Chasing The Dragon II celebrates this audiophile label’s tenth anniversary and pulls together a host of reference tracks from the label’s back catalogue. Janine Elliot takes a listen.

A very special event has just happened. Chasing the Dragon, audiophile recordings from Mike and Francoise Valentine, celebrated its tenth anniversary. I cannot believe a decade has gone so quickly. Mike and I actually go back a long, (sorry) very long time, both being ex-patriots of Aunty Beeb, working in radio and TV studios studiously recording, editing and playing reel-to-reel tapes as well as setting up armies of microphones and stringing miles of cable. Mike surely knows then what sounds best and also the best format to play it all on, so to be sent a brand new ¼”, ½ track, 10½”, 15ips tape (I love ascending numbers) was a great opportunity for my ears to experience better than broadcast quality sound and on BBC LS5/9 and other speakers plus valve and SS amplifiers and on three different reel-to-reel recorders. I have listened to many Chasing the Dragon recordings over the years and even visited many of the recording sessions themselves, such as at Air Studios, London, so I have enjoyed the experiences immensely. I already own their “Chasing the Dragon I” and “II” compilation albums on humble CD. They have always been a learning curve for the uninitiated audio fan showing, for example, the amazing sound quality and dynamics of a London underground train at a station or even a cello piece played in a reverberant hall and then the same performer in the middle of a field in the open air, which obviously sounds much different. Many of the recordings give you a choice to hear the acoustic difference between direct-to-vinyl, digital or reel-to-reel masters of the same piece. Even the choice and set-up of the microphones is explained; Different microphones and their positioning make a mighty difference to the sound capture of an instrument. And, very much like me, Mike is not a fan of the use of tons of microphones in a recording. Less is better. A coincident pair of valve U-47s or C12s (his favourite), or triplet of valve Neumann M50s in a Decca Tree and perhaps just a few spot mics is all you need! Indeed, the origins of Chasing the Dragon came from recording some musicians playing Vivaldi whilst they were in Italy and using the Decca Tree technique of left, centre and right omnidirectional mics positioned on a microphone stand that resembled a tree, hence the name. His collection of the iconic C12s include those made by the Slovakian FLEA company, built to the original specifications. Francoise’s contribution is equally important, not just keeping Mike under control for over 40 years now. She’s an invaluable asset in ensuring the politics and mechanics of getting the music recorded and sold are carried out seamlessly.

AUDIO TECHNOLOGY AND WATER DO MIX

Mike has in his possession an enviable collection of microphones, analogue tape recorders and digital equipment, plus he has, for many years, utilised Air Studios in London – including direct-cut-recording to vinyl on their Neumann VMS-80 disc cutting lathe – so can put together some astounding recordings. Mostly using Zensati and Nordost cabling, 2-track mastering is made on Recording the Masters SM900 ½” wide 12” diameter tape on a Studer A820 recorder at 30ips, and copying onto ¼” Studer A820’s for the copies sold for £425 for this review. Many of the recordings Mike produces are now available on ½” tapes, if you are so lucky, or smaller 7” tapes at 7½ ips, if you’re not. The newly available CTD III, for review here, has 10 tracks showing a wide variety of music types and recording techniques, and you can always guarantee they will be amazing to listen to. What sets Mike and Francoise apart from most recording masters is their choice of music (whether the composers or the style of music), the recording artists, and the commitment to audiophile sound quality. They are never shy to be courageous and record the lesser-known. Interestingly, Mike has also donned a snorkel and filmed underwater scenes for over 80 films, including movies such as five of James Bond films, the Bourne Identity, Atonement, The Da Vinci Code, Basic Instinct, Star Wars, and Trainspotting. Just as in what we hear, visual art also shows beauty and emotion plus angles and positions, and how we react to film is as important to Mike as it is to how we react to audio. So be prepared to experience a vivid light-show of sound. 

