Ambient Recording The album was recorded on Direct Stream Digital at Ambient Recording’s converted Connecticut barn, whose studio’s surfaces are diffused with soft pine wood, hand painted with 15 layers of violin varnish. Mark Conese recorded Darryl Tookes with a Brauner microphone, custom designed and modified by Klaus Heyne, while Joseph Joubert performed on a Steinway D Concert Grand and was recorded using two Shure microphones. Ambient Audio Labs 1070A microphone pre-amplifiers were used exclusively throughout the recording. The Technology New England Morning is one of the few Hybrid SACD albums currently on the market worldwide. Invented by Sony and Philips, the Super Audio CD is based on an entirely new digital audio technology called Direct Stream Digital (DSD). Completely unlike the pulse code modulation (PCM) technology used for audio CD, DVD-Video and DVD-Audio, DSD technology is based on a 1-bit sample at very high sampling rates of up to 2,822,400 samples per second. That’s 64 times faster than the audio CD standard of 44,100 times		per second. The resulting digital bit stream more closely resembles the analog source signal that is being encoded. Listeners will discover that the warm and natural sound of Sony’s SACD draws them into the music in the same way as does a timeless LP played on a fine turntable. Says TBM producer Tanya Bickley, “The human voice is the ultimate instrument by which we judge sound quality because our ears are so attuned to hearing the human voice. We believe people will love New England Morning because the album sounds so natural and the music is so beautiful.” Important to potential buyers, TBM Records has gone to the expense of having New England Morning reproduced as a Hybrid SACD. The album features a high-density layer for the stereo/and or multi-channel DSD recording and a CD layer that makes the disc look like a regular audio CD or CD-ROM. Thus, conventional CD players can play back the CD hybrid layer, while SACD players can play back the high resolution DSD recording on the SACD layer. In other words, New England Morning can be enjoyed by anyone owning a standard CD player, whether at home, in a car, on earphones, in a computer, or by audiophiles who own the latest, most advanced Super Audio CD player. Read an interview with Mark Conese about the recording of this album Darryl Tookes' comments about Ambient Recording

Interview With Mark Conese

New England Morning has been recorded as a Super Audio CD, a process that brings out the full warmth and richness of the music. This interview with Ambient Recording’s Mark Conese explains the SACD process and why it works so well for this album.

What is it about Darryl and Joseph’s music that lends itself to this form of recording?

Basically, this system excels at anything acoustic, such as voice and piano, really anything acoustic, and it captures all the nuances. This being an acoustic project, it’s perfect for this system.

What characterizes the sound of music recorded in this system compared to a more traditional CD?

Well, traditional digital recording has very obvious limits to it. And this system has really broken through or done away with a lot of those limitations. Basically, whatever you put into the system, it records and puts back out when you listen back to it. It doesn’t lose any information or any detail, where traditional digital does lose information. The ear can’t ascertain any differences between what you put into it and what comes out of it, whereas when you work with normal digital PCM, it’s usually very obvious when you put music into it and you play it back, it comes back different missing certain nuances that this system seems to capture.

Can you explain a little bit about the microphone used for this recording?

The microphone we used on the voice was a Brauner (www.braunerusa.com). It’s a mic that’s made in Germany, designed by Klaus Heyne, who lives here in the US and has developed a reputation over probably more than 20 years for modifying vintage microphones to make them sound as good as they can, if not better, than from the factory. And what he’s done is he’s taken his experiences of the last 20 years and combined with the Brauner company, which is making probably one of the best vacuum tube microphones that are being made today, and he’s used his specifications on what he thinks would be the ultimate microphone, especially for vocals, and he’s had Brauner build that microphone to his spec. So it’s a Brauner VM1 Klaus Heyne Edition.

Why is the microphone that you use particularly good for Darryl?

Well, it’s a particularly good vocal microphone, designed by Klaus Heyne to excel for vocals, to really be a world-class vocal mic, as good as any mic ever built. I think with Darryl’s voice—you know, there is such a great voice—that it helps to capture and record all the nuances of the voice.

