Kind of Remarkable

August 17 was the 50th anniversary of the release of Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, an album that jazz writer Fred Kaplan has justifiably described as "dreamily perfect." It’s definitely my favorite jazz album, and gets regular play in my system. In fact, I won’t make up my mind about any audio component until I’ve listened to Kind of Blue through it from start to finish. For me, Kind of Blue is the benchmark recording: If a component gets more out of it than I’ve heard before, I know it’s something special.

Coverage of the album’s anniversary saw the music media paying a lot of attention to the epoch-changing music of Kind of Blue and the unbelievable array of talented musicians who came together to create it. What I didn’t see was any discussion of the record’s sound. Fifty years after it was laid down on tape, Kind of Blue still sounds fresh and alive. There’s so much detail, so many nuances in this recording, that, even after five decades of continuous development of audio technology, I don’t think we’ve yet heard all that Kind of Blue has to offer. But if audio hasn’t yet had its eureka moment with Kind of Blue, some recent advances have brought us much closer to its very essence.

What may be the best analog recording of all time sounds, to me, far better from a digital source than from an LP. A big key to getting the most out of Kind of Blue is a dead-quiet system, and for a given amount of money, a digital source will most probably be quieter than its analog counterpart. In my experience, the quietest, most accurate, most detailed digital reproduction for under about $3000 is a computer hard drive and an external D/A converter such as Benchmark’s DAC1. In my system, that combination took Kind of Blue to a higher plane, bringing to life nuances, notes, coughs, and ambience I’d never heard directly from the CD. The great success that the computer and DAC1 had with Kind of Blue convinced me that PC audio is a very viable alternative to higher-priced disc players.

The source alone won’t make for a very quiet system: power conditioning is also a prerequisite for getting the best out of Kind of Blue. Good-quality power conditioning doesn’t have to be expensive (think Blue Circle Audio), but the benefits are often the equivalent of buying more expensive components. The same applies to high-grade wall outlets and power cables. My recent move into a new house was a useful reminder of how much an audiophile-grade outlet has to offer. It took me a few weeks to get around to installing my outlets in the new house, and when I did, I realized just how bad an effect 50¢ outlets have on sound. A good power cable, too, can be responsible for a good degree of noise reduction. Supra Cable’s shielded Lo-Rad is an inexpensive top performer. (Their Ply 3.4/S shielded speaker cable is also super-quiet.)

To date, it’s a cable of a different type that has provided the single biggest improvement I’ve ever heard from Kind of Blue (and everything else I listen to): USB. Though there’ll be no convincing the "bits is bits" crowd, to others I say that, like me, you may well be floored by the degree of improvement a Synergistic Research Tesla Tricon USB cable can bring to a PC-based audio system. The Tricon didn’t just reveal more detail than ever before, it actually "fixed" what I’d always thought was a flaw in the master recording.

In my review of the Tesla Tricon USB, I mentioned that, at the end of Bill Evans’ piano introduction to "So What," there’s a short double-bass riff in which Paul Chambers’ last several notes sound hopelessly jumbled together. Even after listening to "So What" through audio systems ranging from the awful to the stellar, and from dirt cheap to ridiculously overpriced, here was a USB cable that did the seemingly impossible: for the first time, I heard those notes as a series of clear, distinct tones. I can’t overemphasize how stunned I was. But as impressed as I was with the cable, I found myself feeling something like pride for the recording itself -- as if, after years of trying, an old friend had finally conquered an obstacle.

I can’t imagine life without Kind of Blue. It’s far more than just another jazz album: It marks the beginning of an entirely new way to create jazz, it’s a document of possibly the greatest jazz supergroup ever assembled, however temporarily, and it’s a superb example of the art of music recording. Kind of Blue is a masterpiece, a musical Mona Lisa, a gift to humanity for all time from a group of musical geniuses the likes of whom we may never hear again. To Miles Davis, Cannonball Adderley, John Coltrane, Wynton Kelly, Bill Evans, Paul Chambers, and Jimmy Cobb: Happy Anniversary.

. . . Colin Smith
editor@goodsound.com