2. misc-audio
  3. 1375840071

Does it bother you?

I'm a recording engineer who has worked in some of the world's top facilities. Let me walk you though an example signal path that you might find in a place like, say, Henson Studio A:

1. Microphone: Old. Probably a PCB inside. Copper wiring.
2. Mic cable: Constructed in house with $1/ft Canare Star Quad, solder, and a connector that might have been in the bottom of a box in the back.
3. Wall jack: Just a regular old Neutrik XLR connector on the wall.
4. Cable snake: Bundles of mic cables going to the control room.
5. Another XLR jack.
6. Another cheap mic cable.
7. Mic preamp: Old and lovely sounding. Audio going through 50 year old pots.
8. Patchbay: Another cheap copper cable is soldered into a patchbay where hundreds of connectors practically touch.
9. TT Cable: Goes from one patch to the next in the patch bay. Copper. No brand preference.
10. DB25 connector: Yes, the same connector you used to connect a modem to your computer in 1986. This is the heart and soul of studio audio transfer.
11. DB25 cable to the console: 25 strands of razor-thin copper wire, 8 channels of audio, sharing a ride.
12. The mixing console: PCB after PCB of tiny copper paths carry the audio through countless op amp chips.
13. DB25 cable to the recording device: time to travel through two more DB25 connectors as we make our way to the AD converters or tape machine.
14. AD conversion: More op amp chips.
15. Digital cable: nothing fancy, just whatever works. USB and Firewire cables are just stock.

...and this is just getting the audio into the recorder.

Also:

None of this equipment has vibration reducing rubber feet, it's just stacked haphazardly in racks. Touching.

No fancy power cables are used, just regular ol' IEC cables.

Acoustic treatment is done using scientific measurements.

Words like "soundstage" and "pace" are never uttered.

Does it bother you? Do you find it strange that the people who record the music that you listen to aren't interested in "tweaks," and expensive cables, and alarm clocks with a sticker on them? If we're not using any of this stuff to record the albums, then what are you hearing when you do use it?
trentpancakes

Showing 10 responses by trentpancakes

trentpancakes OP
13 posts
 
That's a silly statement.

So equipment trumps talent? You really think they had a technological edge in the '50s that allowed them to make "better" recordings?

I'm giving all of the credit to great musicians, and being accused of placing the "blame" on someone else. Great musicians make the engineer's job exceedingly simple. When a world-class musician shows up, you stick a mic in front of them and hit record. You play back what you just recorded, and it sounds incredible and moving. The brand of cable used on the mic doesn't change that.
trentpancakes OP
13 posts
 
This is just half of the signal path, and for one channel. Now imagine this happening across 24 tracks, and including the playback signal path through various stacks of effects units. No vibration damping on a single one of them! Every vacuum tube (and there are lots) without a single damper ring on them.

It's likely that the audio you hear on a full-band production has passed through a DB25 port thousands of times in total before reaching the mastering stage. And the vinyl that it was pressed to, every single one of those masters were made on a direct-drive servo lathe with an aluminum platter, with a similar signal path to the ones I described above.

I just can't understand, in the quest for pure playback, it's always "I could hear deeper into the soundstage" and "highs seemed to lift into the air and trickle down" and "timing and pace were more brisk(??)"

..instead of..

"I could hear more of the rumble of the cutting lathe" and "a pronounced 50hz hum from the recording console became apparent" and "an air conditioning unit in the studio ticked annoyingly in the background."

How is it you're only able to hear this amazing stuff that we never heard when you buy more equipment?
trentpancakes OP
13 posts
 
Robsker, the reason why those recordings sound better is because the musicians playing the music were better. It's that simple. In the recording world, it's all about performance over equipment. You want to catch lightning in a bottle, and these old recordings did it.

There was nothing magical about the recording process. In fact, the equipment, by today's standards, was fairly poor. And just going by pure specs it was a nightmare. THD, wow and flutter... these things were off the charts.

I'd rather catch a breathtaking performance on a Tascam cassette 4-track, than a lifeless take through a Lynx AD converter.
trentpancakes OP
13 posts
 
LOL! It's always the other guys fault. Mechanics blame the Engineers, and vice versa. Thanks for the comic relief pancakes.

Then what do you think it is? Do you think it was because they used more audiophile-grade equipment in the '50s? Silvered wires, cables on stilts, dampening stones, and things like that?

Or do you think it's because you had in those early jazz recordings an unparalleled level of talent sharing the room?

I'd like to hear your rebuttal instead of an ad hominem.
trentpancakes OP
13 posts
 
A reason for the better sounding recordings of the 50's and 60's may be that there is a lot less of all the little "problems" you mention in rant.

That simply isn't something that's supported by fact.

