October 6, 2016

Brij Narayan: Raga Lalit [Stil 2711 S 78] an LP recorded and released in 1979 in France

Here is another delightful album from the French label Stil, who released a very high quality run of eastern and western classical LPs in the 1970s and 80s.

Brij Narayan (born April 25, 1952) is the oldest son of sarangi player Ram Narayan. He was about age 27 when this recording was made. Brij has made an appearance in this blog in the past. Unfortunately, his career seemed to stall out a little in the late 1980s and especially the 1990s -- at least in terms of internationally available CDs. I will ask some of my inside sources about why they think this might be. So we shall see.

Tabla maestro Suresh Talwalkar was born in 1948. He was awarded the Padma Shree and has been part of several very memorable recording sessions.

This LP captures a lively performance of Raga Lalit and was in superb physical condition. Very little in the way of sound restoration was needed -- just a nice 20 minute dip in the ultrasonic cleaner and a few clicks removed using Audacity's "repair" function from the beginning of each side. I did not reproduce the entire back cover because it was completely white except for the hard-to-read section which is pictured below. On anything but a very large screen the back cover would look too much like a white square, if I had not performed the cropping. No information was lost in this cropping.



Equipment used in transfer: 
Preparation: Ultrasonic cleaning for 20 minutes in pure clean water, followed by a quick vacuum drying with a VPI 16.5 cleaning machine
Turntable:  Audio-technica AT-LP-1240
Cartridge: Shure M97x
Pre-amplification: Vintage refurbished Pioneer SX-780.
Recorder: Sony PCM-M10 at 24bit/44.1kHz resolution
Software: Audacity, ClickRepair, and xAct. 










(high resolution file ideal for listening on computer or certain portable players)

(standard resolution file ideal for burning a CDR)

(highest possible quality compressed file ideal for listening on a portable player)