Excellent question. One that should be taken seriously.
In direct answer to your question I say Yes! It does bother me in that studio wiring and connectors can be easily improved at fairly minimal cost. So much of the wiring in a studio is done for convenience as opposed to sound quality.
What Trentpancakes doesn't say is that you can still make good sounding recordings in these studios. It's easy enough to bypass most studio wiring, consoles and patchbays and go direct to the recorder. Many engineers bring a handful of "special" microphones and mic pres with them to a session. Skillful engineers can assess what they have to work with and adjust accordingly.
What I think audiophiles don't understand is the engineer's primary job is to capture a good performance. The studio can be a chaotic place where the sound engineer is not the man in charge. People can be milling around, eating pizza, the girlfriends are comparing shoes, the singer's on the phone, the producer is out of the room and the guitar player is just messin' around with some chords and he'll suddenly bark into the mic, "did you get that?". In that hectic environment a good engineer has decent sounding tape of what the guitarist was playing.
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. |
Trentpancakes,
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'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. |
It was largely because hifi and stereo was new and sound quality was a novel marketed feature back then, hence more of a primary selling point and profit maker then than it is today. |
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. |
" the reason why those recordings sound better is because the musicians playing the music were better. "
That's a silly statement. |
08-07-13: Trentpancakes
Robsker, the reason why those recordings sound better is because the musicians playing the music were better. LOL! It's always the other guys fault. Mechanics blame the Engineers, and vice versa. Thanks for the comic relief pancakes. |
There are some recording engineers who go to great lengths to make a decent recording: Todd Garfunkle of MA Recordings, Pierre Sprey of Mapleshade, whoever does ECM, etc.
Just because you came across someone who runs a crappy recording studio only goes to show just how stymied his results are. He's not in it for the sound. It's just a business for him.
You can go to any job site where new home construction is being done and see first hand all the shortcuts and shoddy work being done and when finished, you'd be hard pressed to see any faults. Only after living there for a couple of seasons will reveal the poor workmanship.
When it comes to music, a great system will reveal the limits of the recording at first listen. All of those limits you tallied up show up in the final product. A better run and managed studio would put out a superior product.
Unless you're satisfied with poor recordings, you don't have a leg to stand on, if that is your reference.
All the best,
Nonoise |
Well, I'm sure there are good recording studios, production companies and engineers and not so good ones. The variations of sound quality I hear recording to recording help confirm that.
For me, its a reasonable audiophile goal for their system to reveal all the variations present recording to recording. Forget about "The Absolute Sound", though it might pop up on occasion with certain recordings if you are in a good place home audio sound wise.
Recordings are what they are. Audiophiles that seek to make a recording into something that it is not are unfortunately doomed, for the most part, since they also poo poo any form of sound processing, digital or otherwise. Audiophiles that can appreciate each recording as a unique work of art will probably be happier. If it takes a clock with a sticker on to achieve that, well...... |
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. |
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? |
Any kind of popular music is a business, 98% of the people who buy it have zero concept of what sounds good or doesn't.
Why waste the money on good gear ? |
Why do I suddenly feel like a sucker... again? |
I recently visited a local recording studio with fine equipment. But the recording techniques still gave me pause. Individual (pop recording) instruments were recorded with two mikes, but not to create stereo localization but rather to pick up some natural reverb. (Which is fine.) Thus any sound stage effects are the result of mixing.
This puts a bit of a kabosh on what had been my touchstone for audio: accuracy. I can't know what sound stage effects are inherent in any vinyl or CD rendition. Therefore I can't judge accuracy of reproduction by listening. I think the same logic applies to frequency balance.
Further, to add fuel to the fire, I read in some high end sites and magazines about outstanding spacial and sound effects that I never hear in live performances whether orchestral, chamber music, or pop group. Rather than pinpoint localization of instruments in space, I hear more of a blend with significant directionality. That is very much like what I hear on my speakers. So what is it that those guys are hearing?
So it seems impossible to determine what sound illusions (stereo images are of course an illusion)are more accurate. Just what you like.