LET THE MUSIC BEGIN

This is not a massive musical show, with just 10 numbers, but it doesn’t need to be any more. They really do show off what the team has put together over the last decade, and they add to those on their earlier vol. I and II recordings. My VU needles immediately exercised themselves as the music took off, hitting the end-stop rapidly, but with absolutely no distortion. These Recording The Masters tapes, based on BASF SM900’s, are just so brilliant these days that you really can magnetize those iron filings without much worry, allegedly able to get up to +9dB! Recorded at 250nWb/m CCIR, my rebuilt Ferrograph Logic Seven, Revox B77 and Sony TC766-2 tape machines are designed to play them at their best, and using a variety of amplifiers (tube and solid-state) and new (and old Spendor BC1) speakers could give them a good run for their £425 money. Mike has recorded up to 320nWb/m, which would allow more to be recorded on the tape, but seems to prefer the lower number. This also means it’s accessible to more reel-to-reel owners.

Track 1, the Vivaldi ‘Concerto for Violin and Strings’ just sounded as sublime as I remember it the last time that I played the complete recording ‘ Vivaldi in London’ when I reviewed it in 2023. Using a minimum number of microphones, the performance is so good and the precision of placement of the instruments so fine that it meant I could almost touch the musicians! Interpreti Veneziani is an Italian 9-player ensemble, with several taking the solo spot in this album of Vivaldi concerti for cello and violin soloists. I remember not finding any fault in the recording apart from a few bars of violin vibrato I didn’t like, but bearing in mind this was recorded in one go (and not lots of sections “pieced” together like jigsaw – and often very mechanical – recordings) this was an admirable performance; I remember at the time writing that it seemed the musicians were all joined together with some form of umbilical cord, as they worked so well together making for a uniform and natural performance.  For the reel-to-reel version of this follow-up to the earlier (and one of my all-time favourite LPs) ‘Vivaldi in Venice’ album, the microphones were recorded onto separate tracks on an 8-track A80 reel-to-reel and mixed down later at Air Studios onto a ½” two-track Studer A820. Whilst the solo violin has its own space within the music it still sounds part of the “team”. Beautifully performed with a gusto of energy and emotion, the music is still sensitive when required in this beautiful work, and the musicians enjoy playing the music. Being recorded in the Air Studios Lyndhurst Hall, there was plenty of real reverb available without the need to use horrid digital decay, and all the detail from the instruments and wide dynamic range are all there on show.

Track 2 stars one of my now-favourite jazz musicians, Quentin Collins. A renowned trumpeter, he assembled an enviable group of musicians for this recording, including Gary Husband on drums (who has played with Chick Corea), Jason Rebello on piano (has played with Sting and Jeff Beck), bassist Joe Sanders and talented percussionist Miles Bould. Playing on his carbon-fibre daCarbo flugelhorn the album itself is aptly titled “A Day in the Life”, as it really is just a day out with the all-star musicians, hence ‘The All-Star Quintet’, performing as never before 3 works written by Quentin, plus works from Herbie Hancock, Rebello and Mseleku. Quentin had an interest in jazz at an early age, particularly fond of Dizzy Gillespie and Dave Brubeck. He has played with famous names including Omar, Alicia Keys and Gregory Porter, to name but a few. His trumpet playing is very tight and musical, and the performance here of “Paxos/Antipaxos” (Paxos, meaning “trapezoid” shapes, and Antipaxos are both Greek islands) set my feet tapping from the first bar. Recorded on a 72 channel/24 track custom-built Neve A7971 analogue desk in Studio 1, this desk is one of only 3 originally designed for AIR Studios by Rupert Neve, Sir George Martin (who founded AIR Studios [Associated Independent Recordings]) and Geoff Emerick.  One of the 3 desks is now in Hollywood and the other is in Vancouver. This analogue desk was manufactured in 1977 and unlike common “Neves” it had toroidal transformers. It can rightly be classed as one of the most musical desks in the world. The album was recorded onto the Studer A820 ½” recorder at 30ips using Zensati Seraphim interconnects. The cymbals in the recording are pin sharp and sounded so tight on the aged Coles 4001 super-tweeters of my equally old Spendor BC1 speakers (basically BBC LS3/6) that I had recently used in another review, and the overall musicality through the 1983-designed BBC LS5/9s from Graham Audio was nothing short of breathtaking. With AKG C12 on the piano and percussion and Neumann U-47 on double bass and trumpet, plus solid-state U-47FET for picking up “tight” bass drum beats, the combination gives a very tidy and ultimately musical performance. A C12 has a noticeably warm and musical sound from its valves making it ideal for recording acoustic instruments, a microphone introduced in 1953 and still loved to this day. Understandably Mike Valentine’s favourite! This track is also one of my favourites of this new compilation and indeed on the original CTD album, with its infectious foot-tapping rhythm and plenty of detail and space in the music. Great fun.

