HiFi & Sound reproduction

[MrGongGong]

If someone assumes that the original live performance is the best version available, and generally people do, it makes sense to achieve a 'realistic' reproduction of that original live performance.

I don't make that assumption at all
because what is "best" depends on many things , not just the sonic fidelity of the reproduction
and the idea that there is somehow a "best" version is rather odd anyway

a good friend of mine who makes very clean electroacoustic music often puts on a wind up gramaphone when I go round
we both love the sound it makes and all the other non sonic musical things about it

If you see one form of musicking as being somehow an emulation of another, I think (IMV of course) you are missing out on some wonderful things
many people love the sound of cassette tape , so much that one can buy plugins to put it onto recordings
the first Portishead CD would fail all of your tests BUT is a wonderful recording

The process of recording ALWAYS manipulates the sound into something else ........ that's what it does
I've just recorded a group of Alphorn players in the street and three Harley's drove past during one of the pieces .......a magical moment indeed

[Dave2002]

If someone assumes that the original live performance is the best version available, and generally people do, it makes sense to achieve a 'realistic' reproduction of that original live performance.

I think I could seriously question your assumption, and your assertion about how people react to such an assumption. I'm guessing that that was what MrGG was hinting at.

I always used to think I was looking for "perfect" sound, a rendition of an original live performance, but over the years I have changed and/or refined my views on this.

[pastoralguy]

a good friend of mine who makes very clean electroacoustic music often puts on a wind up gramaphone when I go round
we both love the sound it makes and all the other non sonic musical things about it

[Nevalti]

I don't make that assumption at all
because what is "best" depends on many things , not just the sonic fidelity of the reproduction
and the idea that there is somehow a "best" version is rather odd anyway ....... wind up gramaphone...

Fair enough, 'best' obviously means something else to you. That's OK, we all like different things. Just don't lose sight of the fact that we are talking in this thread about the quality of reproduced music. The 'quality' of reproduction in that context means high fidelity (being very faithful) to the original performance. That is what most of us want and I'm very glad to see you have dropped your criticism of 'realistic'. We all tend to call it hifi even if we have little regard for the original 'hifi' standards set down decades ago. We can't do much about the way the engineer has manipulated the sound and if that is what you are talking about, perhaps you should make that clear.

I can understand the charm of old audio equipment. I enjoy old cars but I certainly wouldn't want to drive one every day and I doubt you would want to listen to a wind-up gramophone every day. The 'best' old cars are the un-molested originals in the opinion of most aficionados. Exactly the same with musical performances in my humble opinion. Unless the original performance was seriously flawed, it is beyond me why anyone would want to distort them, to make them 'better'. If a musician or engineer can hear flaws in their recording it would be a valid decision if they wanted to re-record it or re-master it. Note that I said 'flaws'.

It is quite feasible these days to manipulate an original recording to make it sound 'better' (in someone's opinion) but it is then no longer a recording of the performance that you bought. Would you do that to make it 'better'?

Using the car analogy again, it 'improves' an old car to put in better engines, suspension, brakes, wheels, gearboxes, instruments, lights, etc but what have you ended up with? Is it then a better car? Opinions will vary on that question and opinions on whether a manipulated recording sounds 'better' will also vary but I strongly suspect that the vast majority of us will want an original well recorded performance, not a distorted, 'better' version of it.

Lets turn this around shall we. What do you think is 'best'? A well recorded classical performance or some subsequent manipulation of it? If not the original, why not?

[Nevalti]

I think I could seriously question your assumption, and your assertion about how people react to such an assumption. I'm guessing that that was what MrGG was hinting at.

I always used to think I was looking for "perfect" sound, a rendition of an original live performance, but over the years I have changed and/or refined my views on this.

Perhaps there is a bit too much hinting going on. You are very welcome to explain your refined views for the benefit of us all.

Unfortunately it is all too easy for cryptic comments to appear to be unfounded criticism.

