Ten at 86 — Joe McQueen and friends

This is a review I wrote for SA-CD.net and published there on the 18th of September 2007. SA-CD.net has since become hraudio.net and the old review pages went with it, so this is reproduced from the Internet Archive’s capture. It ran as a site review, and carries a joint copyright line with SA-CD.net.

The review is reproduced as it stood. Only the site’s own furniture around it — the star graphics, the “was this review helpful?” footer — has been dropped, and the ratings it carried are restated as numbers below.

IsoMike · 55802 · hybrid disc · stereo and multichannel · DSD recording

Performance 3/5 · Sonics stereo 4/5, multichannel 5/5

If you like to listen to straight jazz ensembles in surround sound on an SA-CD, recorded using an innovative microphone setup, then this disc is worth checking out.

You may not have heard of Joe McQueen (his name does not even feature on the AllMusic database), but this guy can play sax, at least at the level that you will encounter at a typical jazz festival, and the music is certainly very listenable, being a combination of lesser known standards penned by the likes of Charlie Parker and Duke Ellington.

The title of the album “Ten at 86” is a reference to the number of tracks in the album and Joe’s age (I’ll leave it to you to guess which is which). Accompanying Joe are Evan Coombs on bass, Clayton Furch on the piano, Don Keipp on drums, Skip Musgrave on trumpet and Brad Wheeler on harmonica.

All tracks are instrumental, but if you let the disc play when the song in track ten finishes you’ll discover (around 4:50 into the track) a hidden “bonus” track featuring Joe singing. He has a fairly decent voice, I wish there were more tracks featuring him singing.

As with other IsoMike recordings, this is a 4-channel recording utilizing an interesting microphone placement consisting of four mics suspended from four arms (capturing Front Left, Front Right, Rear Left, and Rear Right). Special heart shaped acoustic baffles are placed between the mics to ensure that the content captured by each microphone is as discrete and unique as possible. The theory behind this is that in a typical microphone setup, each microphone is capturing not only unique content but shared content also captured by other microphones. Unfortunately, the physical placement of these microphones means shared content is captured at slightly different phases by each mic, so when the recording is played back you get the possibility of phase cancellation from the channels. Hopefully an IsoMike recording should result in less phase cancellation, therefore a clearer and less muddy sound. You can see a photo of the IsoMike system used in the recording on page 5 of the cover booklet.

The theory seems plausible, but does it result in a better recording? Well, you can judge for yourself by listening to this disc. I certainly found the recording to be convincingly realistic, with a sense of spaciousness and wide soundstage that is possibly due to the higher channel separation, but it’s also just a touch drier than a typical recording. Incidentally, the venue is the Austad Auditorium at the Val. A Browning Center for the Performing Arts at Weber University, Ogden, Utah. I would normally have expected a venue like this to be slightly more reverberant, but on the plus side the instruments come through with more clarity and detail (particularly the brushwork, and nuances in the piano tone) than I would have otherwise expected.

This is very much a front focused recording, the rear channels are mostly used to convey ambience and reflections from the rear of the venue, and are quite subdued. Therefore, I would have assumed that the stereo version should sound almost as good as the 4 channel version, so imagine my surprise when I played back the stereo track and immediately the music seemed more two dimensional. So the ambience channels are definitely worth it.

The cover notes claim that no “limiting or compression” has been used in the recording. Well, judging by the overall recording level (which is the lowest yet I’ve encountered on a commercial recording) I see no reason to dispute this claim. But the music itself isn’t very dynamic, except for the last track (Broadway) where the extended dynamic range is clearly audible.

All in all, this is an excellent disc to sample the benefits of IsoMike, particularly if you like jazz.