Track 3 stars Justin Pearson, and is a track taken from the massive 5-LP Bach’s six Cello Suites which took one year to put together during Covid 19 and includes Pedro Silva on a 5-string cello (who plays the sixth suite) plus Schumann’s arrangement with piano accompaniment of the third suite with Katherine Rockhill on keys, and mostly recorded using two C12’s. The extended reverb in Temple Church in London gave the music all the atmosphere it needed, so no digits needed there, to Mike’s relief – and mine! Both atmosphere and transparency in the recording make this a spectacular performance, plus great detail and warmth from the cello. Even the bass extension on the lowest notes made my intestine vibrate when played at good volume! That cello is a great-sounding instrument, so listening for almost 5 hours will be truly enjoyable if you have the time. Should you buy the complete recording it also comes with a 32-page “behind the scenes” booklet and “The Cello Suites” paperback book as well. 

Track 4 was recorded at the Henry Wood Hall, Southwark, in 2023, and is one of the most known and best-loved classical works of the 19th century, “Scheherazade” by Rimsky Korsakov. Henry Wood Hall has been used as a venue for large classical music rehearsal and recording since 1971; the capital’s first purpose-built rehearsal room, and named after the famous conductor. This is a symphonic suite, composed in 1888, all about the Eastern tale “One Thousand and One Nights”. We generally call it “The Arabian Nights”, and expect lots of swishes of violins representing the sea, especially as the composer was a Russian naval military before being a composer and teacher. This is a programmatic work, so different characters are represented by different musical themes, and which appear in all four movements. This is the fourth movement, colourfully titled “Festival at Baghdad, The sea. The Ship Breaks against a Cliff. Surmounted by a Bronze Horseman”.  Played by the National Symphony Orchestra, and led by Katerina Nazarova, her violin is so clear and perfectly formed you could almost touch it, though I wouldn’t as her Guarneri del Gesu is worth over £7million! This recording was also available in a binaural version, and well worth listening to on cans if you don’t like to share your music with anyone. Everything here is perfectly proportioned, even the triangles and tambourine at the start of the excerpt are brilliantly placed tightly in the large soundstage. The performers were spread behind and around the speakers, with flute and cello solos perfectly proportioned. Two famous main themes appear in this excerpt with violin rhythms like horse gallops that are so clean you could almost eat off them, then that most famous of all themes appears complete with kettle drum and the raging waves from the strings, and just as you are getting really excited by all the great music it all fades away in the dominant key (B). Maybe Mike is telling you that you need to own the complete work to get back to tonic. I certainly do.

Track 5 Bizet’s Carmen is another well-known work from the 19^th century. Conducted by Debbie Wiseman and recorded in the massive Lyndhurst Hall at Air Studios, the National Symphony Orchestra – a regular for Chasing the Dragon – accompanies the amazing voice of Rosie Middleton. Built in 1884, Air Studios was originally a church, built by the architect of the beautiful London Natural History Museum, and begun by Sir George Martin – often known as the fifth Beatle, because of his involvement with them. Rosie’s voice is so clear, even during her raging outbursts that exercise my VU meters almost to destruction. The tambourine is placed behind the strings and woodwind to the left, carefully performing the accompanying rhythmic pattern of this very famous tune. 

