HiFi & Sound reproduction

[Beef Oven]

Then you have very clearly misunderstood.

Or perhaps you have.

[Nevalti]

.....Best for what ?

OK, I will take the avoidance of the question as an admission that you were simply trying to be provocative.

What I hope i'm getting at is that it can be more than a little odd to conflate a recording with a live experience .........

You 'hope' you are getting at it? Why not be clear?

Who is it you suspect of conflating the two? Could it be you perhaps? Could you have suffered one Gong too many?

I think many people do , and are unable to separate one from the other

Again - who are you talking about? I don't know anyone who does that.

do you not think that in other musics there isn't a relationship between a recording and a live performance ?

I think you need to re-phase that question. Double negatives are always open to strange interpretations.
What I would like is high fidelity of your thought process transferred into print. There seems to be too much distortion at the moment and a few fluffed notes.

[Beef Oven]

I think you need to re-phase that question. Double negatives are always open to strange interpretations.
What I would like is high fidelity of your thought process transferred into print. There seems to be too much distortion at the moment and a few fluffed notes.

It scans better with the double negative and it's clear what's being asked.

[Dave2002]

I will try to cover your last three posts in one response Dave.


‘Real’ is the original art. 'Realistic' is a faithful reproduction of that original art be it Gauguin or Canaletto, Patricia Kopatchinskaja or Eric Clapton.

The ‘art’ is the live performance OR the eventual CD OR the actual painting OR the photograph OR the play - yet you can reproduce any of those art forms with great ‘realism’, great fidelity. My point has always been that it perverse to deliberately reproduce any of those art forms in less than the most ‘realistic’ way that you can unless of course you are trying to do so for a good reason. ‘Realistic’ is simply being faithful to the original art. It remains open to all of us to choose the art that we prefer. None of us will have precisely the same music collection or taste.

I happen to prefer live performances, warts and all, and not an over-processed, sanitised version. If someone sniffs or shuffles their feet during a recording and even if someone fluffs a note that is rarely a killer of an otherwise good performance. I have one lovely recording which starts with a bad note. The artist says, “Hang on, hang on, hang on” followed by laughter from the audience and then by a beautiful performance – wonderful stuff! Only achievable on ‘live’ recordings. I accept that, with your refined views, you may now prefer a ‘perfect performance’ instead of a ‘perfect’ rendition of an original performance (#144) but that can often take you away from ‘reality’ and lead to sterility. Who is the demi-god among us who gets to decide what is ‘noise’, to be stripped away, and what is ‘desirable acoustics’, to be left in? To avoid you making the obvious comment, yes, in most environments I would probably prefer a recording made with a crossed pair of cardioids to one made with a pair of omnis.

Our part, as passive listeners or viewers, is fairly limited. We can choose to watch a play on a tiny TV or a comfortable size HD set. A personal choice but I suspect most of us now appreciate the advantages of an HD TV. It is exactly the same with sound. We can choose to listen on a little transistor radio OR we can try to get the best reproduction of the original art form possible. I choose the latter. Many people, even music enthusiasts STILL do not realise what they are missing on their £100 ‘stereos’ largely because of the ridiculous myth that they all sound the same.

We know when we look at a photo of a painting or a televised play or film or listen to a CD etc that none of those things are real. We know that they are all reproductions but we still get pleasure from them. They can all touch our emotions BUT if you reduce the quality of reproduction, the emotional impact of the original art is removed or dramatically reduced. How far you can reduce the quality of music reproduction before it is ‘ruined’ will be a personal thing. Conversely, the better it is reproduced, the better it sounds – assuming that you like the original art.

Compression is interesting. Listening at very low volume or in a noisy environment, compression is our friend but when listening in a quiet lounge, on good equipment, it can spoil things if it is taken too far. The compression on R3 FM transmissions is well chosen to my mind. Quite tolerable and very useful if you are listening at low volume. It should be feasible to have a variable compression knob on our amplifiers – especially digital amps. Do such things exist?

As for realistic volumes, I don’t see why you have a problem. For orchestral works I choose to sit in row ‘M’ or thereabouts. That is both for integration and for volume. If the volume in that seat is about 80dB (say), what is wrong with me having precisely the same 80dB in my arm-chair at home? For solo performers, quartets and the like I choose to sit at or near the front – ditto – ditto?

By the way, the un-amplified guitar in Rodrigo's Guitar Concerto is perfectly clear from row ‘M’. Just as the composer intended I suspect.

Mostly I agree with you (though you may not think so), but not absolutely.

