They offer 24/88 downloadable and thanks God they do not record the Audiophile Blues or the similar crap. This is a good part. The bad part is that they record at 4X and then outsource the file to vireos industry cretins to “master” them, pushing them as “Studio Masters”. That is sad…. I do not know the quality they odder and I do not know the artists they record. Anyhow, it is what it is….

http://www.yarlungrecords.com/

Music Orientation:

We believe that select late twentieth and early twenty-first century composers can write music as rich and beautiful as the masters of earlier eras. Note Jason Barabba’s String Trio, and works by David Lefkowitz and Krzysztof Penderecki happily along side Beethoven on the Janaki debut release. Enjoy music by Tan Dun comfortably at home with Mozart, Scarlatti, Rachmaninov and Schumann on David Fung’s Evening Conversations.

Dialoghi offers masterpieces by Lutoslawski, Saariaho, Stucky, Rouse and Lefkowitz alongside J. S. Bach, Machaut, and Leonin. Orion includes the magnificent Elliott Carter sonata. David Howard includes works by Steve Stucky, Esa-Pekka Salonen and Galina Ustvolskaya along with the monumental Brahms Clarinet Quintet. Ryan MacEvoy McCullough introduces us to Milosz Magin on his debut recital which also includes Bach, Beethoven, Schubert and Debussy.

Audio Orientation:

There is a distinct breed of recording connoisseur that feels the best-recorded sound comes from the least amount of equipment.  One must use the fewest microphones required to capture the sound, and they must be placed in perfect locations. This is the “less is more,” “minimalist,” or “purist” school. Many microphones, multiple-track mixers, miles of microphone cable can add noise and what audiophiles call a blanket over the sound and over the music. This makes the music seem distant and un-engaging. There are extraordinary recordings made this way. But they are rare, and their engineers walk on water.

In these most recent Yarlung Records releases, I use either one stereo or two mono vacuum tube microphones, which record directly to two tracks (left and right, for stereo playback). We use microphones like the legendary AKG C-24, and matched Neumann U-47s. I believe that these minimalist recording techniques will give you, the listener, the most transparent sound, the most accurate soundstage and the most life-like ambiance of these great artists in a concert hall.

We use customized vacuum tube microphone preamplifiers instead of a mixer, and our custom interconnect cables. I record analog tape and high definition digital audio (in this case 176,400 samples per second and 24 bit depth). Steve Hoffman and Kevin Gray mastered these CDs directly from the digital media, re-sampled to 44.1 kilohertz and dithered to 16 bits so that you can play them on a modern CD player. We hope you enjoy them!