Album Review: Sara K: Water Falls

This week's album review is exceptionally out of the ordinary for a variety of reasons. You need to understand a bit of the technology behind mastering vinyl albums as part of the pre-pressing stage in order to really appreciate what we are dealing with here, hence the following explanation.

With Direct Metal Mastering, the groove is cut directly into copper metal instead of vinyl. High-frequency loss, distortion and pre-echo associated with conventional lacquer mastering are eliminated and transient response is greatly improved. DMM record pressings sound brighter, cleaner, more detailed, with 15% more playing time than with lacquer technology, although in this case the 15% more playing time is ignored for the sake of a pristinely clean pressing, with wide spaces between adjacent grooves. Stampers are plated directly from the DMM Copper Master, eliminating two of the three plating steps required for lacquers.

Direct Metal Mastering is not a new concept at all and has been around for many years. I remember owning quite a few commercial pressings from artists like Queen, The Little River Band and The Alan Parsons Project, all sporting the DMM label. However, these were still mass produced and thus would have suffered from the same things that caused a decline in vinyl sales in the mid to late eighties - quality control problems. With the current revival in vinyl records it is hoped that this album will be only one of many using the particular mastering technique. And if what this LP sounds like can still be improved upon, well, that spells imminent death for any and all digital formats.

Sara K is no ordinary artist. A hauntingly beautiful voice and playing guitar accompanied by top musicians, no other vinyl production method would have done this artist justice. The album starts in an unusual way in that it records a street scene with a Russian accordion player playing traditional music, until Sara K passes him, at which time he would switch over to the Chattanooga Choo-Choo. She was so impressed with this that she decided to use this as the introduction to the album. It clearly works.

Spread over four sides you are treated with incredible guitar work, beautiful melodies and a voice that quite possibly has no equal. There's no point discussing each piece. Should you get to hear it, simply relax and be totally immersed by the music. In fact, it will envelop you by itself.

The technical presentation is second to none. Groove spacing is wide enough that you can physically see between two grooves, the disks are both super flat, 180 gram pressings that simply look different to anything you have ever seen before. The gatefold sleeve explains the DMM process in great detail - in German. But I have managed to track down an English translation already. Notable is the involvement of loudspeaker giant, Bowers and Wilkins (B&W), in supplying the loudspeakers used during the recording of this album.

There are only four vinyl releases in the Stockfisch Records (www.stockfisch-records.de) catalogue, with one of the highly recommended ones being David Roth's More Pearls. To add to this, B&W has released a compilation album consisting of cuts from some of these releases. Called Very Audiophile New Recordings you can be sure that the same care that goes into their loudspeaker design, would have gone into the production of this disk as well.