Many thanks to Cookie Marenco at Blue Coast Records for sending me this album to review.

Blue Coast Collection 3.

Songs We Love – Various Artists.

24bit/192.0khz FLAC.

 

 

Track List –

Johhny Colorado – Meghan Andrews

Angeline The Baker – Tony Furtado

Wicked Game – Jenna Mammina & Rolf Sturm

Rolling In The Deep – Blue Coast All-Stars

Feeling Sunshine – Fiona Joy

You Were Always On My Mind – Derek Jones

Francine – Jenner Fox

I Will Walk – Garett Brennan

Shenandoah – Alex De Grassi

Mexico – John R. Burr

 

Gear List –

Foobar2000

Crime Audio Snotora

Cambridge Audio DACMagic 100

QED Interconnects

Rega Ear 1

HiFiman HE400

 

 

This is the first time in my career as a reviewer that I have reviewed music of any kind.

So forgive me for my lack of terminology for the moment please.

I have to admit that up until now I haven’t paid much attention to recordings of the digital kind.

Sure I have a vast library of WAV & FLAC files ( Yet to switch to DSD ) but I pretty much took it for granted that they were of the highest quality available.

I am learning very fast that this is not the case, Of course the one thing that I kept forgetting was that a recording no matter what format it is presented in is only ever going to be as good as the master recording & the skill and equipment used to make it. Also noting that it is so important to make sure we get our music from reliable sources.

When you listen to music that you’re not usually into and start getting down to it ( as you do ) you know something is going on to make you react in such a manner.

Listening to this album I felt more connected to the performance. There are points in the recording that really pop out to me, The Violin piece in Rolling In The Deep for example. I felt like the violinist was playing just off my right shoulder with the bass player right behind me. It may & probably will be a different experience over a speaker system. I wouldn’t say better, I’ll say different.

The vocals pierce my mind and in all the right ways, They’re not shrieking or distorted, There’s no muffled sound or oversaturated mid range. Just clear vocals with strong presence.

Then there are all those little details that every audiophile looks, No, Listens for, The beads hitting the casing of the maracas, That raw twang of guitar string, The bowstrings dragging across the violin strings and so on…… All those things a good mic picks up, And a good speaker or headphone reproduce for you to listen to in your listening space.

I really hope for my first time I am getting my views across in a clear manner.

Blue Coast Collection 3 could very well mark a turning point for me in the way I chose the recordings I listen to & in fact HOW I listen.

Many people including myself seem to skim over the other important person in this process between artist and listener… The one who records the music, That puts it all together, That tweaks and re records, That pours blood sweat and tears into it, The person that spends endless hours getting everything just right in order to bring us the consumer the best possible experience.

What Cookie & the artists on this recording end up with is a beautifully moving album that puts you in that seat behind the mixing desk, Or the seat in the bar right up by the stage.

It’s an album that is mastered to a level I’ve not heard before, Which is something I intend to rectify from this point on.

I’m not going to give any albums I review a score, But If I were pushed to do so, Cookie and the people involved in this one would get a strong 10/10!

Thank you for reading this review and lets hope as I continue my reviews get better. Paul.