Download Includes 20-page PDF with Full Color Photos by Peter Buranzon (backstage, onstage), Notes, Lyrics

In November 2005 Jane Siberry invited David Elias & XING (pronounced ‘crossing’) to open her show at the San Francisco Great American Music Hall on O’Farrell St. downtown SF. The trio with David Elias (acoustic guitar, vocals, harmonica), Charlie Natzke (acoustic guitar, vocals), and Chris Kee (upright bass, vocals) had recently published what, in 2005 and still nouveau, was simply called a “Webcast”. They partnered through the recently established Apple Music iTunes online downloads. A very innovative interactive graphic music player with mouse-click controls was created using the webcast studio tracks and hosted online. Those studio tracks were released in 2005 on a Sketti Sandwich Productions DIY CD as “David Elias & XING”. The full 14 song studio master of that single morning session, engineered by Charlie Natzke directly to 8 tracks as DSD64 on Sonoma, was later mixed for stereo as DSD Wide by David Elias and mastered by Gus Skinas, then released in June, 2016 as “Acoustic Trio: DSD Sessions”. The DSD studio master is online to download at davideliasmusic.com. The PCM Remaster is available to hear or download on Bandcamp.

The all acoustic 3-part harmony trio had been appearing all over the SF Bay Area, from SF and East Bay down the San Mateo Coastal Hwy 1 coast as far as Santa Cruz. Regular shows were played at nefariously infamous places like The San Gregorio General Store, a roots home to many original Bay Area musicians and host of the annual Greenpeace Festival for several decades.

Performing from the GAMH stage in San Francisco was a welcomed opportunity to celebrate XING’s dedicated work at delivering pure acoustic sounds to live audiences. This trio would evolve to become David Elias & The CasualTees, a larger acoustic and electric band who captured audiences with their energetic soulful and always spontaneous renditions of Elias’s singer-songwriter styles, grafted from his roots in folk, bluegrass, country, rock/pop, R&B, celtic and other layers in between. They had the magnetic quality of simply having dangerously infectious fun onstage as they delivered spontaneous band inspired renditions of every song at every show. The first CasualTees were Charlie Natzke, Chris Kee, Peter Tucker, John Havard, Gary McArthur and Reid Dennis.

This is the second album release using the technique and tools developed by David Elias called Spectral Matching Mastering. Songs were mastered directly from the source DAT (16/44.1k) recordings captured off the GAMH soundboard during the show. The technique uses no 3rd party software/hardware/DAW/tools of any kind. It relies strictly on direct interaction with the open source ffmpeg and ffprobe bedrock tools for mastering.

The technique reverses the recording industry's stubborn habit of imposing steep brickwall filters on PCM masters as well as compression and other unnatural artifacts as far as the human ear and brain are concerned. The culprit behind the time distortions (smearing) and sound location confusion (pre-ringing echo) resuling in edgy D-i-G-iT-a-l sounding ear fatiguing results is the favortism given to the frequency domain at the expense of time distortion. Spectral Matching disowns rigid frequency perfection instead for the time domain using minimum phase linear filters and adhering much closer to the ambient nature of sound that reaches the human ear and brain.

As a result the original master/source is restored to the ambient air that existed when the recording was made, but typically gets masked, squashed, compressed with impulse echoes arriving before the pulse itself throughout.

All in all it makes for much more easy, natural, believeable listening. credits released July 12, 2026

All Songs by David Elias, ℗©2026, David Elias Music

David Elias: acoustic, vocal, harmonica

Charlie Natzke: acoustic, vocal

Chris Kee: upright bass, vocal

Vintage Kitchen Songs, Vol. 1

You are there too.

Debut Spectral Matching Mastering based entirely on the Time Domain.

What does that mean?

The flow of the music is much less D-i-G-iT-a-L and much more Analog and natural. The time distortions common to CD are removed. It is pure lossless 16/44.1k acoustically ambient music for you to enjoy and your ear+brain to relax with.

Developed in 2025-2026 by David Elias there are no 3rd Party Tools/Software/Hardware/DAW used to accomplish the most obvious but overlooked way of mastering any digital PCM recordings be it acoustic, jazz, classical, rock, you name it.

Listen to the album as a lossless full preview...

it has taken me a long time to arrive at this album release. it wasn't a forest through the trees challenge. it was the forest of dreams and deciphering enough by listening carefully enough to build the right dream narrative grove from largely unreleased recordings. from blue straw to green dreams to persistent heroic journeys for love alone, to mythical legends of stellar proportions and revelations on our human conditions, to wide reconnaissance of the highways of brother and sisterhood songwriters all sharing their musically encoded messages for better or for worse without promises, just with camaraderie extended to all, to seventeen years of dreaming aloud declared as whispered thoughts to the oldest granite on the planet, to the entire narrative of love newly sprung and embraced with full admiration only to face fulfillment of the inevitable mortal condition we all face, to true companionship in a single shared morning where everything that really matters is truly seen, to heroic and epic journeys towards spiritual and carnal freedoms told from under a tropical rainstorm weeping on a far-away pacific island, to the symbolic and cathartic message in a bottle cast away without concern yet still with acceptance of finality, to final testaments of the eroding and exhausted mother of us all from her dusty brown and grey to green, to blue skies then the waters lapping the beaches under the cyclops of solar stares that first deliver then carry us all finally away to the only unity we ever have, each carried by us within the very us that makes and keeps us us despite our grasps for finding solace and comfort elsewhere, though we may search from A to Z. all told using just 6, then just 4 strings and just enough chutzpah.

