October 25, 2019

Lalgudi Jayaraman & G Srimathi: Carnatic Violin [HTC 8086] a cassette recorded in 1970 and manufactured in 1990 in India

Fast on the heels of the recent upload of a bansuri LP is a transfer of one of many cassettes I have purchased from the good people at Shrimati's in Berkeley, California. There were requests for bansuri and violin releases, so I thought I would do these first. Plenty of plucked strings and vocals on the way.

This one features Lalgudi Jayaraman and the slightly mysterious G Srimathi, who I believe was Lalgudi's sister. I could not find terribly much information about Srimathi -- no doubt I was looking in the wrong places. Anyone with interesting information, especially of recordings -- please supply in the comments. I thank you in advance.


This cassette was recorded in 1970 and manufactured in 1990. I don't have a lot of information about all of the various iterations of HMV/EMi recordings in the Cassette Years, but this appears to be a reissue of this LP (photo courtesy of an Indian website selling LPs):





I certainly think the original LP is much more attractive than the reissue cassette. 

Transfer: Nakamichi ZX-9 cassette deck, refurbished to "better than new" state by Willi Hermann
Pre-amplification: Vintage refurbished Pioneer SX-780.
Recorder: Sony PCM-M10 at 24bit/96kHz resolution
Software: Audacity and xAct.

Monitoring: Focal Spirit One headphones




downloads:

24bit, 96kHz FLAC files (972 MB)
highest resolution files I am capable of producing


16bit, 44.kHz FLAC files (270 MB)
after decoding to WAV files, these can be burned to CDR


320 kbps mp3 files (103 MB)
highest quality mp3 files possible 







(the above is an audio recording -- the sound quality dramatically improves pretty quickly into the performance. Check it out and give it a chance, for two hours or so)

3 comments:

  1. Hi Riachard - Thanks for another wonderful transfer. Some info from a friend of the Lalgudi family....G Srimathi used to play duets with him ... Was married to Bramhanandam and moved to the US . Learnt from their father Lalgudi Gopala Iyer and later from her brother Lalgudi Jayaraman.

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  2. for some reason I get an error message which downloading: file creation failed. Has never happened on this site for me before. Just a heads up

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