Track 6 is a piano piece, the lesser-known and bad-tempered final movement to the famous and gentle ‘Moonlight Sonata’ first movement by Beethoven. Again recorded at Air Studios in Studio 1, with their Neve desk that has the “mellower” more beautiful sound largely due to the toroidals and a clever EQ add-on that Rupert Neve and George Martin chose themselves many years ago, the extra overall depth and warmth in the bass shows that this is not a “brighter” toned Steinway grand. To my ears I knew this is a Bösendorfer (too many years of performing on piano) and flawlessly played by John Lenehan.  Though initially Mike had mic’d up a larger number of microphones in and around the piano to hear what would work best, it all culminated in employing just 3 C12s above the top, mid and bass strings of the piano, closely positioned with no added reverb apart from the piano itself. This works really well to capture that iconic “Bösendorfer” sound, though to me it stifles the sound a tad. That said, it really suits the best-known first movement with all its ascending woeful minor broken chords. John had earlier won a Gramophone award for his take on the complete piano works of John Ireland for Naxos, and Mike also hired him for the epic Beethoven Emperor Concerto recording with the Locrian Ensemble.  His finesse and accuracy for the “Moonlight” Sonata, heard here, is also accompanied with my favourite (and earlier composed) “Pathetique” sonata on the full recording. Whilst Beethoven would have written it using a 61-note forte-piano (the precursor of the modern 88-note pianoforte), he never actually called it the “Moonlight”. He probably wrote it on a “Walter” piano which didn’t even have dampers, and Beethoven wrote of the opening movement; “..this piece should be played with the utmost delicacy and without dampers”, though everyone seems to ignore that now! Beethoven wrote this and another sonata (both Op.27) as he was beginning to go deaf – and even penned at this time about his worries over his aural ailment. He was beginning to find it hard to hear higher frequencies that you need to make-out words in conversation, so perhaps this distinguished lesser-bright sound from a Bösendorfer was nearer to his “reality”. Unusually, both first movements of the Op 27 sonatas are slow and mellow. Interestingly for this recording, John Lenehan isn’t that fond of Bosendorfer’s (and nor am I, though it was actually jazz-pianist Oscar Peterson’s favourite piano, and Liszt’s, too), and would have rather played the ubiquitous Steinway that was sat in the Lyndhurst room next door. As it couldn’t be moved, to everyone’s relief John simply just carried on with doing the recording, and he does a brilliant performance here, bearing in mind it had to be recorded without stops or editing onto direct-cut-disc. Is it the actual tone of the Bösendorfer that’s lacking at the top or is it that the bass is just so damn good? The sound of the piano here is actually quite stunning with decent speakers, as is John’s playing.

Track 7 As an exponent of binaural, one track from Mike on this audiophile collection had of course to be for ‘your personal ears only’. This track, from ‘Binaural Baroque’ does work on loudspeakers as well, but due to the use of a Neumann dummy head, there is very little room reverb to add treacle to the recording. This track is the last movement of Vivaldi’s Guitar concerto, played by Morgan Szymanski and the Locrian Ensemble of London with the guitar positioned to the left and a harpsichord clearly defined in its own position on the right back.  All instruments are clearly heard with pin-sharp precision, such as the cello bass line. Worth getting out your headphones though! Monitoring of the recording and mastering of this album was carried out on what many class as the best ear-warmers of all; Stax electrostatic Earspeakers. Brilliantly recorded and mastered onto vinyl for LP lovers this is labelled as the “world’s first binaural direct cut recording”.

