Category: Music & Audio

In our “Music & Audio” category, we take a deep dive into the fascinating world of sound. From the basics of **music theory** to portraits of inspiring **musicians** and the latest trends and techniques in **Hi-Res Audio** – you’ll find everything your audiophile heart desires here. Find out more about the history of music, the development of sound technologies and how you can optimize your listening experience.

  • Frédéric Chopin: Complete Polonaises – Garrick Ohlsson. Latest addition to the Mother Earth Radio program.

    Your moment begins now.

    Some sounds immediately cast a spell over you. They challenge you to fully immerse yourself. This moment of deep immersion is exactly what you will experience when Frédéric Chopin’s ‘Complete Polonaises’, interpreted by a master like Garrick Ohlsson, is played on Mother Earth Radio. As the latest addition to our high-resolution program, we invite you to discover this monumental work in the quality it deserves.

    The soul of music: craftsmanship you can feel.

    Garrick Ohlsson, known for his immense technical brilliance and profound musicality, is the ideal interpreter for Chopin’s polonaises. Every note, every chord, every dynamic nuance breathes the history and emotion that Chopin put into these pieces. It is the result of years of dedication and a deep understanding of the composition. His artistry is a perfect example of the mastery we seek and celebrate at Mother Earth Radio. This recording, originally released on EMI Electrola in 1973 as an original vinyl record, is a timeless testament to the absolute art of sound.

    Frédéric Chopin: Complete Polonaises - Garrick Ohlsson.

    The journey of sound: From the original to your ear.

    As you would expect from Mother Earth Radio, we have treated this recording with the utmost care. It has been meticulously digitized from the original vinyl record into high-resolution audio. This means: no loss, no compression, a sound that can breathe and ground you. And of course, every note of these polonaises has been enhanced by our unique 429 Hz tuning to give you a listening experience of unparalleled depth.

    Composition with character: an invitation to discover.

    Chopin’s polonaises are far more than just piano music; they are epic dramas of sound that reflect Polish history and the deepest human emotions. They challenge the listener, but offer an infinitely rich reward. It is this kind of music – sophisticated, profound and borne of true mastery – that lies at the heart of Mother Earth Radio’s selection. With us, you’ll discover the diversity of sound beyond the quickly consumable, music that demands attention and rewards with deeper insight.

    Your moment. Mother Earth Radio. Welcome home.

    Mother Earth Radio is your portal to these unadulterated sound experiences. It’s the place where you not only hear music, but feel it – music that is grounding and centering. Here you will find a community that understands the value of real music and celebrates the moment of sound.

    Ready for your moment? Your wish is our command.

    Would you like to experience this extraordinary artist or track right now? On our web player page you can not only dive directly into the high-resolution stream, but also use our song request! Request the artist or track in question and we will play it for you within the next three tracks.

  • VR & Hi-Res Audio: This is how you really hear

    The forgotten feeling: what VR glasses tell us about good sound

    Imagine you’re watching a video. Not on the TV, but as if you were in the middle of it. Everything around you is an image and it feels like you can walk through the scene. I’m talking about VR goggles, and to be honest, until recently this was more of a gimmick for me. The images were often blurred, pixelated – you could sense the potential, but it didn’t really blow you away. But then Meta Quest 3 came into play. And with it came a resolution that simply left me speechless. Suddenly the image was so incredibly sharp, so detailed, that I really felt like I was part of this other world.

    VR & Hi Res Audio
    Photo by Alessia Lorenzi

    But the real kicker came when I took my own videos from my hard drive and created them with a special program called Owl3D for these glasses. I put them on and the moment the video started, I thought: “This is amazing! I’ll never look at a normal screen again!” The image was so lifelike, so tangible. And although it was already breathtaking, I instinctively felt: “If only the resolution was just a little bit better!” It’s hard to imagine how incredible it would look if it were absolutely perfectly sharp – simply stunning. It’s already great, you can see everything, it looks great, but that last little bit more pixels, that would be it!

    Why we talk about VR when it comes to good sound

    It is precisely this feeling, this intuitive understanding of “resolution” and what would constitute an even sharper image, that is the key to a realization that many of us have unfortunately lost in the field of audio. Because it’s exactly the same in the world of sound! The only difference is that hardly anyone today knows what “good” sounds like.

    We are surrounded by music. It’s playing on the radio, streaming on our smartphones, coming out of small Bluetooth speakers. And yes, it all sounds okay somehow. It’s as if we’ve been looking at the world through these slightly pixelated VR glasses for years. We no longer know what we’re missing. We have become accustomed to a lower sound resolution, to highly compressed formats in which countless nuances, tiny details and the natural spatiality are simply no longer there.

    Streaming with low resolution
    Photo by cottonbro studio

    As with VR glasses, where you lack a little resolution to really feel the fine texture of a tree bark in the virtual forest or see the sparkle in the eyes of an avatar, we lack the sound pixels in the sound. We hear the song, yes. But do we also hear the subtle vibration of a guitar string, the delicate reverberation of a voice in the recording room, the exact position of each individual instrument on the virtual stage? Can we hear the “air” in the room where the drums were recorded? Quite often, unfortunately not.

