Most Realistic Recordings

Melm,

I concur with your assessment of EMI recordings from the end of the analog era. 
Even their budget label: Classics for Pleasure, produces state of the art sound.

Cantate Domino, from Proprius.

Kambara Music in Native Tongues from Waterlily.

Horowitz, The Last Recordings from Sony Music

Jazz at the Pawnshop from Proprius.

Nimbus is the name of the label I was trying to remember.  You should search out some of their CDs.

A few standouts:

Arne Domnerus / Lars Erstrand - 'Live is Life' (Live)

Tom Waits - 'Nighthawks at the Diner'

Benny Goodman - 'Benny Goodman & Friends'

Rickie Lee Jones - 'Naked Songs Live and Acoustic'

You might also want to look into binaural recordings.  Google explains it better than I can.  There was a British classical label that took it up big time years ago, but it went defunct.  Perhaps someone else will remember their name.

Thanks everyone for the recent comments. I'm loving the suggestions.

@kefas, thanks for pointing out the one-mic recordings. That sounds very intriguing and I will definitely look into that.

Forgive my ignorance, but I must ask a technology question (and if you don't know, that's ok). How does one mic capture and preserve the left-to-right soundstage/imaging? Does it have something to do with the capsule count/positioning within the one microphone? I can understand how it can capture some amount of depth, but it's unclear to me how it can preserve width. Anyone know how this works?

In this category the SOUND LIAISON One Microphone recordings rules in my opinion. 

The advantages of the One Microphone approach to recording are obvious; phase coherence, perfect imaging, great sense of depth, superior realism. Another advantage is that it forces the band being recorded to really play. There is nowhere to hide, no fixing it in the mix. Our ears are much more sensitive to phase errors than we are aware of. The obvious solution to avoid phase errors is to record the whole band from one point. But until recently we didn't experienced a microphone that was up to the task. Drums and piano sounded too distant and the sound stage did not reflect what I heard standing in front of the band. The first thing that impressed me about the Josephson C700S was the natural sound of the mic and the sound off axis. This is what makes the difference between a good microphone and an average microphone. Secondly the microphone is quite unique, it has three capsules instead of the more common two.
So when recording with the Josephson C700S, instead of placing microphones at the instruments we now place the instruments around the microphone. Mixing is no longer possible. We have to create the complete sound stage at the spot by carefully moving each instrument closer or further away as well as left and right in relation to the microphone. The benefits of this way of working is that the result is completely free of phase errors and that the sound is very natural with a wide deep soundstage. So far all musicians have been struck by the incredible authenticity of the recordings and commented that they never heard their instrument sound so real and lively.

The Gillian Welch / David Rawlings albums on Acony sound pretty amazing using a very detailed "home recording" approach, especially on vinyl. If you like acoustic, folk, Americana, acoustic blues, alt country, etc. they are very worthwhile. Soul Journey is probably my favorite, but Time(the Revelator), The Harrow & The Harvest, All The Good Times are all fantastic. Cheers,

Spencer

Yes, from the point of view of great sound some of the best DG recordings ever have been produced within the last decade or so.  But they are inconsistent.  Apparently DG has contracted with different independent producers to do their recordings.  Some of the best, at least to my ears, are represented by the Shostakovich - Nelsons - Boston Symphony series.  Try the 10th, for example.  But some they have done in Berlin have been less than stellar acoustically IMO.

@melm  I've been cruising some of the recent EMI orchestral recordings on Idagio. And yes, they are actually very good. Surprisingly good also are some recent DG orchestral recordings.

On the classical side you can find realistic sound and great performances IMO if you look at recordings made towards the end of the analog era. EMI, for example, really excelled at this time, and they sound just as good in Redbook as in analog. I would cite as an example the Tchaikovsky 4th Symphony with Muti and the Philharmonia. Play the 3rd movement (the pizzicato movement) at a comfortable level (perhaps just on the low side) and, if your system is up to it, the dynamics of the fourth movement will shock with volume and clarity just as at a concert.

Ken Kriesel of M+K, another good one.  I also thought of Sarah Jaroscz: been nominated for Grammies for Americana several times.  The engineer she uses is amazing, Gary Pacosza.  He's does amazing work. 

I am also a fan of Sheffield, M&K, Telarc, Chesky, Clarity, Three Blind Mice, Proprius, Astree, etc.  They do great jobs engineering, recording and mastering.  But, there are plenty of examples of "ordinary" records with extraordinary sound.  I have a David Peabody album named "Americana" that I would put up against anything when it comes to making it sound like the singers and musicians are in the room.  Particularly, listen to the track "Sewing Machine Blues."  This is typically a less than $10 record on Discogs, so it is not like hunting down original Blue Notes.