Track 8 brings out the best of Irish singer-songwriter Eleanor McEvoy. Her voice is very distinctive; very detailed and gentle even when she lets rip, so this recording is a real testament to Jake Jackson (mixing engineer), and John Webber (mastering engineer on the Neumann VMS-80 direct-cut-disc lathe for the LP version). As this was recorded D2D as well as other formats, the recording is a live performance, so everything needed to – and does – work seamlessly from track to track. On the final master you can hear everything! Available in all formats including PCM and DSD digital, her voice is close mic’d and with the assistance of Damon Butcher (The Beautiful South) on piano. On this track Eleanor adds to the piano with the top octaves in a duet that appears at the start and throughout the track. Her soft voice is like treacle, closely caressing the microphone and with a brilliant depth of sound and soundstage that makes this one of the best vocal recordings in my (vast) music collection.

Track 9 might be the shortest track on this compilation at a mere 1’30”, but those 90 seconds were actually my favourite of this new album. On completing the ‘Mendelssohn Octet’ album in 2022 the Locrian Ensemble (also appearing earlier in track 7) still had some time left, so they decided to add another track “Two Guitars” by Ivan Vasiliev, though there are no guitars here. The composer might not be that well known, but this track certainly is, and it has a clear melody on pizzicato strings in the first half and then arco for the rest. Showing the pizazz of Jack Liebeck on violin, this track is impeccably mic’d and recorded by Mike and the team, using just a pair of valve AKG C12s, of course. Recorded at London’s vast Henry Wood Hall, the recording still sounds intimate and even the large reverb there doesn’t take over. This is just right, though I just wish Ivan had written a few more bars!

Track 10, the last track, had to be Clare Teal’s homage to Ella Fitzgerald. Either that or it would have been the unique sound of Glen Miller in ‘Big Band Spectacular’, starring the Syd Lawrence Orchestra, famed for their rendition of the 40’s music. Both are big, vast sounds that exercise your HiFi the way it should be. Here we have both, as Clare is accompanied by the same orchestra. BBC Radio2’s Clare Teal has all the tone to show off the wonderful music from Ella, and this track “Ding Dong the Witch is Dead” is certainly alive and well here. Complete with the brilliance from the brass section, the sweet saxophone and clarinet, and held together tightly by the percussion, this is a track that will keep your feet tapping away as they did at the start of this album. Those second-beat brass blasts at the end of the phrases certainly kept me and my musical cat enthralled and to attention. The saxophone solos were so clearly defined that even me cat looked for the player when it first entered to the left. 

Listening to Chasing the Dragon music is an education. It teaches you a lot about the music, the musicians, the different recording mediums and microphone techniques. I relish every time I can be involved in seeing Mike and the team at work. What they produce inevitably has a clearly-defined soundstage that warrants a really good hi-fi set-up to really show it all off. With the meticulous precision of the engineering team as well as the musicianship of the performers, CTD recordings are an essential part of my – and surely should be your – hi-fi armour. Whether Chasing the Dragon was a career move or just a labour of love, Mike and Francoise make their analogue-tape, digital-download or vinyl recordings a staple diet for any music lover and audiophile.  The choice and positioning of microphones always seems to give the best from the musicians and importantly, to ensure that the visual soundstage – yes, you can almost see the musicians – is just perfect and correct, and sonically stunning. Topped with the charisma of the recordings – matching Mike’s large collection of colourful Hawaiian shirts – this is an epic collection, and if I had to make a slight quibble, it is only the positioning of the microphones for the Beethoven ‘Moonlight Sonata’ that perhaps would have been slightly different if I were holding the reins on that one, but us BBC sound engineers always think we can do things better.

Price: 

£425 10½” 15ips, ¼” CCIR reel

Janine Elliot

SUPPLIED BY CHASING THE DRAGON

System used:

Ferrograph Logic 7, Sony TC-766-2, Revox B77 (reel-to-reels); Music First Audio Baby Reference pre-amp, Synthesis Roma 98DC valve and Krell KAV250a SS (amplification); Graham Audio LS5/9, Wilson Benesch Arc/Torus, Spendor BC1 (loudspeakers); Tellurium Ultra Silver 2 cables, Coppice Audio stand and Townshend rack.