    Rediscovering the lost dimension of music

    Hi-Res Audio or excellent vinyl playback are like those razor-sharp VR glasses that suddenly show you what is visually possible. They add the lost pixels of sound. Suddenly, a whole new dimension of music is revealed:

    • Spatiality: The band is no longer a flat carpet of sound in front of you, but spreads out in the room. You can clearly locate individual instruments, feel their exact position and their reverberation, as if you were sitting in the middle of a concert hall.
    • Subtlety and detail: You suddenly hear the sound of the singer’s breathing, the soft creaking of a chair in the studio, the plucking of the strings of an acoustic guitar – all these tiny details that make the listening experience incredibly vivid and real.
    • Dynamics: The music really “breathes”. Quiet passages are really whisper-quiet, loud explosions are powerful and clear without being unpleasant or overdriven. The entire emotional range of the recording is palpable.
    • Emotion: With all these additional sound pixels and details, the music becomes more emotional, more gripping, more real. You are no longer just a listener consuming a recording, but immersed in the experience and almost become part of it.

    Many of us listen to music today as if we were looking at a world-famous painting through a tiny, blurry cell phone camera. You get the idea that you recognize it. But then you suddenly find yourself standing in front of the original in the museum. The colors, the texture of the brushstrokes, the sheer size – it’s a completely different emotional experience, isn’t it? You didn’t know what you were missing until you saw the real thing.

    It’s the same with the sound. For a generation that grew up with compressed MP3 files and streaming in average quality, the full, unadulterated sound – as it was recorded back then, with a stable power supply and via analog mixing consoles directly to tape – may be a completely new sensation. It’s not just “better”, it’s fundamentally more. It is a deep immersion, a rediscovery of the music we love and the experience of emotions that were previously hidden.

    Take the plunge: recalibrate your ears

    Maybe it’s time to put on the “VR glasses” for your ears. Find a really good hi-res source, be it a streaming service that offers lossless playback, a well-recorded vinyl or a high-quality FLAC file. Listen to your favorite music – and let yourself be surprised. You might very well realize afterwards: “I never want to listen with less sound resolution again!”

  • Musicians at work part 2

    Greyson Nekrutman hears “Sleep Token” for the first time

    On the YouTube channel of Drumeo there is a quite interesting series where drummers listen to a song without the drum track that they don’t know. They then have to play their own drum interpretation of this song.

    I have selected the session with Greyson Nekrutman from many videos worth watching. Because here you can get an idea of how such a thoroughbred musician from the top league approaches his “work”. Greyson is a jazz drummer who has pretty much every trick in the book, if you’re interested check out his Buddy Rich techniques in the video“Caravan“. Anyway, the good Greyson is given a hardcore death metal song to play here, extremely challenging, and he masters the task to a tee. And he does this dressed in tweed trousers. That deserves my highest respect! Chapeu, Greyson!

  • Musicians at work – Part 1

    Chad Smith plays “Break My Heart” by Dua Lipa

    Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith contributed the drum track for Dua Lipa’s “Break My Heart”. At the beginning of the YouTube video, he says that he visited his friend Andrew Watt, the producer of Dua Lipa. He said they were just talking about how this song needed a live drum track! And Chad said: Let’s go!

    In music production, drums are mostly programmed. It costs nothing and you don’t have to set up and adjust microphones and select several recordings, cut them and then ultimately quantize them back into the clock grid through the computer.

    But Dua Lipa and Andrew Watt probably know that a real musician on a real drum kit is a different kettle of fish! And when Chad Smith from the Red Hot Chili Peppers comes to visit…

    I find it interesting that Chad is fooling around and singing and making jokes here, but you also see something else. Right from the introduction of the track, he’s waving his arms around, implying that he’s playing a “4 on the floor” – that is, banging the kick drum on every quarter of the beat, which is considered the easiest exercise. But listen carefully: you can set your watch by this kick drum. And furthermore, every drum note sits and thunders in an absolutely perfect manner. You can also see this in Chad’s highly concentrated facial expression. He may be underchallenged, but he gives his all. It’s a real pleasure for me to watch.

    Have fun!

  • Why today’s music is so BORING. The decline of musical innovation – Rick Beato

    In his video, Rick Beato names and explains the theoretical reasons why today’s music is so boring.

  • Dredg – Catch Without Arms

    Dredg – Catch Without Arms

    Latest addition: The epic Dredg album “Catch Without Arms” !


    It’s the most expensive record I’ve ever bought – and worth every penny. The acquisition of this gem was made possible by the wonderful platform discogs.com and a clever, tasteful collector in the States (Good catch, CB!!), who bought the record at the time and has now sold it. Mother Earth says thank you!

    Catch without arms, the third album from Californian band Dredg, is described as “a change to a simpler and more straightforward style of music for the band”. I think it’s a highly complex, virtuosically played record; great melodies, beautiful harmonies, a very interesting approach to guitar work (like: yes, that was actually the guitar solo?!).