How to meaningfully audition speakers??

Hi Charles - your question has been touched on in a couple of different threads, including that jazz one. I think I'll let Frogman take a stab at it here if he likes, as he writes much better than I do. A short and flippant answer would be that almost all recording engineers are untrained (meaning self-taught, basically), and most really don't have any idea what they are doing. I am more than half serious when I say that, unfortunately.... Modern digital techniques have enabled any idiot to think they can make a great recording now, and there are many of them thinking they are doing so. They just stick a bunch of mikes all over the place and mix it however they think sounds cool. Even in the classical world. The musicians almost always have a much better basic understanding of how to record their own instruments properly than the sound guys do. But we almost never have any control over that whatsoever - this is true of musicians in all genres. The recording labels drive the bus in general. The musicians are lucky to be consulted at all, and in the orchestral world it would only be the conductor getting consulted, maybe a soloist too if there is one, except in very rare circumstances.

Yes, I could give a more serious reply, but this is actually an issue that very quickly makes me very angry. This is why most professional musicians roll their eyes at audiophiles that say they want to maintain "fidelity to the recorded signal" above all other priorities. Much of the time, the recording job was crap - why the hell should we be faithful to someone who we know did not record us well? Instead, the reference point for a system, auditioning speakers being the most important part of that, should be to the actual sound of un-amplified live music, as Frogman said.

Another flippant answer about why the older orchestral recordings sound much better would be that it has everything to do with analog vs. digital recording techniques, particularly the differences in the miking, but let's not start that argument here. OK, I'll shut up now.

Some great things here - first, I knew that Frogman would write a much better response than mine, and I am pleased to see it does not conflict whatsoever with mine, either.

Charles, I believe his post answers your next question to me, I think?

Bifwynne, I think that is a good point you make. With digital editing techniques as they are now, an engineer who knows what they are doing can pretty much make anything sound like whatever they want. This is another big reason why there is not much standardization.

Onhwy61, while I understand your point, I have to disagree. Unfortunately, one thing Frogman and I are basically saying is that there is not much aesthetics involved at all in recording nowadays, particularly the really commercial pop stuff. I think you are giving the engineers too much credit there. As Frogman said, recreating subtle tonal colors and balances of acoustic instruments, no matter what the ensemble size, just cannot be done artificially with multi-miking and a mixing board. So yes, those things do matter very much in the equation. Multi-miking and mixing tends to almost completely obliterate spatial cues, for just one example. That's why they add reverb, to make it sound more "live" again - but all sense of the actual recording space (assuming it was in a decent concert hall or jazz club or church) is gone, and with it many other important aspects of the sound. This unfortunately applies to all but a very tiny percentage indeed of the digital recording that has ever been done, so that does have quite a bit to do with it, too. This is not to say that you can't mike things for a digital recording the same way for an analog recording - you could. But this is almost never done.

Hi Onhwy61 - your last post expresses exactly what I was saying. However, it is not just rock/pop recording that uses multi-miking and tracking - ALL modern recording does this, whether appropriate or not. There are very few exceptions, even in the jazz and classical worlds. That's exactly the problem - these techniques DID travel to the other music types, very soon after these digital techniques were possible in the 80s. I have never seen less than seven or eight mikes at any recording session I have ever been a part of, even of a small ensemble (professional recordings, that is). As I said before - this shouldn't have to be inherent in theory to modern/digital recording - yet the fact remains that it is in actual practice. These techniques, as you say, have nothing to do with the sound of real instruments in a real space. They have everything to do with ease of editing and mixing, and almost nothing to do with the actual sound of the music being made by the musicians. This is why musicians laugh at the concept of "fidelity to the recording."

Hi Onhwy61 - everything in your last post is correct; there were indeed multi-track experiments in the analog era, especially in the opera world. However, what I am trying to say is that it was not done anywhere near as much as it has been in the digital era - the main reason being it is so much easier to do it with digital technology than with tape. It is indeed possible to make purist recordings in this modern era, but pretty much no one does anymore, which is the main point I am trying to make.

One prominent engineer in my area, when asked why he doesn't do them anymore, answered that he was afraid he would be fired by people who couldn't understand why he wasn't using all of the capabilities of the new technology. Other engineers have said the same. It's the whole "it's newer, it must be better" mentality. Many engineers are afraid they will be called Luddites. It's very sad.

Dover, you and Frogman are right on. I especially agree with the last part of Frogman's post: "The differences in sound between an oboe and an English Horn are obvious even over the crappy speaker in the elevator. Yet, that "component XYZ made those differences inaudible" as I have heard stated several times only means that the listener simply doesn't know what either instrument really sounds like. There really is no shortcut: if you want to really understand "accuracy" you have to attend live performances. Of course, not everyone has that as a goal."

People may not like to hear this on this board, but this right here is a large part of the reason why many musicians don't give an audiophile's opinions the time of day. It is a sad thing that not everyone has that as a goal - for a musician, no other reference point makes any sense. If this is not your goal, you are just sitting at home playing with your own toys, and while you might like the sound you have created, it probably doesn't even come close to what a musician would call "accurate."