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.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 7th, 2008 at 2:36 pm and is filed under High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.