Krell, Audio Research type stuff used in the recording process. Tubes are great but not required. Any idea on the interconnects used?

Just wondering.

zingo

Chesky Records

OUR PHILOSOPHY

Our philosophy is simple: to create the illusion of live musicians in a real three-dimensional space. Chesky Records tries to achieve the impression of reality with the most advanced technology available, careful microphone placement, and, most of all, a recording team that pays attention to every minute detail-making your listening experience tangible, pleasureable, exciting, and realistic. Our commitment to detail and our dedication to the music we produce has earned the company world-wide acclaim for the artistic and technical excellence of its releases. But Chesky Records didn't become a Grammy Award-winning independent audiophile label overnight: it's been nearly eleven years of hard work coupled with an abiding passion for great music that has gotten us this far, and it is this very same combination that will carry Chesky into the future.

OUR HISTORY

It all started in 1978 when a young composer/musician named David Chesky, who was beginning a career on Columbia Records, found himself frustrated with the lack of artistic control afforded by his position. He asked his business partner and younger brother Norman if he thought they should start their own record company. But what did these two young men who had made their way from Miami to New York at a tender age know about running a business? Frankly, not much. But what the brothers may have lacked in corporate acumen they made up for with a burning passion to create great music and great sounds, and the desire to to create new and exciting ways to capture and reproduce music.

And so, Chesky Records was born. Norman remembers: "We wanted to please both musical connoisseurs and the high-end audiophiles by signing some of the best musicians in the world, and then capturing their live performances with the latest and best technology." Adds David, "I would walk into a recording studio and see fifty microphones set up. When I realized that people don't hear music that way, and that musicians play differently when they are recorded like that, I decided that if we ever started a company, it was going to have a different and unique recording philosophy."

By 1986, David was traveling to universities and talking to scientists and engineers about the parameters of recording capabilities. This was also the year that he had the honor of being introduced to the great classical pianist Earl Wild, who not only gave the younger musician some pointers on composition and performance, but also the opportunity to listen to the master tapes of one of his famous Rachmaninoff recordings from the Reader's Digest series. David was so impressed by what he heard that he and Norman struck a deal with Wild and Reader's to re-issue the work on audiophile-quality vinyl. The Cheskys had saved every nickel to build a custom mixer and tube tape recorder that would bring the original glory out of older recordings. The bid was successful, and the ensuing release was met with such widespread critical success that we were able to reissue the other Reader's recordings and then do the same with a number of orchestral works on RCA.

The next step would prove to be even more difficult than the first. We had to show that they were capable of not only producing wonderful reissues, but first-rate original recordings as well. Renting out the legendary RCA Studio A, we set up their custom-built equipment and recorded jazz violinist Johnny Frigo, followed in short succession by long-admired jazzmen Clark Terry and Phil Woods. As these initial efforts garnered raves from jazz fans and audiophiles alike, we managed to build a formidable roster of Latin American talent: Luiz Bonfa, Grammy-winning clarinet and alto saxophonist Paquito D'Rivera, and vocalist Ana Caram. The Chesky catalog has grown steadily ever since, and includes jazz legends Peggy Lee, Herbie Mann, Joe Henderson and McCoy Tyner, adult contemporary artists Livingston Taylor, Kenny Rankin, Rebecca Pidgeon, Sara K., John Pizzarelli, and Christy Baron, classical keyboard masters Earl Wild and Igor Kipnis, and world music innovators Orquesta Nova, celebrated guitarist Badi Assad, Carlos Heredia, and I Ching. Along with the excitement over showcasing famous musicians and establishing newer ones came significant technical advances in the recording process. Chesky Records was the first company to use 128x Oversampling to achieve previously unheard levels of fidelity, while utilizing the finest analog-to-digital converters to attain what came to be known as High Resolution Recordings. Now Chesky is the first independent American record label to record using the new Digital Versatile Disc (DVD) technology. The recently introduced first recordings made with 96kHz/24-bit components have astonished even the hardest-to-please audiophiles, and they promise to be the future of high-end audio.

