FIM K2 HD Mastering CDs
Our good friends [hi Alex! hi Teck! :-)] sent us a sampler of the latest reference quality FIM CDs. Thanks guys!
It has taken awhile for us to grok these CDs. We still don’t have a good handle on the music itself – but the sound, the sound is impeccable.
Very quiet background. Lots of separation. Crystal clear tonality.
And no ‘sweet mud’ that the old XRCD[2]’s have, with more detail and coherence than some of the other audiophile recordings out there. Still missing those midi-dynamics and upper midi-dynamics that LPs have.
In other words, these are really the ultimate in ‘audiophile-ish’ CDs – safe to play when other audiophiles are in the room :-), pleasant, impressive when it is called for, revealing of system strengths and some of its weaknesses, and it is REAL music, and not … well… Nora Jones is real music..WAS real music – but the recording, the sound, here is better and more varied.
A goodly selection…
The CDs come in the XRCD-ish folder…
… and a new ‘framed’ folder.
Here you can see the frame…
And inside are usually several pages of notes – along with the slide out CD, which, since it has a sleeve, is a little easier to get out without completely trashing your CD with finger prints and finger nails and cardboard streaks.
Details…
More details…
A write-up is over at Dagogo … if you can stand all the exclamation points.
Hi Mike/Neli,
Glad you like the discs…..always glad to share….this way, we can listen to the same things and compare…
we could be *hearing* similiar things especially with Alex’s *primed* Coltranes…
will send more interesting discs as we discover them….
happy listening…
Alex/Teck
While I very much respect FIM and Winson Ma, the statements circling around the net about these CDs being HD and “22 times better than a CD” are completely misleading. A CD is a CD is a CD…the max frequency is around 20 kHz the dynamic range maxes out at 96 dB. Nothing you do prior to the mastering onto the CD format can make the disc better than the specs of the format.
It never ceases to amaze me that people are swayed by irrelevant claims and marketing BS. K2 HD discs may be really wonderful CDs but they pale in comparison to REAL HD recordings!
Hi Mark,
I agree with everything you said [22 times?!] but just like there is a difference between the sound of early 80’s CDs and modern CDs, so too there is [much less of] a difference between some of these FIM CDs and non-FIM CDs.
It is not just ‘bits’, it is WHICH bits WHEN. That is why we don’t have Windows popup on our CD players when we put in a DSOTM disc – they are both just bits, but the bit sequence is different [looking at it as a 1-dimensional stream].
Kind of a stupid analogy, but I hope it demonstrates why I think CDs sound different.
Thanks for posting.
Take care,
Mike.