When you’re recording, how do you balance out the excellence of the Brauner mic with the wonderful microphones you used on the Steinway with Joseph?

The microphones we used on the piano are a brand new Shure microphone, and it’s a pre-production model, a model they are just coming out with now. I had tried them on piano previously and found that they were the most neutral sounding I’d heard on the piano. They color the sound the least out of any microphone I’ve tried on the piano and that’s why I went with those.

Tell us about the studio where the recording took place—what makes the recording sound so good?

In the studio, which I designed and built, we’d added at one point wood diffusion to the walls, and it was a soft wood, a pine, a rough-sawn pine. We liked what it did to the sound, with the exception that the porousness of the wood absorbed the high frequencies, more so than it did mid-range or low frequencies. In my opinion, the reverb of the room became a little out of balance, so what I did in order not to change the mid-range and low frequencies but in order to change the high frequencies was add violin varnish. I spent months and months trying to find the right product—I tried all different types of varnishes and lacquers and polyurethanes and all different types of products and found that this one particular violin varnish did exactly what I wanted. It created a very hard surface on the pine without changing the density of the pine. It didn’t soak into it and change the actual density of the wood, all it did was create almost like a shrunken, tight, glossy surface on the very exterior of the wood and what that did is that made the high frequencies now reflect off of it, instead of being absorbed into the pores. And that evened out the reverb in the room over all frequencies—now the high frequencies had the same reverb characteristics as the mid-range and the low frequencies, and made the overall sound more even.

What is it about voice and piano that make this such a superb Super CD product?

The human voice is one of the sounds that the human ear is most used to hearing. It’s been hearing the human voice for as long as humans have been speaking, and your ear is very cued into when a voice sounds proper or doesn’t sound proper and it’s easy even for lay people to hear a good recording with the human voice, because to them it sounds natural and it sounds real. The human voice is the ultimate instrument to judge recording quality because your ear is so attuned to be able to pick out if things have been changed by the recording process or if it’s natural. People will love this recording process because they will be hearing what they’d normally hear.

We’re proud to be recording at Ambient. Is there a quality about this album that excites you?

I really like Darryl and Joseph and their musicality and their musicianship. They’re as talented as humans get, and it makes it a pleasure to be able to record them with DSD.

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The Studio—the Musician’s View ( Darryl Tookes)

What happens with Mark and Ambient is that just when you think they’ve exhausted the frontier of possibilities, if he feels that way for a moment then he just shuts down until he can find something new that’s going to make an improvement and that’s what has happened. I can’t tell you how happy I was when Mark called and told me this summer that there was something new going on that would be intriguing and have a lot of possibilities for this kind of a recording. Not to mention the fact that Mark’s got such a fine piano and the room – I’ve always loved the room and working with Mark and all that but when he told me about this Sonoma system and how it would be a natural for the kind of finesse that we wanted to bring to this recording, it really made me really happy.

The other thing that we talked about that was really a big moment for me when getting started with this, was a lot of times when guys are in that rarefied air of audiophiledom like Mark is, sometimes the kind of cats like that don’t really pay a whole lot of attention to the human voice because it’s like, you know, you’re so busy pressing the envelope or stretching the frontier with new technology that the voice sometimes gets left out, but in Mark’s case, it was just the opposite. He told me that he had discovered this microphone that was so exciting to him and then when he sent me online to research it, I found that the only thing that was not happening with that microphone was that when certain engineers felt that the singers had too many aspects of their voice that needed improvement upon, so the output of the microphones was too true! Since I’ve always been fighting this battle with how to get what it is that I really do best recorded—and the best I’ve ever done was at Ambient a few years back (up until this time) so all those reasons really thrilled me as to why there was no time like the present to try to get moving on this thing. It’s indeed a pleasure.

To be able to work with Joseph at this stage in his maturity and his professional experience, to be in the environment that we’re in at Ambient, right next to one another, while we’re singing, playing, for Joseph NOT to be in headphones, for me to be in headphones, and have that microphone that’s picking up my every thought and suggestion for my voice, it’s just great.

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