[Dave2002]

Perhaps there is a bit too much hinting going on. You are very welcome to explain your refined views for the benefit of us all.

Unfortunately it is all too easy for cryptic comments to appear to be unfounded criticism.

There are very many aspects to this. Firstly, a lot of music recordings are made for listening at home, and also they are often made to make a profit for those who make and sell them. We can pretend otherwise, but a lot of music represents products which can be traded. We thiink we can also conveniently ignore all the popular "music" - a lot of which has in the past cross subsidised the making and marketing of classical recordings, but it exists and is clearly much more popular and marketable than classical music.

If we start with the popular variety of music, I hope there's no way that a significant proportion of the population will want to try to reproduce the sort of sounds they hear at festivals and pop concerts. That would lead to major complaints of noise pollution. Jazz is similarly noisy - and can't really be reproduced in domestic surroundings. Even chamber music, which ought to be much quieter can be too loud. Perhaps Mozart would be acceptable, but if many people want to hear Brahms' Piano Quintet, or Prokofiev's 6th Piano Sonata at anything like natural levels, the neighbours will complain.

So, what to do? Many producers of music products try to make them so that they are acceptable to many, and if that means reducing the dynamic range, or the low frequency response they will do it. Some may go the other way - as in BIS recordings, which are advertised as having the full dynamic range - but any company that does that sort of thing will perhaps only appeal to a very limited market. Even people, such as myself, who appreciate having a very wide dynamic range, find that it can be unmanageable, and perhaps only achievable in my situation using headphones.

Engineers and producers have for a long time adjusted the sound - reduced the dynamic range, or if that's not done electronically, either by automated equipment or manually, asked the performers to adjust their performance for the recording. Soloists for classical recordings are often highlighted in a way that one would hardly ever hear in a concert hall, and given the limitations of 78s, then LPs, then stereo LPs this makes a lot of sense. Nowadays it isn't quite so necessary to do this, yet ironically we frequently see concerts or recordings (e.g BBC studio or live recordings) where as many as 30 microphones are used, including kick microphones on drums and double basses - to give greater impact.

Think back also to John Culshaw and the Decca recordings of the Ring. They were not recorded to be realistic, but to give an effect. Apparently the first attempts were "realistic", but without the visual stimulus of the stage action it was felt that there weren't interesting enough, hence a different approach to recording was adopted.

One can also throw in other arguments such as "the sound that the composer intended" - but for some pieces, apart from the fact that we can never know anyway what the intent was, it is fairly clear that some "effects" can't work without tinkering - or else they will be inaudible. What was Mahler thinking about, employing a mandolin in his symphonies, for example? Was he trying to provide work for out of work mandolin specialists? Most of the time the mandolin is inaudible in a live performance, but in a recording there is an opportunity to boost the sound and make it audible. Should it be? Was that intended? Rodrigo's guitar concerto is perhaps a more interesting example, as there the guitar will probably be audible, but only just. I've never heard that piece live, but I suspect that like other guitar pieces I have heard, even chamber pieces, the guitar will be amplified.

I don't want to write too much more in one post, but even now I think there are issues coming out about what "realism" means, and also whether it's desirable and sensible to have realistic sound in products intended for listening in a domestic setting. Perhaps someone else could now join in and take this further.

I'll give one last analogy though, from the visual world. Consider a photograph and also a painting of a sunset. What do they achieve?
Out of interest I recently took some photographs of clouds and sunsets, and arguably they were realistic. They would not have won photo competitions. Most photos which do well in competitions, and probably with good reason, are tinkered with and use various forms of visual emphasis. In such cases surely the intention is not to provide realism, but to try to achieve a similar psychological effect on the viewer to experiencing the real-life view. Even this attempt to provide psychological realism doesn't always work as a motivation though. If you look at pictures in National Geographic magazine - including some very famous ones - they are often stunning, and show interesting people and places - China for example. There are some places in China where the red and gold are tarnished and dulled by pollution, and photographs taken of such places can look "realistic". They would not get published, and people would not like them. It is amazing how much they can be "improved" by the use of some PhotoShop filters, to produce a much more striking effect, one which might achieve publication and public acceptance. Are these then better photos? Maybe! Are they more realistic? No! Try Africa as another scene - often very dusty and brownish grey. Realism or vibrancy?

