Grammy Award nominee Morten Lindberg from 2L record label speaks about MQA + video...
I have a strong personal bond with this particular recording. I still remember the intensity of Christian's playing. There was a degree of concentration where the instrumental and musical development from take to take was evident in Christian's every movement and in his physical contact with the instrument. For me, a young sound engineer at the time, it was an experience that set a benchmark for later work in music production.
This recording was made direct to DAT in 1993. Early digital technology had many drawbacks and weaknesses. For this remastering we dug out the original SONY PCM-2700 from our storage and fed test signals into it to provide a sonic "fingerprint" of the converter. Using new technology from MQA we can now correct inaccuracies in the time domain, the so-called pre- and postringing in the impulse response, that were present in the old digital recordings. The result lifts a veil from the sound image and gives us a transparent and intimate listening experience.
This was one of my first productions after completing my education as a sound engineer. The set-up was extremely simple and straightforward: a stereo pair of Brüel & Kjær omnidirectional microphones recorded direct onto a DAT player. A brand new Steinway D-model had just arrived from the factory in Hamburg to the old Oslo University Hall. A few months later this particular piano was sold to a theatre, where it was unfortunately badly serviced and ended up a virtual ruin. Perhaps it is this very element of irretrievability that makes the recording of this instrument so special, but I should add that I have never, in all the years since, come across a piano with such a strong sonic personality.
Meeting Bob Stuart and discovering MQA has been a total revelation. I have spent many hours with Bob listening to original recordings and being constantly amazed by the incredible sense of space and clarity brought by MQA. The end-to-end process allows us to more accurately capture the original sound and to deliver it perfectly all the way through to music lovers