Octave Records
A record label run by people who build the equipment you will play it on
Octave exists because of a question that had no good answer: if we spend fifty years building equipment to reveal what is on a recording, what happens when the recording itself is the limit?
So we built a studio in Boulder, and we record the way we would want to be recorded — small ensembles, live to stereo, at DSD 256, with as little done afterwards as we can manage. No compression for the sake of loudness, no fixing in the mix, no tricks that flatter a small system at the expense of a good one.
And we pay for all of it. Every studio, mixing, mastering, production and distribution cost is ours, the artists keep their recordings, and they share in what those recordings earn. That is not a marketing position; it is the only arrangement that seemed reasonable to us.
We know exactly what this sounded like in the room, because we were standing in it
Every other kind of proof in audio is somebody else's opinion or somebody else's number. These are the only discs in the world where the company that made the recording also makes the equipment you are playing it on. If you have ever wondered how much of what you hear is the system and how much is the recording, this is where to find out.
The artists
Octave covers every cost of making the record, the musicians keep ownership of what they made, and they share in what it earns. Recording an album properly is expensive enough that most musicians at this level never get to do it, and the ones who do usually sign away the result. We would rather pay for it and let them keep it.
Where to begin
By what you listen to — but if you are starting, start with something small. A trio in a real room shows what these recordings do more clearly than anything with fifty musicians on it. The Audiophile Masters volumes are the least expensive way to hear a range of them, and The Art of HiFi series was made specifically to demonstrate one thing at a time — bass, soundstage, percussion, guitars, strings, woodwinds.
Formats: SACD and vinyl, $29.
The proof that needs no reviewer
The session notes. What was in the room — the microphones, the distance, the hall, and a paragraph from the engineer on what they were listening for. It turns a disc from music into evidence, and no other label can print it, because no other label's parent company builds converters.