I mentioned paintings - clearly there is no point in having them if photographs are better. People still value paintings, and some at least are based on real places - they're not all abstract.

Music might be a bit like that too.

Over to the rest of you.

[MrGongGong]

That is what most of us want and I'm very glad to see you have dropped your criticism of 'realistic'.

I haven't
because it's ALL real
just like the Wombles are real puppets

when photography was invented the artist Paul Delaroche said
'From Today Painting is Dead'

it wasn't and it isn't

What do you think is 'best'? A well recorded classical performance or some subsequent manipulation of it? If not the original, why not?

Best for what ?

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
Some music is wonderful if you are in the room
some music is wonderful as a recording
some music is both
some is neither
and which is which isn't fixed

[jayne lee wilson]

You can talk about the Culshaw Ring, or some of Decca's Stokowski Phase 4s, (or indeed some of Michel Glotz's work with Karajan), and say (I guess correctly) that the sound was very manipulated in the creation of an effect, a type of soundstage, an ambience, an immediacy, etc. Many of us don't care for the balance on that Ring Cycle.
But take a few other famous engineers and producers - Kenneth Wilkinson for EMI etc., Mohr and Layton for RCA, Wilma Cozart & Bob Fine for Mercury - many of them would say that "accuracy" - realism if you like, but quite simply truthfulness to the sound they heard in the given acoustic - was indeed the aim. That was what they spent all their time with different mic layouts and tape recorders trying to achieve (why else did they record in 3 channels?). They would hope that a given listener would try to reproduce that at home, as far possible. Just because I can enjoy the same music on my Tivoli Model One/CD (in mono!), as well as the big ATC/Harbeth rig, doesn't invalidate the latter experience as one that gets me closer to a live in-hall experience.

If you say such accuracy, truthfulness to the timbres, dynamics, acoustical space of a given event doesn't matter, because you feel that in home replay you're so far from the actual event that anything goes, you may open up the danger of worse and worse recordings being made (which is what those "compression wars" in pop releases were all about really) - just as today, many people feel that there's "no essential difference between CD and MP3".
For much of my first 40-odd years I could scarcely afford a record collection or a good system. But I would always have held to that basic, simple principle of accuracy in classical recording and playback. Once you lose that, what's left? How would you evaluate any recording?

**Just seen GG's above post - no-one is CONFLATING the live experience with the recording; it's simpler than that, which is that - in the classical field, there is (or should be) an ESSENTIAL RELATIONSHIP between the two, as Nevalti and I have been trying at some length to describe.

[MrGongGong]

**Just seen GG's above post - no-one is CONFLATING the live experience with the recording;.

I think many people do , and are unable to separate one from the other
do you not think that in other musics there isn't a relationship between a recording and a live performance ?

[Dave2002]

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
Some music is wonderful if you are in the room
some music is wonderful as a recording
some music is both
some is neither
and which is which isn't fixed

I feel that others aren't getting your message.

[Beef Oven]

**Just seen GG's above post - no-one is CONFLATING the live experience with the recording.........

I think That is EXACTLY what some people are doing

[jayne lee wilson]

OED:
"Conflate: Blend or fuse together. (Especially two variant texts into one)"

I've been quite explicit in my last post that this isn't what it's about - I think Nevalti has too in his own way...It is, metaphysically, an impossible concept to "fuse" live and recorded; but metaphorically it doesn't work either, unless you're invoking a delusional psychosis; rest assured, I don't really believe I'm in the Musikverein when I listen to the VPO (shame, really, perhaps LSD might do it? )

