Boris Khaikin

This week we visit mid-50s Moscow and the Bolshoi Theatre for a superb recording of Tchaikovsky's best-known opera, Eugene Onegin. It marks the first in a planned series of Soviet-era recordings transferred from a collection of original Russian LPs recently donated to Pristine Classical by our friend Dr. John Philips.

I must admit to little experience with these recordings, and I am really not quite sure what to expect from them. The repertoire is unfamiliar, the names equally, and the Cyrillic script hard for me to read.

When I first mentioned these recordings I got a swift response from Fanfare reviewer James Altena, who asked: "I hope that a priority item among your intended releases of Soviet era operas will be the first-ever CD release of the late 1940s recording conducted by Alexander Orlov of Tchaikovsky's Oprichniki."

Happily this recording was among the Russian boxes (once I'd guessed the title from the cover!), and is now pencilled in for a release in January. James has since sent me more suggestions - I'll be getting my Russian letter translator out shortly and investigating what else is lurking in there!

The present recording dates from a little later, 1955, and demonstrates well how the Soviet technicians had mastered the recording technologies both they and the Americans had taken home from Germany at the end of the Second World War. It's as fine a piece of audio engineering as almost anything else I've heard from the mid-fifties, and in these new transfers, from near-mint LPs, and following XR remastering, this classic recording sounds better than ever.




Take a look at the picture above. What do you see? Two small black boxes and a CD. The bigger black box is a 1TB external hard drive that holds the Pristine Audio Digital Music Collection - all our recordings in multiple FLAC formats, plus all our Streaming Exclusives. With the addition of scores for more recent releases, and cover artwork and the like, this little box, as tall as the CD, half as wide and perhaps half as thick again, holds 26,502 files in 2,103 folders, a total of 529GB of data, or 568,667,464,473 bytes in total.

The double-CD to the right of it, by contrast, totals 10,934,479,518 bytes, less than 1/520th the data. (Oh, and those FLAC files almost double in size when played, unlike the CD.)

My point? Things are shrinking. A stack of 1000 CDs barely half fills a box that's little more than half the size of a CD case. And the drive in that Intenso drive could hold more if I'd chosen the 1.5TB option. As it is there's enough music in there to keep you occupied for a very, very long time.

And right underneath it is the media player that'll handle it and deliver "perfect" digital sound to your hi-fi system, after a fashion. It's a very, very small PC - 8.5cm long, 3cm wide and 1.5cm thick (that's about 3" x 1" x 0.5")  - and it runs the Android operating system common among smart-phones that don't have an Apple logo on them.

It's very bare-bones, but it works, and if you have the right connections it'll play those 24-bit FLAC files almost right out of the box.

My test device arrived yesterday afternoon. It comes with very little: a short HDMI connector for TV or monitor, a USB adapter for external storage, and a mains adapter for power, plus a basic pamphlet on how to get started.

So I plugged in the power and attached the MK808B to my PC monitor, and there it was on the screen - and basic Android desktop. I unplugged the Microsoft wireless adapter for my keyboard and mouse from my PC and popped it into the USB connector provided and suddenly a pointer appeared on the screen. I plugged in a USB memory stick with a video on it and clicked on the video player - it found the video and, when asked, started playing the movie.

Now for the Digital Music Collection. I removed the memory stick and plugged in the Intenso drive. No problem, the MK808B found it and I could see all the files on it. But the default music player didn't recognise the FLAC files as music, so wouldn't play them.

But this is an Android PC, just like my phone, and I know there are zillions of music players on the Google Play store, many of them free, which are brilliant at this sort of thing. With the MK808B connected wirelessly to my office wi-fi network, off I go, and a few clicks later I've got a new music player that happily zips through all the files on the Digital Music Collection and plays all the FLACs.

Now hang on a minute, this is coming out of my monitor's built-in loudspeakers. It's hardly a hi-fi experience, is it? I mean, they're good (Asus have partnered with Bang & Olufsen to deliver better sound from this monitor than I've ever heard before from a PC screen), but they're not that good.