Equipment in the '50s and '60s was marked by its high THD, noise, microphonics, and nascent electrical engineering. Signal chains, instead of having loads of DB25 interconnects, had multiple generation losses on tape decks with, by today's standards, abhorrent specs. Almost every piece of equipment in the chain was a tube device that added multiple odd and even-order harmonics (which is actually perceived as pleasing to the ear, although it is, by definition, distortion).

The entire philosophy of '80s recording and engineering was to clean up the signal path of the '50s-'70s, which was considered to be extremely low fidelity.
trentpancakes OP
13 posts
 
When all is said and done when a studio/producer/engineer does adopt audiophile standards, I'm thinking Mapleshade, you do get better sounding recordings.

Thanks for the reply, and it does accurately depict what goes on in a studio. It's controlled chaos, and it's about getting a creative spark on tape FAST. There's no time to obsess over a signal chain. Take "Something in the Way" off of Nevermind, as a rock n roll example. Kurt starts strumming the song on the control room couch, and he's killing it. It sounds perfect. So Butch scrambles and throws a mic in front of him right where he's sitting, and they captured perfection. If he had stopped to employ some audiophile aesthetic, it would have been lost.

Of course studios and engineers who specialize in audiophile recording are going to produce clean sounding records. It would defy reason to say that they don't.

But it still doesn't explain how audiophile listeners only seem to find extreme positives when they listen to traditional studio recordings on expensive stereos. It's all about "big soundstages" and "less smear" and "livelier pace." It's never "revealed more noise" or "heard tuning problems" or "hum was more pronounced" or "soundstage stayed the same."

How are you getting good things that we don't hear, but aren't hearing the bad things that we DO hear?
trentpancakes OP
13 posts
 
The original assertion was: "many small ensemble jazz recordings in the late 1950's and early 1960's sound better (more realistic, so to speak)--- often by a wide margin --- then most recordings of today."

...which I still maintain the musicianship played a large part in. They were capturing a moment in time, in the middle of a musical revolution of sorts, with musicians that were riding a creative wave that had yet to be explored, in a studio environment that was at that time rare. To think that it wouldn't come across as a creative explosion on tape is putting too much faith in machines over man. It's the same reason psychedelic music sounds so vital and alive when you're listening to a recording from 1966. You're capturing young musicians in the eye of a creative storm, and a social movement. It's why we decorate recording studios the way that we do. It's why we want musicians to record in the same room, with every instrument bleeding into all the other mics. We want that eye contact, we want the vibe, we want emotion on tape.

5% more emotion on tape will improve the quality of the recording immeasurably over a 500% increase in fidelity. This is one of the reasons why we don't obsess too terribly much about the cables (besides the fact that our ears don't hear it). There are much easier ways to improve the quality of the album, and the results are far more tangible. Just record better performances.
trentpancakes OP
13 posts
 
The only thing that might concern me is if Trent tried an alarm clock with a dot on it and heard something different (the alarm maybe??) :)

I would be concerned, too! I would definitely love to see the results of double-blind ABX testing with devices like the Clever Little Clock and "Proton Alignment" products. I suspect the must difficult part of the test would be getting manufacturer consent.
trentpancakes OP
13 posts
 
I view most recording engineers as a person just doing a job with very little(if any) passion(think of Homer Simpson sleeping on the job) regarding sound quality.

That couldn't be further from the truth. Read any recording engineer's trade mag... recording engineers are obsessed with sound quality, and getting raw emotion to turn into electricity on magnetic storage. Check out 'Sound on Sound' or 'Tape Op' to hear the language of the recording studio. You'll find there's almost zero overlap in terminology or focus. An engineer who claimed a digital cable "improved pace" would be laughed out of the control room before never being called for work again. Even the top manufacturers of recording equipment are quite resolute in saying that all digital interconnects are the same as long as they complete the circuit. Can you imagine an audiophile company saying the same?

The difference is, we put the obsession into tangible improvements. Yes, I absolutely could get a 1% increase in fidelity if I changed out the resistors in all of my equipment for Vishay Dale, and if avoided the DB25 interconnects and kept short signal paths. I could absolutely do it. But why spend my time on that if I can get a 50% increase in performance quality by getting the singer riled up and reminding him why he wrote the song, or picking up a coffee for the drummer who's feeling left out again? That kind of thing pays dividends.

The obsessive-compulsive stuff pays off very little in the end and, in my opinion, doesn't make an album more listenable. What makes an album transcendent is emotion, power, fragility... For very little money and effort, we can get to 99% perfect fidelity. It's the final 1% that costs millions and adds very little.

I never listened to Abbey Road and thought, "Man, if only they'd recorded this through 24-bit 192Khz A/D converters along unidirectional silver mic cables. Then they'd be on to something." No, all that distortion, 50hz hum, tape hiss, and background noise adds up to something beautiful.
trentpancakes OP
13 posts
 
Judsauce, you GET IT. Thanks, man.
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