Are we reduced to looking at measurements and calling the relative absence of distortion and coloration "accuracy"? I think so. |
What I find surprising is that 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. Any explanations from an engineering or engineering approach perspective as to why this might be? |
I do think high end audio is a much riper playground for charlatans in general than is the recording industry, where people compete for jobs based on actual skills and abilities. |
"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?"
I don't find the alarm clocks with sticker on it part strange. :) |
I know there are some professional sound engineers that are also participants on this site that buy into the audiophile mantra to a great extent. I'd like to hear what those folks have to say about this. |
Maybe its easier for the professionals to record the music than it is for audiophiles to play it back because they are professionals trained to do this stuff. |
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Yes, it bothers me. Always has. Nothing you say surprised me, but to sit and think about all that wire and crappy connections, I'm surprised anything gets out sounding as good as it does. I hear good recordings occasionally and it makes me wonder what exactly it is that those guys are doing different. I've always thought it criminal the way the industry ignores good sound. Like an artist painting poorly, or a chef dismissing good flavor, etc., etc. For gods sake, they are selling MUSIC! They are required to present it properly. Too often it is not an honest product. |
No, what you don't know will not bother you, unless you an audio engineer. Ignorance is bliss. In the end, if the recording sounds bad, the listener is not really interested in why. Bad is bad. |
Because I am a fan of time and phase coherent speakers, I once asked Jim Thiel if he knew of any recording studios that used his speakers as monitors and he told me he knew of one that was locally based but of no others. From my experience in a large pro studio the monitoring systems alone seemed to be an afterthought and the choices were driven by so-called "industry standards," or, worse, were custom installations. Yikes, can you imagine the phase incoherence of some of these designs? No wonder we have speaker manufactures inverting the phase of the midrange drivers relative to the tweeter and woofer. Plus 4th order crossovers with high phase angles at the transition points. No wonder playback has continued to be the pursuit of the holy grail for so many. |
Does it bother me that the folks who record music do not care about sound quality? Yeah, I suppose it does a little bit, but I realize that this behavior is not abnormal.
I suspect that the folks who manufactured my automobile don't give a rat's ass about driving performance either. Many folks who squash grapes for a living are not wine connoisseurs. That's just the way of the world. |
I'll take the bait. It would be great if the studios followed more audiophile-approved practices. But because they don't, or may not, doesn't negate the value of doing all you can to make the playback as good and true as possible. Otherwise you're compounding the problem. Or to put it another way, two wrongs don't make a right. |
Trent: EXCELLENT thread, thanks for starting it! I have often wondered the same thing as I am an amateur hobbyist recording engineer in my home studio plus I spent time in a Montreal studio a few years ago learning recording, mixing, engineering, etc.
One of the paradoxes I've wondered about is, though it seems to be not so much an equipment limitation to get the music onto the media (witness Count Basie three-channel recordings from tube gear on Roulette from the late 50s) it does seem that the hardest part has ususally been achieving hi-fidelity playback representative of what was captured in the studio. That's not to say that some, well, ok, many, recordings weren't simply tracked poorly to begin with, based on poor decisions made by the recording engineer, or poor set ups to begin with. Believe me a little infomation can be dangerous; if I could go back and have my hand on the "handle" (you know the one that Charlie stole), I would gave recorded some of the finest and most classic of all recordings with a different set up and mixed them quite differently, but this is all Monday Morning QB'ing.
So becasue we're stuck with what we got, we try our best to undo as much of the damage as was done in the first place. |
You sound like a troll. Whats your name and what studios have you worked in? What albums have you engineered? Pardon my skepticism, but since you just joined today and this is your first post.... |
I notice some artists recordings are leaps better than others. Further some of them are just bad; although the music is good so I assume they are recording for ipod listening only.
Whether the artists who consistently record outstanding fidelity and who incidentally have publicly commented on the strides they go to to achieve great fidelity ever go to audiophile extremes you refer to or not, the result is profound.
I can see you came here to bait the audiophiles (or tease the monkeys as it were), but whatever is done by those who care about their sonics is noticed and appreciated. Now I expect more monkeys will begin to throw dung at you . . . . |
