So what did you do over Easter? I have to admit I spent most of Easter Sunday in something of a doze, but then I had been on Tokyo time overnight, catching the first of the groundbreaking double-DSD concert relays organised by the Internet Initiative Japan and supported by Sony and Korg.

I wrote about this project a couple of months ago in this news piece, but it was only as the dates approached that I was reminded by Korg with the kind offer of one of its DS-DAC100m units, so that I could try the concerts for myself.

The Korg is a compact DAC/headphone amplifier, powered from the USB output of the computer to which it’s connected, and with both headphone and line audio outputs, and sells from around the £200 mark. It will convert both standard DSD (2.8MHz), otherwise known as DSD64, and double-DSD, or DSD128, which uses a 5.6MHz sampling rate – and of course will handle ‘conventional’ formats from MP3 right the way up to 192kHz/24-bit.

A number of other Korg and Sony DACs can also be used for this live streaming, but one of those and a pair of headphones is all you need, along with a suitably fast broadband connection. The IIJ suggests 20Mbps, so my Virgin Media connection, delivering up to 152MBps, was more than sufficient.

With the appropriate drivers and software downloaded and installed – the work of about 10 minutes to get the driver, Korg’s AudioGate DSD playback software and the PrimeSeat package used to receive the streams – and some strong coffee to hand, I settled down at 3am to listen to the first of the live concerts, direct from Tokyo’s Bunka Kaikan Recital Hall.

The headphones I used were Focal’s excellent Spirit Pro, and a cable from the Korg snaked across the room to my main system so I could listen on speakers, too.

Does double-DSD live streaming work? Emphatically yes, with an almost uncanny sense of a live event being delivered over the connection. Last Sunday’s transmission – which you can still hear on demand via the PrimeSeat platform until this Sunday – was in fact a sequence of four one-hour concerts and a longer final one, spaced apart with a one-hour gap between them to make up the ‘Tokyo-Harusai Marathon Concert Vol 5’, with a total running time of over nine hours, and well as the remarkable presence of the performers in the lovely-sounding recital hall, it was also amusing to feel oneself in the thick of the audience as they settled before each concert.

Papers rustled, heels clicked across the floor, and just as the opening announcement was being made for one concert a chap let loose a stentorian sneeze somewhere off to the left of the microphones, actually making me jump in my seat.

And the music? A mixed programme based around the musical rivalry between Berlin and Vienna, and the composers supported by impresario Johann Peter Salomon, with works from Bach, Gluck and Salomon himself, through Mozart and Haydn to Beethoven and Handel, all played by small-scale forces and totally enchanting throughout.

It’s hard to pick standouts from more than five hours of music, but I especially enjoyed Handel’s 'Rejoice Greatly', from Messiah, performed by soprano Naomi Satake accompanied by Kanako Yuasa, with a perfectly natural balance between performer and accompanist, while Beethoven’s Variations on ‘Rule Britannia’, played by Yuya Tsuda, also had that perfect sense of hearing a real instrument in a real acoustic.

That, I think, was the beauty of this whole project: excellent high-definition sound, and an entirely convincing presentation of how music sounds in a genuine space, with none of the close-miking or spotlighting of performers we so often hear in studio performances and even in some live recordings.

For nine hours – with coffee breaks – overnight and into Sunday morning, I felt like I was in that hall enjoying the concerts, feeling the size of the space around me and the presence of both performers and audience.

It was really rather enthralling, and now I can’t wait to hear how the double-DSD streaming concept translates to a larger hall and heftier musical forces.

That opportunity comes this Saturday evening, with a live relay of La Damnation de Faust from the Berlin Philharmonie, with the Berlin Philharmonic under Sir Simon Rattle, and soloists including Charles Castronovo as Faust and Joyce DiDonato as Marguerite.

So far, I think this ultra-high-resolution project has been nothing short of a triumph – let’s just hope these initial concerts are the start of something big.