NRF Records and Tapes, Norsk Radiofabrikk AS er verdens, og Norges, minste musikkselskap og representerer de uhørte, de utstøtte og de akterutseilte stemmer i tillegg til de som ennå ikke har sunget.
Vi er ikke dommere i X-Factor og ikke promoterer vi kommersielle artister heller.
NRF Records and Tapes, Norsk Radiofabrikk AS is the world's, and Norway's, smallest music company and represents the unheard, the outcast and the marginalised voices in addition to those who have not yet sung.
We are not on the panel of judges in X-Factor neither do we promote commercial artists.
The NRF Story
Founded in the early 1980's Norsk Radiofabrikk designed and consulted in high-end audio. A change came in 2005 with the design and construction of surround sound studio facilities in Asker, near Oslo and in 2020 in Bergen with the venture into vinyl and tape production - NRF Records and Tapes.
About NRF Records and Tapes
This label is positioned at the periphery and intersections of idioms.
Its focus is on developing constellations of different sound practices that resist the temptation of being popular in the sense of repetition and mode of consumption.
The label focuses exclusively on somewhat marginalised sound practices that requires an adventurous ear, working primarily with found, formed and synthesised tapestries that negate the quantised and the pitched, and instead constitutes the dissolved, the asymmetrical and atonal that subverts the tempered scale.
Not only is its focus on the sonic objects that inhabit these sound worlds, but also on the spatial syntax of the sound field and the location of sources therein, going beyond the stereo sound-field and extending into the spatial complexity of immersion, inhabitance, situatedness and dwelling.
Working exclusively with Scandinavian based practitioner that come from a divergent and interdisciplinary background that interjects exiting departures from traditional methods of production, compaction and dissemination, the label represents practitioners that work with ambience, soundscape, electro-acoustic, acusmatic and noise elements.
Their practices place importance on the ecologic sound worlds that we inhabit in everyday life. In their work these are amplified, augmented and transformed into listening fantasies where intimate encounters take place with the listener, whilst taking in consideration concepts such as cybernetics, philosophy, sociology, and animal and plant behaviour as a way to dissolve the dichotomy that modernism propagates when it created the fissure between nature and culture and between the human and technology.
If anything, this label is a way of putting one's ear to the ground and listening to what is forming and deforming around us. In this sense, forms of life; clouds, trees, fractals, root networks, the entropy of sand castles - these forms of life give life to forms, and when captured through electronic recordings apparatuses we can begin to understand the heard and the unheard and the about to be heard.
Our productions aim at riveting your ears to the point where all the senses can begin to flow through the ears, creating a space where all sounds have equal agency, and none are secondary qualities but are constellated as objects in themselves, triggering the unification of sensory experience.
What is NRF Surround Sound?
It’s a technology for producing enveloping surround sound in headphones, 2-speaker and multi-speaker systems. It uses the phase information available in a stereo recording to code two additional channels of information. Without any decoding of this information, it will sound more ambient in mono, wider and more “airy” in stereo, and have instruments placed all around you in a room with 4 or more speakers and a surround receiver.
Correctly decoded, you will have a four channel experience that’s indistinguishable from a discrete four track playback, with over 15dB of channel separation, full bandwidth and low distortion.
It is monitored, mixed and mastered using special plugins that encode a 360 degree sound field into normal stereo that’s then expanded using a decoder to feed up to 7 speakers. This production workflow ensures that what we hear in the control room is what you hear in your living room.
Technically, it’s based on artist and engineer Peter Scheiber’s patents (that he licensed to Dolby) and Sansui’s QS patents and that resulted in the “Regular Matrix System Disk Record Standard of The Engineering Sub-Committee, The Record Industry Association of Japan” of 23rd of March 1972. (US3746792A,US3632886A)
There are so many ways to play Surround Sound, what do you recommend?
For not so much money, get at least 4 identical, great speakers that you like listening to. Place the side speakers to the side of you - perhaps slightly behind you, facing you. Get a second-hand receiver that has Dolby Pro Logic II, and off you go into surround heaven! Be sure to indicate to the receiver that you have full-range speakers, no subwoofer nor centre speaker.
For lots of money, just visit your local Hi-Fi dealer, and say you want to decode Pro Logic 2 material. They’ll know what to do!
For enthusiasts, try the Lexicon Logic-7 decoders, or get a refurbished Sansui QS Variomatrix amp from eBay. Be sure to use main speakers with really good low frequency reproduction.
NRF Norsk Radiofabrikk has been at the forefront of audio circuitry design since the late 70’s. Our expertise is for a large part based on matching distortion to our perception of audio quality.
Our Virtual Analog Circuitry Simulator (VACS) matches the imperfections of vintage gear with a coveted sound to modern, digital recordings. This is perceived by listeners as a “mellowing of tone” and a removal of “digital harshness”.
VACS operates both in the time and frequency domain, and exists in the form of a plugin. Technically, it introduces a defined bandwidth, phase response, noise floor and distortion characteristics that to the largest degree possible reduces aliasing effects from other plugins, and mellows the sound of a variety of dynamic effects normally used in digital record production.
In use, it is inserted at critical points in the Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) workflow. In its basic format, it does not emulate tape machines nor introduce jitter or flutter or modulation effects. It operates at the level of a Neve or other recognised console, so we are not talking about “phatness” but about subtle sculpting. Most listeners will not hear the difference on a causal AB comparison, but will readily detect the difference when used on a complete production.
The development of VACS sprang out of research into the sound of vinyl recordings from the 50’s done in preparation for the production of the “Sky Etudes” album, the first matrix encoded vinyl produced in Europe in 30 years. The vintage vinyl recordings showed an amazing fidelity, often surpassing modern pressings by a considerable margin in stereo wide and frequency response extension. Looking at how noise, distortion and frequency/phase response came together to sculpt the sound sparked the idea of doing something similar, but at the much higher resolution of a modern DAW to introduce some of the same “feel” to the sound.
What is NRF-VACS?