And at the same time that Chesky has been pushing the very boundaries of recorded music, we also reached our greatest artistic triumph. Paquito D'Rivera's third Chesky release, Portraits of Cuba, a beautiful collection of jazz interpretations of Cuban folksongs, won the 1997 Grammy for Best Latin Jazz Performance, beating out a slew of major-label competitors. Chesky Records has its collective eye on the horizon. In 1997 we introduced a children's division, Chesky Records Kids, with the release of A Children's Introduction to the Orchestra. Maintaining its mission to produce only the highest-quality products, Chesky Records Kids focuses on music education and environmental awareness. Faced with a lack of musical education in the schools and a depleted classical music audience, Chesky Kids hopes to provide an aesthetic foundation which children will be able to build upon throughout their lives.

Striving to broaden our audience while staying fast to our commitment to use the finest technology available to deliver beautiful music, Chesky Records is developing the listening pleasures of tomorrow today.

zingo

From talking with David Chesky, I found out that he either custom made or modified all the recording equipment they use in the studio; definitely audiophile.

zingo

Reverberation and Space. Most pop and jazz recording sessions take place in acoustically damped studios, which are, trust me, unsuitable environments for music listening. That's equally true for the musicians themselves: They're frequently put in separate isolation booths, so the only way they can listen to each other is with headphones. And since they can't hear each other acoustically, they tend to play at one volume, loud. In fact, the studio acoustics are so acoustically dead analog or digital reverberation must be mixed into the recording to create a more lively room sound. The problem is that the added reverberation doesn't sound like a real room.



I am perplexed that so many consumers and reviewers enjoy this sound. Perhaps it is just years of living with pop recordings that this artificially created reverb has become the norm, and that some listeners actually prefer it over the natural reverberation of a real space or concert hall. It seems like most mainstream recordings are made to be listened to over $10 computer speakers. Such is the aesthetic of modern recording, and, perhaps, our whole culture.



At Chesky we have no need for artificial reverb because we always record musicians in great sounding, real acoustic spaces. We prefer the sound of music performed in churches, concert halls, and clubs over the digital artifice generated in the very best studios of the world. But believe it or not, some musicians have to acclimate themselves to our more natural and organic recording style. How did we get to this point?



Today, musicians are so used to recording in acoustically dead studios it takes them a while to get used to a real environment, where they can listen to each other. Whether it is a rock band, a string quartet or jazz group, the most exciting music is created by the interplay of the musicians reacting to each other in real time in a real space. Too bad the vast majority of today's recordings are tracked, and assembled from individually recorded bits and pieces. The rhythm tracks may have been recorded in August, keyboards and guitars in October, and vocals the following January, all this rendering the music less alive, more fabricated. I find that many young musicians use modern studio technologies as a crutch, "Lets overdub it, or fix it in the mix." This makes you lazy. In a real live session you are nervous and you have to focus to give a good performance. At Chesky we always record the entire band and the vocal "live." It keeps you on your toes (I only know too well from my own experience as a player) and makes you focus like never before.

Tonality. Our entire recording chain features the finest custom vacuum tube microphones, microphone preamps, mixers, and digital converters. We spend as much time as high- end companies do designing, building and testing our gear. All in an effort to produce recordings with accurate tonality our signal path is kept as short as possible. When you hear one of our recordings on a good system you will hear the musicians? nuances and micro dynamics. This is not so with mass market studio recordings where much of that is lost in overprocessing and signal manipulations. If you do not believe me do this experiment at your home. Substitute your high-end equipment with a cheap receiver and see what it does to the music. Now remember this is what most commercial recordings go through in a recording studio. I'll remind owners of the very best high end components, your investment in the best gear can only preserve information, not improve it, and if it is lost in the recording chain you can never recover it. At Chesky we're crafting audiophile recordings for audiophiles.

