There’s more to that Blu-ray player and surround system than just Hollywood films and opera recordings – it also has plenty of potential to make more of music, says Andrew Everard

Audio demonstrations at shops are always something of a hit and miss affair: at best you’ll be listening to a new component in a system with which you’re familiar, but the chances are the room will be rather unlike the one in which you listen at home – well, unless you’re lucky enough to have one room in which to enjoy music, and another in which to actually live!

However, a recent demonstration I attended, given by loudspeaker company Focal’s MD Gérard Chretien at retailer and installer Studio AV in Eton, proved illuminating: the system was half-familiar, comprising Focal’s imposing Maestro Utopia 3 speakers driven by Naim electronics fronted by the NDS/555PS network player, and so was the music, given that I’d been asked to bring along a USB stick containing some high-resolution music.

From the first bars, I was taken with the sound, and clearly so was Gérard, busily photographing the display of the iPad we were using to control the system so he could remember what I played. And as ever, one of the real showstopper tracks was from 2L’s Souvenir project, which was my highlight of 2012’s music.

The Trondheim Soloists sounded superb in 192kHz/24-bit FLAC through the Naim/Focal system, so much so that I didn’t have the heart to point out that it was possible to make it sound even better.

No, not with better electronics and speakers – though that could no doubt have been achieved by throwing even more money at the system we were enjoying – but with more speakers. For while high-resolution music can be striking, high-resolution surround done properly has the power to amaze.

As previously reported here, the 2L set, released in two stages during last year, was recorded on location in a Norwegian church in surround sound, with the musicians arranged around the microphone array.

A true surround experience
In other words, this is a true surround recording, one in which the performance surrounds the listener, not one of those exercises in adding a bit of concert-hall or opera-house ambience with the odd echo or cough somewhere behind your sofa.

Yes, surround can be used like that, to give the feeling of being in the audience, but the fact remains that while our ears can detect the ‘space’ around us – the size, shape and liveliness of the auditorium, for example –, for the most part the live musical experience is laid out in front of us, whether on the concert platform or the opera house stage.

True, we’ve had recordings putting the music around us before: the dawn of the DVD-Audio/Super Audio CD age saw all kind of rock and pop discs being frantically remixed to pan the bass guitar round to the left or make a cymbal suddenly sizzle behind us. But we’ve moved on from such gimmickry, and now the ability of a well-made recording such as those coming out of Norway at the moment to place us in the heart of the performance shows just what can be done with surround sound.

That’s brought a new use for the Blu-ray player and the multichannel audio system, beyond the Hollywood blockbusters and the concert or opera discs. For some time, audio industry commentators have hankered for an audio-only format based on Blu-ray, just as Super Audio CD drew on DVD technology – well, it’s here, and it’s Blu-ray itself, meaning you need no new equipment to enjoy these new surround recordings.

In fact, Blu-ray is showing its ability to be a universal carrier of music formats in the hands of the 2L team, led by company founder Morten Lindberg: not only do the Blu-ray packages carry the surround formats, they also allow downloads, using a network-connected Blu-ray player, of the MP3 and high-resolution FLAC stereo versions of the music.

So what’s on the disc is LPCM stereo at 192kHz/24-bit, 5.1-channel 192kHz/24-bit DTS-HD Master Audio, 7.1-channel 96kHz/24-bit DTS-HD MA, and – amazingly –9.1-channel Auro-3D 96kHz/24-bit.

This last, which adds discreet height channels to the conventional surround configuration, is only just becoming available on a few Hollywood film Blu-rays, so again ‘the little Norwegian label that could’ is keeping itself ahead of the game.

And it can continue to do so, given that its recordings are made in 352.8kHz/24-bit DXD, making it possible for even higher-resolution versions to be released in the future – when the hardware has had some time to catch up.

All of which makes the Souvenir set, at around £27 delivered from www.2L.no, something of a bargain for the adventurous listener, keen to hear what surround can really do for music.