(This album is the first release I have using a compilation of processes (.bat files under CMD Win 11) and I began putting together and documenting in late 2025 through May/June 2026. I refer to the process in general as Spectral Matching. It uses pure time domain as the basis for MASTERING or REMASTERING each track on this album. It can read any codec and bitrate/bitdepth master and write any codec and bitrate/bitdepth remaster. The goals of my Spectral Matching techniques are: 1) Recover the "Air" with full ambient resonance, harmonics, natural attack/decay, that is still in the 16/44.1k digital masters but needs Spectral Matching remastering to make use of only the time domain (not frequency) to bring it back out as ambient natural sound for human ears; 2) Create a set of tools and docs that are 100% free of any 3rd party software, licensing, whatever. My techniques used to remaster every song on this record "Intuitive Dream-Narratives (Vintage Kitchen Songs, Vol. 1)" used no commercial application software or DAW of any kind. It is all very simple to operate at the command level and uses only ffmpeg and ffprobe (open source) directly through command calls in Windows CMD batch files. No licenses or purchases are required to make use of this tool that I hope to share with others in the future as soon as I nail down some remaining final steps to make it more bomb proof and very easy to use for anyone with no real training -- It is designed especially for use by unsigned independent musical artists like me who want good sounding masters but don't know who can or how to or how much or any of that stuff. Stay tuned.)

released July 11, 2026

All Songs Written and Performed and Spectral Matching Remastered by David Elias, Copyright 2026, David Elias Music, Volcano, Hawaii, USA

• Recorded Live Studio in 2000 in Boulder, CO on Original Sony DSD Recording 2-Track Workstation Prototype

• Mastered and First Released in 2025!

These recordings were made in Boulder Colorado in 2000. Gus Skinas used one of the early Sony 2-track prototypes of what would become the legendary multitrack Sonoma DSD Workstation used by Sony to record Hybrid 5.1 Multichannel SACDs shortly after.

Gus invited me to Boulder to try a 3-mic setup directly to the 2 tracks -- no mixer was used, just very good mics with very good preamps into the ADC DSD Converters that were being hand built by Ed Meitner, and then straight into the DSD recorder. The prototype was just "a small box" with a small screen and keyboard, designed for permanently archiving Sony Vault tape masters to an analog-like (PDM) hi-res digital format they invented with Philips called DSD (Direct Stream Digital).

We recorded using just that gear and my guitars and voice and some harmonica. I was playing songs that were mostly new at the time and would appear on several albums to come, including my first and only 2 SACDs on disc ("The Window", "Crossing") and a 2001 live stage album I recorded as a trio in an otherwise empty well acoustic-ed playhouse in Half Moon Bay, CA off Hwy 1, just below San Francisco.

"Half An Hour Away" was a 2001 CD I self-produced and performed by the David Elias & The Great Unknown trio: Myself, Gary McArthur (flute/tenor sax), and Lisa Kelly (mandolin). I wanted to try recording a stage performance with some mics in the empty playhouse theater audience space. So I put mics in the front 4th row or so, and in the very back near the wall in the balcony. I used these mic tracks in the mix for natural delay and natural reverb. Spot mics were used on my voice and guitar, flute/sax, and mandolin. No digital effects, no edits. Nothing except our trio on the stage, and the nice sounding room to fill with ambient acoustics. I also had spot mics on guitar, voice, flute/sax and mandolin.

This is the approach I then took recording "The Window" SACD in 2002 as well as "Crossing" in 2005 as pure DSD recordings made with and mixed/mastered on the Sonoma DSD Workstation.

These songs are personal honest bare naked recordings. As much so as anything I could do then or now. I have had a name for my approach to stark, barebones, honestly accurate recordings: Audio Vérité.

This was recorded 25 years ago. I guess I had to wait until my ears grew up to hear it just right. No mixer, effects, compression or anything else was used to influence the sound. Just straight Audio Vérité.

• DE, December 16, 2025

This is the PCM Remaster Download as 24/44.1k

Get DSD Studio Master Download here:

https://davideliasmusic.com/dsd-masters

Read the artist's description of how "The Window" was made: https://positive-feedback.com/Issue9/eliasdsd.htm

"Let's make it clear that the songwriter/guitarist no only produces great music, but also great sounding recordings, going his own way with self-released albums that still set standards almost two decades on."

In 2020 HIFICRITIC magazine named "The Window" in its 5 ALL TIME BEST DSD RECORDINGS. You can hear the highest quality master now on any Smartphone or music player (as FLAC). Decodes to 24/352.8k on MQA compatible DAC. Plays on any gear (no DAC required) as 24/44.1k

Acoustic band plays live studio and gets recorded by expert hands and ears for hi-res in 2002 and becomes a benchmark enduring what is to follow through the present. Remastered with MQA encoding (FLAC plays on all players) release in 2016.

NOTE: You will hear the tracks streaming from my website as uncompressed audio!