Whenever I get to hear something that is so supremely good, and so delightfully performed, with such insight and richness, I feel it warrants a immediate sharing with you. This new Yarlung Records Pure DSD256 album, released today, is such a recording. Can you tell I'm excited about it? Yes, indeed! You need to hear this.
Beethoven, Ligeti & Lefkowitz, Quartet Integra. Yarlung Records 2025 (Pure DSD256 - Direct Mixed, Stereo) Edit Master Sourced HERE
Bob Attiyeh and Yarlung Records return with a superb new Pure DSD256 recording. This time he shares with us an excellent recital performance by Quartet Integra, recorded in April 2025 at the end of their three year residency in Los Angeles. Bob tells us they had just returned from acclaimed performances in Wigmore Hall in London, and they left again after the recording for summer concerts (and a little bit of family time) in Asia before moving to Paris and Hannover in the autumn.
Kyoka Misawa and Rintaro Kikuno on violins, Itsuki Yamamoto on viola, and cellist Ye Un Park—bring astonishing versatility and depth to these performances. The album opens with Beethoven's final String Quartet No. 16 in F Major Op 135, premiered after the composer's death, and continues with a captivating performance of Ligeti's ground breaking 1968 String Quartet No. 2, an explosive yet unexpectedly beautiful work. The program concludes with David S. Lefkowitz's Green Mountains, Now Black, a richly layered new work composed in 2025 in response to the composer's emotional response to the 2025 Los Angeles fires.
In all three works, the Quartet Integra bring a depth of insight surprising for a group of musicians so relatively young. They have been described "as the most exciting young quartet to emerge from Japan (with Ye Un from Korea) since the storied Tokyo String Quartet" and listening to these performances without prejudgment will tell you why. Their intensive training at Suntory Hall's Chamber Music Academy has served them well as they perform with a degree of refinement, combined with power and energy, that is most gratifying to hear.
The recording session in April 2025
As usual, Bob Attiyeh has made parallel recordings to both 15ips reel-to-reel tape and to Pure DSD256 using his Merging Technologies HAPI D/A converter. I have been listening to the Pure DSD256 release from NativeDSD that was mixed and mastered entirely in the DSD domain (Direct Mixed) by Tom Caulfield from the DSD256 tracks.
As you can see in the photos from the recording session above, only a single stereo pair of microphones what used to make this recording, Ted Ancona's AKG C24 microphone previously owned by Frank Sinatra, and Yarlung Audio vacuum tube microphone amplification designed and built by Elliot Midwood.
As Frans de Rond (Sound Liason recording engineer and founder) observed in a recent blog post, "One of the biggest technical challenges in multi-mic recording is phase interference. When multiple microphones pick up the same sound source at slightly different times, those signals can combine in unpredictable ways. Some frequencies cancel out, others are boosted, and the result can be a smearing or hollowing of the sound. Engineers spend countless hours adjusting placement, polarity, distance, and delay to minimize these effects.
"With one microphone, none of that is an issue. There are no competing arrival times between microphones, only the natural timing and spacing of the instruments themselves. The phase coherence is simply built into the physical world. What you hear is stable, focused, and true."
And this is so very true of this one microphone recording from Yarlung Records. The image is as rock-solid as anything you will ever hear. And that superb focus of sound created a recording that is very special. The sound is vibrant, direct, absolutely transparent, with superb detail resolution and sound stage imaging. As always, no compression was applied. It is, altogether, a remarkable recording of a set of outstanding performances.
All photos courtesy of Yarlung Records