Why would an audiophile listen to recordings done through the recording consoles that have miles of cables, cheap resistors, capacitors, countless op amps and switches? I am amazed by the double standard that exists in audio magazines. They would never dream of reviewing a hundred dollar receiver, but they have no problem in reviewing a lo-fi recording. Some reviewers even go to the point of calling these CDs their references. Remember, most of these discs were produced with every type of artificial electronic gadget available in a modern recording studio, and have no reference whatsoever to real acoustic spaces. Would a home theater critic use a DVD made from a grainy, out of focus home movie to evaluate a high definition video projector? I don't think so.

Contrast and compare. We've invested countless hours evaluating microphone capsules and building the most transparent microphone pre amps. We even have a custom made OTL tube mixer that rivals state of the art audio pre amps in transparency. We also do countless listening tests to hear minute differences in analog to digital converters.

The best cables are used just as you would at home to preserve the musical signal. We also spend hours before each session making sure that all the cable connections are cleaned and have the best contact when hooked up to the system. We spend hours upon hours on minute details to improve the recording chain. In high-end audio a little goes a long way.

In the end our goal is to make transparent recordings. We want to give you a clear picture of the event, not one that is colored by equipment or aesthetics.

zingo

Imaging and depth. Imaging is the left to right stereo picture of a musical group. For instance, if we went to hear a live jazz quartet in a club they might be set up like this: starting from the extreme left is the piano, then the bass, the drums are in the middle, and the saxophone is on the right. Together these instruments would be laterally spread across the stereo image.

However, in most pop and jazz recordings there is really no imaging or depth. All instruments and vocalists are individually close mic-ed so what you hear is "multi mono." The mixing engineer pans the instruments into positions in the stereo, (or multichannel surround) image. There are no spaces between the instruments, and absolutely no sense of a continuous left-to-right soundfield; it's more like a series of little dots where the microphones where placed. So you really can never get a true seamless left to right image because all of the mono microphones interfering with each other.

At Chesky we use a single microphone to capture the entire stereo or surround image. You also hear the actual spatial relationships between the instruments. I believe this is the only way to create this illusion at your home: live musicians being picked up by a single point microphone. Our very special microphone features a number of closely spaced capsules that receive sound from a number of directions.

Depth. In a studio recording there is no depth. The mixing engineer simply puts on reverb to create some illusion of depth. One of the best ways to capture true depth of the original recording event is to use a "single point" microphone.


Imagine the following experiment. Record an orchestra and put a microphone on the first violin, and second microphone on the tuba (which is located all the way in the back of the orchestra). When the two players hit their notes their sounds would arrive at their respective microphones at the same time. The result would sound flat, lacking spatial dimensionality. There goes your illusion of depth. Most of today's orchestral recordings are done with many, many microphones.

Consider a different, more audiophile approach. I have a single point microphone capturing the sound of the close first violin, and the same microphone also captures the tuba located fifty feet away. The resulting time delay between the two instruments arriving at the same microphone documents the spatial relationship of the two instruments. This is how we hear depth in the real world. And that is how we record at Chesky records to capture the depth and space of the musicians. We never overdub instruments or vocals, we record the entire band live. It sounds better, and there's no other way to capture realistic depth and acoustic space. For some reason, the major labels rarely do.

Dynamics. In many pop and jazz recordings there are no soft to loud dynamics, and the reason for this is simple. Mainstream pop radio relies on dynamically compressed music recordings that seem equally loud all the time. This approach may work well in a disco, but is bound to fail in acoustic music. All acoustic music has dynamics; in fact, its very appeal lies in ever-changing dynamics. Acoustic music gets loud, and it can get really soft as well. When you compress the dynamics you get this punchy sound that is loud all the time. If this is what we really want, I suggest that all young music students forget about pp, and mf markings and just learn fff. Because this is what super compressed commercial world of recoding is all about.

At Chesky we give you the complete dynamic range of the music. Sometimes people complain that the overall volume level of our recordings is lower than commercial recordings. Yes, this is true. The reason is, we need headroom so that when the band does get loud we can capture the full dynamics range of the music - just like in real life. Imagine going to an acoustic music concert and listening to music at the same volume for two hours, one constant level with no dynamics at all. LOUD, LOUD, LOUD!