GG, D2002, Beef - looking back, Nevalti and I have painstakingly addressed your points, with a breadth of response and I hope a generosity of spirit: I recognise that we all listen differently, and both CONceive and PERceive that experience differently. Trouble is, faced with my elaborations of the "real/reproduction" relationship you all seem to come back on it with mere denial - "oh, you just don't get it" etc., but without any real address of many of the things I've said. What about those famous engineers I mentioned? Were they deluded in their ideas, aims and ambitions? Was "realism" or accuracy to the musical event (the original meaning after all, of High Fidelity) a pointless aspiration? Or my point about how we process what we hear - brain x may supply more (from memory, experience) of what's missing from a good classical recording than brain y - and thus refer to it as "realistic", while y says, "nothing like it".

Remember when Stereo was new. Why did early listeners so enjoy that ping-pong ball, that garage door, that train? If you whizzed back in time and said to them, "of course, that ping-pong ball sounds nothing like a real one" what d'you think they'd say? You'd probably get an odd look...

Some 1950s/60s recordings exist in stereo and mono versions. I often enjoy mono in itself, (and a few listeners prefer it ). Is a mono recording no more or less "realistic" or "accurate" than a stereo one? In terms of what went on in that venue? THAT's exactly the sort of question none of you seem prepared to answer directly.

[Dave2002]

I think you have to distinguish between a transmission and a recording. There is a difference, though in engineering terms there are things in common. In a recording there is the possibility, often taken, of changing the performance. Fluffed notes are replaced by new ones from retakes, singers who sing "off key" are brought back into line etc. This might sound better to some, indeed many, who would then find "live" sound imperfect. Listening to "real" live sound can be like going to a horse race, or watching a tennis match - you often don't know who is going to win. You can watch similar tennis matches between Andy Murray and Federer, and still not be sure who is going to win. In a recording a lot of the uncertainty is removed. You will know that the soprano who sings The Queen of the Night aria will get it right and in tune (or not) because you've heard it before. In the concert hall or opera house you do not know, and you can marvel (as I did not too long ago) at the performance of a singer who got through that aria on stage with all the notes in the right places, right pitches etc. - no use of technology to bring things back into tune etc. Absolutely fantastic as a performance.

This might demonstrate one reason why some (many) prefer live transmissions to recorded ones, or to recordings. Even the 30 minutes delay which R3 used to insert into "live" transmissions was sufficient for some mistakes to be remedied, be they musical ones, or simply technology ones. This is not possible with near instantaneous transmission.

On the other hand, some people think they want perfection. How can they achieve this? One problem here is "what is perfection?" It is barely real - near perfect renditions of the Queen of the Night aria are very hard to come by, and almost impossible for live performers - though some are stunningly good. So a perfect or ideal performance is one which is unlikely to be heard in "reality", but which might be possible using recording techniques, and then we hit the problem of "whose perfection is being realised when a recording is being made?" It is no longer a question of "simply" placing microphones and recording the sound pressure - as that will have imperfections, but now becomes a matter of "given the source material - including multiple copies and takes - how can this be processed to give the "ideal" recording?" The responsibility for the final product is no longer simply in the hands of the performers, or the conductor, but becomes a more collective effort. Who is going to decide what the final product should be?

So, what is real?

[Nevalti]

....... In a recording there is the possibility, often taken, of changing the performance. Fluffed notes are replaced by new ones from retakes, singers who sing "off key" are brought back into line etc. ..........

This might demonstrate one reason why some (many) prefer live transmissions to recorded ones, or to recordings. .............

........... "what is perfection?" It is barely real - near perfect renditions of the Queen of the Night aria are very hard to come by, and almost impossible for live performers - though some are stunningly good. So a perfect or ideal performance is one which is unlikely to be heard in "reality", but.............
So, what is real?

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.

[Nevalti]

I think That is EXACTLY what some people are doing

Then you have very clearly misunderstood.