Written by Karl Erik Sylthe, february 2009
Four new releases in Blu-ray Audio are announced from Lindberg Lyd, and "The Nordic Sound" is the first one of these. At the same time this one is the third in a row, and like the first two this is also a two-disc release. It has the hybrid multi-channel SA-CD on one disc, and Blu-ray Audio on the other.
"The Nordic Sound" follows the positive developments that took place with the user interface on SONAR, in that you can operate it without the use of the display. It is the same audio formats that are used, respectively DTS HD Master Audio 5.1, LPCM 5.1 and LPCM 2.0.
2L has used graphics capabilities for Blu-ray in a good way, in that it is displayed graphics albums with "cover flow" in the iTunes-inspired style. Useful on a record, which consists of short-stories from 18 different albums from 2L.
Music
With the exception of the upcoming "Dena piano duo" with Grieg's addition to piano pieces by Mozart, are all taken from previous releases from the last 2-3 years. The great majority are also well-known recordings for me, with the exception of recordings of Islandsmoen, Ives and the Grammy nominated Immortal / Nystedt.
The selection shows the great range which lies in the releases from 2L, and is suitable as a presentation and teaser from this catalogue, which is mostly based around classical and contemporary music, but without any hesitation cross borders. Not mentioning to tear down the borders.
Sure there will always favourites in such a collection of music. To me, TrondheimSolistene with Marianne Thorsen make a peak with their performance of Mozart's violin concerts. Excellent performance of these beautiful works of Mozart, as we have written more about here.
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At the other end of the musical axis is Cikada Duo with works by Arne Nordheim. Wonderful exciting, and should be explored by anyone who wants to find out if it is hold in my claim that we here find contemporary music's answer to Bitches Brew.
A little in between these landmarks, we find a third favorite in the Tor Espen Aspaas, in a piece from Schønberg taken from the record Mirror Canon. I will also draw up the two tracks from Islandsmoens Requiem. Very exciting, especially Confutatis is impressive.
DSD or LPCM?
The first listening of "The Nordic Sound" was made on my main setup, where a test copy of the Pioneer BDP-51FD is playing via analog outputs to Linn Kino / Chakra C6100. The interesting thing was that I, almost without exception, set with a feeling that the sound was improved based on memory, compared with the excellent SA-CDs that have been published previously with this material. I had a feeling that there had been improvements made by the master, but this is refuted by Morten Lindberg in 2L. There are no changes beyond that there are different audio format. Thus, the explanation must lie somewhere else.
Playing on my reference player BDP-LX70a confirmed the impression. It is a fantastic amount of air in the tracks. And even though this is also the case for SA-CD, it is even clearer when playing LPCM on most recordings. And it's a little against the first impressions from Divertimenti, where I think that the limitations of distance settings on the Pioneer players fails slightly to preserve the perspective. Perhaps it is simply the explanation for this discrepancy in preference between Divertimenti and these tracks on "The Nordic Sound". The forward perspective on Divertimenti a huge demand for precision in the settings on the 5.1-setup, and here the Pioneer BDP failed compared with the Sony 9100 ES DVD.
We will in the future still have a focus on the comparison of sound quality between the SA-CD and Blu-ray Audio. Basically this a question of DSD vs LPCM. In the meantime, you can enjoy the unique sound quality on these recordings from 2L, whether you choose to play SA-CD or Blu-ray Audio.
Teaser of "The Nordic Sound" on Youtube. More about "The Nordic Sound" at 2L