What we are trying to do at Chesky is to give you the most accurate recording and documentation of a live event. We want to put you as close to the real event as possible. We work toward this goal by using all the techniques mentioned in this article. Trying to achieve this in any other way may be nice, and some people may like it, perhaps even rave about how great it sounds. But the result is not the sonic truth. You may like it, but it is what it is, and no more: it's artificial and fake.

What we are offering is the musical truth. A pure recording, an authentic moment captured in real space and time. I believe that when heard back on a proper high end system capable of resolving musical detail you, the listener, will hear the difference!

Fongolio

Excellent post(s) Zingo! Thank you.

concealer404

Keiko wrote: »

General Tire











jk

Took me a minute, then i spit Mountain Dew all over my screen.

mrbigbluelight

Keiko wrote: »

General Tire

:biggrin:


Nice, Zingo. Interesting to read what Chesky's philosophy and goals are in his recordings. While he's in the music "business", he definitely doesn't appear to be part of the music "industry".

A link to Jen Chapin has some samplers that one can listen to. Now, with the understanding that it's over the internet, played on some sub-par Cambridge computer speakers :redface:, you can still hear what Chesky's results are, IMO. (they are short samples).

http://www.chesky.com/core/details.cfm?productcode=SACD347

organ

That's interesting. Thanks for sharing, Zingo. I may check out one of their discs. Can you tell me what type of music Chesky specialize in? The only "audiophile" recordings I own are from Reference Recordings.

zingo

They record a lot of classical and singer/song writer type music, but do have a good variety and one of the best recording qualities if you ask me.

If you check out HDTracks.com, you can listen to a demo of most of the music (Chesky and otherwise).

organ

Very cool. Will check it out. Thanks Zingo.

Rev. Hayes

Mapleshade also comes to mind.

I've never listened to any of their recordings but they certainly have that "audiophile" mindset.

From their website-

When people first hear about Mapleshade, there's always a barrage of questions. "Why do you still record on analog tape?" "Can wires really make my stereo sound better?"

http://shop.mapleshadestore.com/Aboutus.asp

Face

Skywalker Sound: http://www.skysound.com/images/scoring.pdf

Hawkeye

You can also look at Elusive Disc and browse the collection of XRCD's. I've found them to be of very high quality and very enjoyable. The catalog is somewhat limited, but if that choice of music is your cup of tea, can't go wrong.

Gordon

tonyb

Mapleshade has some excellent recordings also, again, if it's your cup of tea. They do offer a good variety and you can listen to tracks on their website.

schwarcw

Check out Steve Albini's Electrical Audio studio. He is a wizzard at recording techniques and done some high profile artists. He's not big on electronic trickery. He's predominately an analogue guy using vintage mics, preamps, etc. He has a live room and prefers natural reverberation. Look Here

For mastering, Bob Ludwig is a living legend for the work he has done. Look Here Also, look at his studio Here

BTW, for you cable naysayers, I dare you to ask these guys or any accomplished engineer if cables make a difference. Nuff said.

schwarcw

Keiko wrote: »

Happy New Year, Carl. Let loose the Kraken! :eek:

Happy New Year Mike! This one is for you!

Release the Kraken!

tonyb

C'mon Mike, somebody throws a Kraken at you, and you have no south pacific pie to counter ? I'm disappointed, your slipping my good man.:biggrin:

dorokusai

You won't find any of those studios cabled with Radio Shack style or "came with the box" stuff.

schwarcw

Kraken Pie:eek:

Mike, you are out of control!!

W WALDECKER

David Manley was a South African born recording engineer who designed all of his own Audio playback and recording equipment and he started VTL after friends suggested that he should produce gear for the public because his homemade stereo equipment sounded great. Windham Hill records produces some excellent recordings and is run by Musicians for Musicians and features artists like Michael Hedges,Liz Story,George Winston,Michael Manring,David Torn....ETC

FheBlackPassat

Telarc Recordings. Simply outstanding.

hearingimpared

Keiko wrote: »

Mz. Kraken PIE!

Thou are not insane but OUTSANE!!!!:biggrin:

doctorcilantro

Anyone watched any of the Bernie Grundman vids on youtube?