Audio Video News

Acoustic Sounds has announced plans to record the 17th Annual Blues Masters at the Crossroads festival in high-resolution Direct Stream Digital (DSD) and make the recordings available on the company’s Super HiRez digital download platform in time for the holidays.

The Blues Masters at the Crossroads festival will take place October 17-18 at the company’s Blue Heaven Studios, a “sonically superb” 91-year-old Gothic church in Salina, KS. The festival will present 11 acts, including Kim Wilson, Mighty Sam McClain, Rip Lee Pryor, and Sonny Green.

Gus Skinas, digital audio expert and president of the Super Audio Center in Boulder, CO, and Chad Kassem, founder of Acoustic Sounds, will oversee the recording. “Capturing the legacy of some of these Blues performers is very important to me and I really can’t think of a better way of capturing the power and emotion of their music than with live recordings in DSD,” Kassem said. “We’ve been doing the Blues Masters shows for a long time and I’m confident these recordings will be treasured by music lovers.”

Recordings of this year's Blues Masters at the Crossroads performances will kick off a series featuring recordings from the festival's previous 16 years and marks the first time a live blues concert has been recorded in DSD in its entirety.

The announcement follows an agreement between Acoustic Sounds and Warner Music Group (WMG) to make high-resolution downloads of more than 1,200 mainstream albums available on SuperHiRez.com.

The first wave of hi-res titles from such artists as Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, and Tom Petty are available now, with new content being added daily. “Adding Warner to our existing roster of major labels [Sony, Universal] is huge win for us, the industry, and for those looking to enhance their high-resolution music collections,” said Kassem, who launched SuperHiRez.com last September with just 70 titles.

More than 1,700 albums are currently available for download on SuperHiRez.com and Kassem expects the catalog to reach upwards of 3,000 albums by the end of the year.