I think many recording engineers, producers etc. did set out to achieve fidelity, as you might call it. They were not trying to change things. However there have been constraints from the very early days of recording. In the acoustic era these would have been very severe, and then the advent of electrical recording improved things considerably. I don't actually know how they did recordings for the electrical era of 78s - did they use multiple microphones, which would imply a mixer, or did they simply use one microphone, but sufficiently far away from the orchestra that the gain in the microphone to record cutter would most instruments to sound reasonably balanced? Eventually, of course they would have used multiple microphones, and I'm fairly sure that a concerto recording or a recording of an opera would have microphones for soloists, even in mono recordings. Possibly they used a few microphones for the orchestra - one for each "zone" of the orchestra. On the other hand, we do know that companies such as Mercury only used a few microphones even for mono recordings.

The advent and adoption of stereo - as a concept it had been around since at least 1932 (if we ignore some very early transmissions in Paris) - brought better realism to recordings. It probably also changed the way the engineers presented the music, and also different techniques could be used, and no doubt were. The crossed cardioid method is only one way of recording in stereo, and some companies would record soloists effectively in mono, and then pan-pot them in to the rest of the sound field. Some companies would have used dummy heads or baffles, some widely spaced mics, etc. Presumably the engineers did what worked for them and they felt comfortable with.

Some venues are difficult to record in, or at least many would consider that to be the case. I have attended concerts in St. Pauls, and I can say that if you want to get a pseudo realistic effect of the sound in that venue, then take a "good" recording of Mahler's 8th, add in loads of reverberation, and generally muddy the sound. In fact it might be hard to create a recorded sound which will sound as "bad" as the sound in the cathedral. I suspect that realism is really not what most people would want. To get round that kind of problem, many engineers might use close microphones, and somehow attempt to mix things together to give a passable result. I have the LSO Live recording of Gergiev's performance of Mahler 8 - indeed I am listening to it now on Spotify - http://open.spotify.com/album/5zuvbeXepdQpWHnWtzTsE1 I can assure you that muddled as this is in the recording, it is a lot better than the sound in the actual performance. It would be quite interesting to know how that recording was actually made. Even with its problems, the final sections do have some of the power which other recordings such as Solti's and Kubeliks' have, plus a terrific reverberation at the end. For all I know the reverberation might have been suppressed during much of the recording, but allowed to come through at the end for ambient effect.

You may want realism, but I doubt that many people will agree with you regarding that event.

I have heard that Mahler's 8th does work in Symphony Hall, Birmingham.

Liverpool Cathedral is different from St Pauls, but gives a similar muddied acoustic. Also the distance between the organ pipes and the orchestra presents problems in some (most) live performances, though you do get the feel of power from the organ if you sit close to the organ pipes.

Since the stereo era engineers have diverged somewhat from theory and/or earlier practice. Partly this is because equipment must be cheaper than previously, and perhaps also of significantly better quality. Why use 2 or 3 microphones when you can have 30?

Some do multi-channel, and some do stereo with lots of microphones. Sometimes I wonder if they know what they are doing.

I am interested to hear that you have heard performances of Rodrigo's concerto without amplification. I have been to only a few concerts with guitars. One was a guitar quartet, in a modest sized hall - and they used amplification. It seemed to be necessary. I have also been to very small venues, and heard unamplified guitars. For the Rodrigo I really just don't know if it would work in a large hall without amplification, though there are some venues, such as the Church in the Rock in Helsinki which has fantastic acoustics, where it might work.

[Dave2002]

Has anyone noticed we seem to have drifted way off our original topic - not sure if this is helping our OP. Maybe too late, but should we start another thread on realism, theory of recording, psychology, perception, emotions etc.?

[Nevalti]

Or perhaps you have.

Oh dear, blatant evasion again!

Go on, amuse us; try to support your assertion - "I think That is EXACTLY what some people are doing " (sic).

Use a dictionary before you try though. Maybe you will wish to change to words other than 'conflate' to make your point, whatever it may be. Someone here, no names mentioned, seems to making a habit of using the wrong words. You seem to have stumbled into a hole of their making.

[Stephen Smith]

.......- not sure if this is helping our OP. Maybe too late, but should we start another thread on realism, theory of recording, psychology, perception, emotions etc.?

i agree, I would hesitate to point anyone "looking to upgrade their system" to this thread, and I hope not too many in that position come across it. I wish we could vote for developments in threads, to be shunted up a branch line (or perhaps blind alley is a better description).

[Beef Oven]

Oh dear, blatant evasion again!

Go on, amuse us; try to support your assertion - "I think That is EXACTLY what some people are doing " (sic).

