"If you were serious about sound you would..."
...post over 20000 times in a hifi forum. Thank you!
If you were serious about sound you would...
If your audiophile quest is to get the best sound then buy the best equipment used to make the recordings originally. One of the few things nearly every audiophile agrees about is that you can't make the signal better than the original. So:
Solid State Logic 2 channels preamp 5k$
Meyer Sound Bluehorn powered speakers 2x 140K$
Pro Tools MTRX system 10k$
Mac Studio Computer 8k$
Total about 170k$
How is it possible to get better sound than the best recording studio gear?
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- 107 posts total
@mapman Great answer, but do you care about the most accurate sound or do you care about your enjoyment of music accurate sound be damned? Obviously you have given your expertise to the audiophile world which all around here appreciate. One of those branches is objective the other is subjective, your objective experience and commitment to audio is valuable but to me your subjective commitment to audio is only valuable is your ideas line up to my subjective ideas promoting confirmation bias something only the marketing department of audio manufactures need. I would really like your answer I don't think there is a right or wrong answer. |
I know very little about how a recording engineer captures and mixes an artist, and I know absolutely nothing about the Pro Audio choices recording engineers make to practice their craft. Since this is a forum, and everyone has an opinion, here are my two cents. My guess is that a recording engineer wants to hear everything with the greatest detail possible when recording an artist. The engineer then takes those tracks and modifies them if working in the digital domain, according to the engineer's and artists' tastes. And now, above all, the engineer wants to hear in great detail what effects the the digital processing have produced. Then, there is the whole process of volume control for the individual tracks. This is done for analog recording also, or adjusting where artists stand or microphone position if recording a "live" performance. I see this akin to a cook deciding on more or less salt. The engineer is messing with how much each track proportionally contributes to the final mix. Yet again, the engineer wants to hear exactly what these modifications have done to the mix. So I am naively assuming that the engineer wants a playback chain that is extremely fast and highly detailed. Whether the playback system "sounds good" is of secondary importance. I do not think that equipment used in a recording studio is even designed to appeal to the tastes of the majority of home users. And finally, it is we, the consumers, who purchase the final mix and play it at home. And, no surprise, we all like flavors, different flavors. As consumers of audio gear, I think what we do over time is refine what flavors we like, and if we are lucky, we find equipment that reproduce those flavors for us. If we are luckier still, we are able to afford the equipment that checks all those flavor boxes for us. So to answer the question of the post, "If you were serious about sound you would..." I would continue listen to as much gear and as many home systems as I can and see if said gear and systems appeal to my flavor profile. Then figure out what gear contributes the most to my tastes, and then figure out how to recreate that sound in my home. Most of us reach a point where it is "good enough", or we run out of money. In summary, I have no interest in the Pro Audio gear choices an engineer makes (but I think the whole process is fascinating and I would love to see the process in action), and neither should you. What we care about a recording is whether it sounds good on our flavored home system, and that it has just enough salt and not too much coriander. |
Most misunderstanding in audio debate comes from acoustic and psycho-acoustic ignorance...The misunderstanding comes from the focus put on the price tag and on gear upgrades instead of the acoustic...
But the OP commit the same sin , claiming that if we are serious about sound we must buy the same piece of gear as the studio sound optimization tools...He focus here on some specific type of gear as the only one possible SOURCE for " good sound"...
Which idea makes no sense at all , because the source of sound is not DSP nor the gear used to work with it, but first the original physical acoustic INFORMATION conditions in most music albums , especially jazz and classical... LIVE RECORDING and STUDIO RECORDING differ completely and mixing serve the recording process in classical and jazz not the reverse...
And the accuracy TRADE-OFF acoustic process of recording is not the studio process of mixing or optimizing which is a digital and DSP accuracy , nor the translation of these two conjugated process the same as the system/room physical acoustic accuracy conjugated with the psycho-acoustic accuracy..
What is accuracy? one thing is sure digital accuracy cannot define alone the complexities of physical and psycho acoustics accuracy and it is subordinated to it anyway ....
Then what is the source of sound ?
For the playing musician it is himself playing in some acoustic conditions, for the audio engineer it is himself modifying the recorded sound for the better or the worst, for the listener the source of the sound is his system room , for an acoustician the source of the sound experience is the psycho-physical process around the ears structure and the brain in some controlled or uncontrolled room for a specific listener or for an average listener ...
The source of the music experience is ALL that together... Then proposing to buy the same gear as those picked by an arbitrarily chosen studio engineer is preposterous claim as preposterous as throwing money on too costly gear...
I will let extremely processed sound albums out here....Most of us dont buy that anyway...
The processing studio works in classical is there to HELP the original timbre playing instruments translations from some chosen recording microphones positions and choices TRADES-OFF, the studio job is done to help this recording process not to modify it or change it artificially for some results making the recording engineer the creator instead of being the servant in the recording process ...
The studio engineers working in the classical field recording work to help these initial acoustical choices in some acoustic location by the recording engineers ... They dont work thinking that all the potential listeners will buy the same studio system as them, but they know that customers will listen in many different room and acoustic conditions... They dont optimize the sound in a way that what they intended will be heard and decoded by a system exactly as their own, if they were doing so they will create a product completely different than the microphone trade-off recording process intended by the maestro or the musicians ALSO involved often in the recording process to begin with...
Then saying that playback studio is the source of the sound is false... It is confusing the recording process of live recording with the studio recording and mixing process among other confusions ...
The sound quality is not defined only by mixing and digital accuracy but by other acoustic factors as time and timing and different ratios of reflectivity...Then speaking as if " digital audio accuracy" was the main factors is confusing digital mixing with acoustic recording or worst subordinating recording to mixing as if the mix in itself was the goal...And it is forgetting that dsp mixing are secondary compared the sound experience psycho-physical acoustic factors in the recording concert hall and in the listening room ...
And to answer this comment above, the subjective and objective factors in hearing are inseparable at the beginning and at the end... It is called psycho-acoustic... And digital audio is ruled by psycho-acoustic not the reverse... bit are not more true and more objective than some brain/ears experience.... Thinking this is reversing the acoustic science and subordinating it to digital process of translation.... Sound is not a digital signal... It is FIRST AND LAST a qualitative perceived experience...
Saying that audiophiles throw money to costly system and claiming that this can be preposterous in many case is a claim i can endorse but claiming that music is reducible to sound and sound reducible to digital signal is not even wrong... It is not even false.... It is a meaningless claim made with half truths around a way more complex interdisciplinary scientific matter and physical phenomenon ....
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