Sara K. - Made In The Shade [Stockfisch SFR 357.7052.2] {Germany 2009} (PureAudio BluRay)

×

Sara K. - Made In The Shade [Stockfisch SFR 357.7052.2] {Germany 2009} (PureAudio BluRay)

Close

Sara K. - Made In The Shade
Label/Cat#: Stockfisch SFR 357.7052.2 | 2.0 FLAC: 902 MB | 5.1 FLAC: 2,29 GB | Artwork: 155 MB | Recovery Info
Country/Year: Germany 2009| Genre: Singer/Songwriter | Hoster: Filepost/Filefactory

MD5 [X] CUE [X] LOG [X] INFO TEXT [X] ARTWORK [X]

webfind [] selfrip [X]

×

Sara K. - Made In The Shade [Stockfisch SFR 357.7052.2] {Germany 2009} (PureAudio BluRay)

Close

×

Sara K. - Made In The Shade [Stockfisch SFR 357.7052.2] {Germany 2009} (PureAudio BluRay)

Close

Santa Fe, New Mexico-based artist Sara K has mostly been known as a darling of the Audiophile circles, especially since her six-album stint with Chesky Records. During a European tour with several stops in Germany, Chesky Records had contracted Gunther Pauler to handle the sound engineering for the shows. He was so impressed with Sara K’s musical style, he offered her a contract with his own Stockfisch Records. With her Chesky contract nearing an end, she accepted, and soon began a fruitful partnership that has garnered even more critical praise for her truly superb-sounding Stockfisch offerings. Gunther Pauler is without a doubt a true genius, and his Stockfisch discs uniformly offer some of the most realistic and dynamic sound available.

I’ve been messing around with audio for more than thirty years now, and I really thought I’d pretty much seen and heard it all, seeing just about every album being released in just about every possible newfangled format. When SACD and DVD-Audio arrived, I really thought we’d reached the pinnacle – how much better sounding could a digital disc get? And although I don’t think we ever really saw the DVD medium as a music carrier, I think you could pretty successfully argue that the SACD was, in a convoluted kind of way, just a glorified version of the DVD disc – with no video, of course. So when Blu-ray rumblings first started appearing on the internet in blogs and various audio forums, I took it with a grain of salt, and saw the Blu-ray as a vehicle most likely for movies only – why would anyone even consider a music-only Blu-ray? And with essentially the abandonment of SACD by the major labels, I can’t begin to tell you how shocked I was to see music-only Blu-rays appearing a few months ago. So when I cued up both the Blu-ray and SACD versions of Sara K’s Made In The Shade, things got really confusing – and pretty darnn cool at the same time!

Now I have to preface my remarks with a couple of truths: there was an obvious level difference between my Sony SACD player and my second-generation Samsung Blu-ray player, and I have no way of level-matching the two. So any differences I heard could pretty easily be attributed to the louder output of the Sony SACD machine. And my Samsung, while a fine Blu-ray player in its own right, suffers from the usual ailments and inabilities of players in general from two years ago, so newer machines hopefully won’t exhibit the stubbornness and occasional refusal to readily perform as did the Samsung.

That said, I still found the Pure Audio Blu-ray disc a little clunky in operation, especially when trying to use the player without a video display. The Samsung’s display is pretty spartan, so after fumbling around for a few minutes, I finally broke down and read the information on the Blu-ray box (pretty novel idea) and discovered that by pressing the color-coded buttons, I could easily jump between the available audio options. And while A/B’ing between SACD and Blu-ray, if I paused the Blu-ray player for too long it would lock up, requiring me to restart the player to get any action. I eventually just started toggling the input switch on my preamp between the multichannel sources and didn’t bother pausing anything from that point. Regardless, the sound quality from the Blu-ray disc was superb, whether from the DTS Master Audio 5.1 track or from the uncompressed PCM 5.1 track. And two channel purists should be delighted with the uncompressed PCM stereo track as well. Ultimately, I felt the SACD sounded perhaps a smidge better, with a more seamless surround presentation, and – I truly felt – a significantly greater degree of midrange warmth compared to the Blu-ray tracks. However, this could easily just be my mind playing tricks on me. After turning on the video display, I was happy to see that the Blu-ray disc loaded fairly quickly and was easier to navigate versus the Pure Audio (no video) option, but was somewhat underwhelmed by the lack of any video extras, like perhaps access to the song lyrics or maybe a photo gallery – sorry, no cigar!