Use a dictionary before you try though. Maybe you will wish to change to words other than 'conflate' to make your point, whatever it may be. Someone here, no names mentioned, seems to making a habit of using the wrong words. You seem to have stumbled into a hole of their making.

I merely gainsaid you. No need to become hysterical.

[MrGongGong]

OK, I will take the avoidance of the question as an admission that you were simply trying to be provocative.

It's very obvious to me that what is "best" is contextual rather than absolute

‘Real’ is the original art. 'Realistic' is a faithful reproduction of that original art be it Gauguin or Canaletto, Patricia Kopatchinskaja or Eric Clapton.

No it's not
The Wombles are REAL , real puppets
recordings aren't necessarily reproductions of sonic events that have happened

They can all touch our emotions BUT if you reduce the quality of reproduction, the emotional impact of the original art is removed or dramatically reduced.

So I guess the "birdsong" in Beethoven 6 is lacking in "emotional impact" then ?

and this is obviously rubbish

[Nevalti]

Mostly I agree with you ......., but not absolutely..

I'm glad to see we are mostly in agreement Dave. I did take care to say earlier that we all must choose the performances we want to reproduce. I have bought CDs which turned out to be awful and I certainly would not want to hear again some live performances I have heard in Salisbury and Winchester Cathedrals or Romsey Abbey. As you suggest though, some music does work in those venues. The BSO playing 'Fanfare For The Common Man' in Winchester Cathedral, about 20 years ago, was one of the most spine tingling sounds I have ever heard.

Why someone would choose to make a commercial recording in one of the difficult venues is beyond me.

Simple crossed pair recordings do exist (http://thesession.org/discussions/30951) but the techniques used are rarely advertised. To me, they provide a refreshing change to the over-processed stuff that we can get hold of all too easily. If a complicated technique has been used and I have been fooled into thinking it was a simple technique - great! The artists then include the excellent engineer.

Some of the 'free' CDs on the BBC Music Magazine were far better than the big record-label versions. I have been in the Turner Simms concert hall when R3 were making live transmissions from there and I could only see the one pair if mics. I would love to have been able to hear their recording of that performance but never did.

[Nevalti]

I merely gainsaid you. No need to become hysterical.

The word you were after was 'amused' not 'hysterical'.

That you are not prepared even to TRY to justify yourself speaks for itself.

[Nevalti]

It's very obvious to me that what is "best" is contextual rather than absolute

Thank goodness; I think you've got it. The 'best' reproduction of a piece of art is a 'realistic' reproduction of it. Anything else is NOT a reproduction but one may of course prefer that 'thing' which is not a 'realistic' reproduction.

...The Wombles are REAL , real puppets

And reproductions of those puppets are REAL reproductions. Photographs of Wombles are REAL photographs. But if a child wants a Womble, they will be happy with a 'realistic' reproduction NOT a photo. I am sure you can translate that concept into music reproduction.

.. recordings aren't necessarily reproductions of sonic events that have happened

Absolutely! Poor recordings or manipulated versions are never going to accurately emulate the original sonic event . Many, many CDs etc are produced with a gross amount of manipulation BUT the end result, the commercial CD, is nevertheless a work of 'art' intended by the artists, and that includes the engineers, to sound a particular way. Just in case it happens to be a brilliant piece of 'art' it behoves us to listen to it in the best way possible, to 'reproduce' as closely as we can the performance that they were trying to get us the hear. The better the hifi system, the better the reproduction. If, once you hear it, you don't like that particular piece of 'art', you are free to manipulate it however you wish, but to deliberately avoid listening to it with high fidelity seems utterly perverse to me.

[Beef Oven]

The word you were after was 'amused' not 'hysterical'.

That you are not prepared even to TRY to justify yourself speaks for itself.

The clue is in 'gainsaid'.

[MrGongGong]

The 'best' reproduction of a piece of art is a 'realistic' reproduction of it. Anything else is NOT a reproduction but one may of course prefer that 'thing' which is not a 'realistic' reproduction.
.

eeer NO
(in a word)
because you seem to be suggesting that the reproduction is NOT a work of art


and ALL recording is a "manipulation" (to use your word) ......

I think some people like to justify their expenditure
nothing wrong with liking fancy kit (I'm after a Sound Devices 744 myself)

[Beef Oven]

eeer NO
(in a word)
because you seem to be suggesting that the reproduction is NOT a work of art


and ALL recording is a "manipulation" (to use your word) ......

I think some people like to justify their expenditure
nothing wrong with liking fancy kit (I'm after a Sound Devices 744 myself)

Pet theories, high expenditure and cognitive dissonance is a dangerous cocktail.