FIM Super Sounds! III. A Musical Celebration of Sonic Wonders.(Sound recording review)

FIM Super Sounds! III. A Musical Celebration of Sonic Wonders. FIM XR24 073.

OK, call it showing off, if you will. First Impression Music producer Winston Ma has put together another collection of materials remastered through meticulous XRCD24 processing, and the result shows off the best of FIM and should show off the best in your equipment.

Like most sonic spectaculars, this album of bits and pieces from FIM and other sources is more of a demo disc than something most folks might sit down and listen to straight through. It's for those few minutes when you want to see what your audio system can really do, or when you want to show your friends and neighbors that there is more to life than Star Wars in Dolby Digital 5.1. And I'm sure it hasn't escaped Winston's notice that it draws attention to FIM's other albums as well, the ones these excerpts come from. Anyway, like the previous two volumes of demo music, FIM Super Sounds! Vol. III contains some things you'll like and some things you might not, but the two factors they all have in common are their unquestioned musicianship and their impressively realistic sound.

Let me just mention three tracks that impressed me most: the opening segment, Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man, with Eiji Oue and the Minnesota Orchestra, taken from a Reference Recordings album by engineer Keith Johnson. It's got a breadth and depth that are uncanny and a drum that is both natural sounding and bass woofering. Another track from Johnson and Reference Recordings has pianist Minoru Nojima playing Liszt's La Campanella. The particular disc from which this is taken has for the past twenty years been a touchstone for great piano recordings, and the XRCD processing makes it sound a touch, a hair, an eyelash smoother and more dynamic. The third cut I enjoyed most was the concluding piece, Red River Valley, an instrumental arrangement by Harold Faberman for percussion and strings, played by the Ethos Percussion Group and the Colorado String Quartet. With the lines of the old ballad subtly combined with Home on the Range, I can only say I found it heartwarming.

This is not to take anything away from the other nine selections on the disc, which range from classical to folk to jazz. There is a little something here for everyone, as I've said, including the New Philharmonia Orchestra doing a movement from Albeniz's Suite Espanola, which I reviewed most favorably elsewhere; a track from John Newton Howard's Sheffield direct-to-disc John Newton Howard & Friends, with its solid dynamic impact; and various other older and recently recorded music.

Lastly, I should mention that the disc's second track, Peace in the Heart, will extend the width of your speakers ...