Luckily I have a solution. In my living room there's a TV with an optical digital audio output. There's a nice new digital hi-fi amplifier with optical digital inputs. Put an optical cable between them, plug in the MK808B to the TV's spare digital HDMI input, and what do you have? A totally digital signal path from the original FLAC files to my hi-fi system.

It works. What's essentially a €40 ($40, £35) widget that's light enough to dangle behind my TV can deliver all the music on my Digital Music Collection to my hi-fi in as good a sound quality as any other player in the universe, at any price. Because the digital amplifier handles the conversion to analogue current needed by my loudspeakers, there's no expensive circuitry required at any point before there to convert digits into music, so I don't need an expensive player to do that job.

It's tiny because it doesn't need to be any bigger. It has built-in Bluetooth, so I can reclaim my PC's keyboard and mouse and use a portable Bluetooth mini-keyboard with trackpad (or whatever) as a glorified remote control. It doesn't need a display because, guess what, there's a whopping big 40" high definition LED display sitting in the corner of my room that's better at the job than anything you can fit on the front of a hi-fi separate.

This looked good. Then I spotted something else - a networking media app. It's come to the right home! It finds all the various stream offerings that are floating around the house and gives them to me: my Squeezebox Server that sends music and Internet radio to our digital radios; a connection to XBMC that's running on a PC on the network; the Plex server (similar to XBMC that can send video and FLAC to an iPad, among other devices) that's running on another PC; the DNLA stuff I don't really understand that connects all sorts of digital media devices, and more. I didn't realise I was so well connected!

Now the likelihood is that some of these services, such as Plex or Squeezebox Server, may do some file conversions before they send our the music I select from them. I'm not entirely sure, but it wouldn't surprise me if the ability to play a 24-bit FLAC using the Squeezebox method might not be delivering quite the quality I'd hoped for, but equally it may. I'd have to investigate if I decided that was my preferred means of transmission.

Or I can stick to a local drive, as originally described. There's another slot on the MK808B which apparently offers the use of a MicroSD card (they call it a TF card, which according to the Internet (!) is the same thing) which I've not tried yet, but in theory I could pop in a 64GB memory card stuffed with music, video, pictures and more and have this as well as whatever I've got plugged into the USB port.

In short, it works. It's a bit of a hobbyist's solution perhaps, but I'm sure it wouldn't take long for me to have it working simply and the way I want. And the next generation XBMC player for Android is just around the corner too. In use your TV becomes your media control centre, with this little dongle hidden away at the back, and that digital connection from TV to digital amplifier ensures the best possible sound quality can be delivered to your speakers.

When something as small, simple and cheap as this can deliver so much, so well, it's no surprise that those who like endless tweaking, or investing in  esoteric sound equipment, are turning their attention back to vinyl, despite all its shortcomings. What else can they do with all their money when $40 is all they really need?

 

 

 

New Genre Search.

This was an excellent idea sent to me earlier this week by one of Pristine Streaming's new subscribers. By going through all of the recordings in the main player and adding a simple extra couple of words denoting the musical category, you can now search for music by genre as well as any other words used in the titles or artists lines.

For example, typing chamber music (or Chamber Music - it's not case-specific) into the search box and pressing return will filter our everything but chamber music from the playlist. Fancy some jazz? Just search for "jazz" What could be simpler?

The musical categories are based on our existing cataloguing schemes and are as follows:

Orchestral Music, Chamber Music, Keyboard Music, Vocal Music, Opera, Blues, Jazz

Note that I've split the vocal section into two. Opera is just that, with Vocal Music covering everything else from large choral works to solo recitals. Keyboard Music refers to solo keyboard recordings, with piano concertos covered under Orchestral Music. Then again, type Piano Concerto and you'll find this does an equally good job at finding just this - that was always an option, as are other keywords found in existing titles, such as Symphony, Quartet, Sonata and so on.

Give these keywords a try, then perhaps randomise the playlist - it's a great way to finding new music!