Beethoven Piano Sonatas: Moonlight and Pathetique Master Quality Reel To Reel Tape

TAS Super Tape List: Classical

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Live studio recording of pianist John Lenehan's performance of Beethoven Moonlight and Pathetique Piano Sonatas.

This 1/4" Master Tape Copy was created from the 30IPS 1/2" Running Masters at Air Studios.

**It is standard practice in all recording studios to keep the tape "tail out". This reduces "pre-echo" and it means that the tape should be placed on the right hand side of the recorder, re-wound and then played.

Regarding the D2D LP Pressing: In order to make the D2D Vinyl recording, the Interpreti Veneziani Chamber Orchestra performs each album side live in the studio, recorded via state of the art, all-tube valve microphones, fed to a Neve Desk, and then via a pure analogue path directly to the Neumann VMS80 lathe.

The brilliantly captured session was carefully engineered, and mixed live, no overdubs! During the performance, the Neumann VMS 80 Cutting head engages the master lacquer ("stamper" used for pressing LPs) and is not stopped until the entire side is complete! The results are amazing! A dynamic album that needs to be heard!

Chasing The Dragon's excellent 1/4" 15ips R2R recording of pianist John Lenehan playing Beethoven's 'Pathetique' and 'Moonlight' sonatas. In the past, Chasing The Dragon has used vintage tube microphones, often set up in a classic Decca-tree configuration, for its D2D LPs. This brand-new, live-in-the-studio recording certainly sounds Decca-like in its tonal richness, solidity of imaging, and dynamic power. Indeed, it is, if anything, even fuller in timbre (and more 3-D) than Decca's piano recordings, with overtones (on sostenuto notes) lingering for precisely the right duration, audibly (and beautifully) enriching the timbre in just the right way it is fleshed out in a good hall. This realistic harmonic 'sustain' is not something that you typically hear on LP (much less on digital sources), where the fundamental tends to dominate, as if the pianist were striking a single string and immediately damping its vibrations, thinning down and decay. This remarkable difference in 'completeness' of tone color makes for an equally remarkable difference in sonic realism. Though the music couldn't be more different, the sound of Chasing The Dragon's tape immediately put me in mind of the sound of The Tape Project / Reference Recording's Nojima Plays Liszt. We're talking that level of naturalness, which, in piano recordings, is about as high as it gets.