The music was superb, and Gunther Pauler has definitely gotten a good handle on the whole multichannel aspect of recording. I wasn’t incredibly impressed with his first venture into surround sound – it just seemed that too much was going on in the surround channels, but both of these hi-res discs provide a convincing degree of realism, very much on par with the excellent stereo-only SACDs that Stockfisch initially released. The songs are poignant and reflective, and the sparse accompaniment given many of the tunes here gave me a real clue that the album was headed down a less fiery path than usual for Sara K. The title track, “Made In The Shade,” was written for her stablemate and musical partner at Stockfisch Records, Chris Jones, who was diagnosed in August 2005 with Hodgkin’s lymphoma and died a mere month later. Check out the Stockfisch disc Sara K and Chris Jones, Live In Concert for a thrilling reminder of the chemistry between the two artists. Sara K’s website seems to be no longer functional, but a trip to her page on the Stockfisch website confirmed a posting I’d seen on another blog – she’s announced her retirement from touring and recording, and mentions this disc as her last – she’s just had enough of it all.

Regardless of whether you choose the SACD or Blu-ray option, trust me, you won’t be disappointed. I was both thrilled and surprised by how good the music sounded via my Blu-ray player, and it gives me great hope that some form of mainstream hi-res music will continue into the future. Very highly recommended! audiophile audition

Lineage:

Retail Blu Ray->
Pioneer BDR-206->
AnyDVD HD 6.1.9.0>
AudioMuxer 0.9.3.8

RAR-files

If you have problems extracting the RAR files on your HD, please verify these checksums. If they do not match, redownload the not-matching part and try again.

(copy & paste to your editor and save as *.md5 in the folder where the RAR files are located)

75606bc0ce892906a66c75ac53bbef67 *FHQA-SaK-MaInThSh-BD20.part1.rar
3e99db5212b8a219b3e70ec15bf29fe7 *FHQA-SaK-MaInThSh-BD20.part2.rar
c9ad6ac5bd72b8cd9443302d7a56bf71 *FHQA-SaK-MaInThSh-BD20.part3.rar
c3b29314b919120734d784604145cb29 *FHQA-SaK-MaInThSh-BD20.part4.rar
7a5fcb071a5695849ffe9a695de54465 *FHQA-SaK-MaInThSh-BD20.part5.rar

307f2c08969f1347130b20a661bb1aad *FHQA-SaK-MaInThSh-BD51.part01.rar
686343e98fe9bfe3b253055ab026703c *FHQA-SaK-MaInThSh-BD51.part02.rar
721e6d5f52a403254f4e857b8aa138f1 *FHQA-SaK-MaInThSh-BD51.part03.rar
3682782deb101b04ec92a1eb46010bc3 *FHQA-SaK-MaInThSh-BD51.part04.rar
bb96ff539123eac6dce50bbba724683b *FHQA-SaK-MaInThSh-BD51.part05.rar
199f0ca9d4b9d2095c7224cb340d730e *FHQA-SaK-MaInThSh-BD51.part06.rar
dc27bc456e2a9c46b41ad4a81d4a7945 *FHQA-SaK-MaInThSh-BD51.part07.rar
31e41075297b16ac6ce31d851a03dd9a *FHQA-SaK-MaInThSh-BD51.part08.rar
739411dbeb0dfd5a198357e1a1c08bbb *FHQA-SaK-MaInThSh-BD51.part09.rar
ab2a509cdd5fa2086174c95da475c547 *FHQA-SaK-MaInThSh-BD51.part10.rar
6dfc63d9d09cbbf0ac4a579793350ed7 *FHQA-SaK-MaInThSh-BD51.part11.rar
77298131e3433ea8ed799528576bb9b6 *FHQA-SaK-MaInThSh-BD51.part12.rar

5afd3fe439dc592e9f337b2bfbdbd285 *FHQA-SaK-MaInThSh-INFART.rar

Password:

finest-hq-audio

More Stockfisch?

my Stockfisch uploads

Check my blog for other lossless uploads:

http://www.avaxhome.ws/blogs/luckburz