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Im sort of shocked no one has mentioned three companies who specialized in this and achieved some commerical success: Telarc and the modern ioteraction of Telarc: Five Four Productions. This was Michael Bishop (chief engineer) who won more grammies for high resolution recording thatn jsut about anyone. He has many many incredible recordings in his catalog, such as Hiromi, and Eric Bibb- two that stick out to me as incredibly realistic. Just go to Discogs and search for Michael Bishops

Another David Cheske, he used a SOundField mic for many years and did live single mic SoundField recordings of major orcehstras and organists in famous rooms. He was about capturing he ambience and experiecne of the performance.

George Masenburg, a few mentioned his Little Feat recording but I think all of them were great. He also did NIckel Creek, and quite a number of other bands- also recordng LInda Ronstadt with Nelson Riddle Orchestra. Extra ordinary. He hated colored mics and preamps, and used the most neutral gear possible so his recordings represent clarity and realism.

Al Schmidt: He was a engineers engineer and recorded many great artists at Capitol such as Diana Krall and Jane Monheit. He would spend days on mic placement and had perhaps one of the best rooms in LA to use all the time: Studio A at Capitol.  It had Nat King Coles Piano in it and Nelsn Riddles famous chair and bandstand. 

Another great: Mark Waldrep, and amazng engineer and the guy behind Real HD AUDIO.  I met him on Jennifer Warnes recording and loaned him a mic.  He's recorded an enormous catalog of outstanding music.   Find him on realhd-audio.com

Then Direct to Disc, refined and developed by Doug Sax and Bill Schnee. These guys started Sheffield Labs and did some of the most realistic recordings ever. Thelma Huston and Lincoln Mayorga, wow.. Bill also recorded quite a few other killer sounding records, Steely Dan among them. Bill was someone that people called to get a GREAT sound.

Search for the great engineers above to find huge back catalogs of great recordings. Recording [tracking+mixing] Engineers are the ones most responsible for a great recording as Musicians are focused on the pereformance, their intruments, not whats happening in the control room. There were a few musicans who could do both, Alan Parsons comes to mind, but its a short list.

Brad

Lone Mountain/ATC

Arvo Pärt – Creator Spiritus, Theatre Of Voices, Ars Nova Copenhagen Dir. Paul Hillier With Christopher Bowers-Broadbent, Organ, NYYD Quartet.  This is a hybrid SACD published by Harmonia Mundi in 2012.

I gotta say that, for the past forty or so minutes I've been getting absolutely outstanding fidelity from an Idagio CD level stream of Beethoven String Quartets performed by the Ehnes Quartet. Natural, sweet tone. Small live room ambience. All the dynamic range a string quartet can muster.

I have made several 100 recordings of orchestras, choirs and chamber music in such venues as UCLA Royce Hall, Disney Hall, Ford Amphitheater, Gindi Auditorium, etc all in Los Angeles. I have performed in all but Royce where I was a parttime reviewer for the Daily Bruin. I know what live music sounds like. What I want in my listening room does not require approximation to the live event at a large theater unless it involves a live performance. I greatly prefer a recreation of the music performed in a studio or an appropriate venue for a live performance or orchestra. In other words, I want to feel close to the music, not at a distance from the performance which is so common in modern recordings (especially classical music). My friends are more adamant in wanting front row seats. I appreciate natural reverberation when it fits the music, even various forms of added reverberation (such as echo chambers e.g. Capitol Records basement chambers). I’m sure that many audiophiles like their music to be distant, in rows 15 and back, there are recordings galore for that now. However, in the history of recorded music, the most revered recordings tend to be from the 1950s and 1960s. Why is that (that’s rhetorical).  In the pre-tape era, clarity and tonal balance was most admired (with a nice dose of dynamics as they were direct disc recordings).  Mics and horns were recorded into at close proximity to the performers.  

@fleschler 

Realistic to what?  A live performance or a recording stage/studio recording?

Neither, specifically. I was more interested in if you, as a listener, felt like a recording sounded quite similar to a live instrument/voice. Venue certainly influences the reverberation, but if you have been to a live event of any kind, you know what a real instrument/voice sounds like regardless of reverberation. So, that's what I'm soliciting: recordings that you believe (based on your hearing) very similar sonic characteristics to what you would expect from listening to a real instrument/person. I would like to try these on my system to see if I experience the same.

Hope that makes mores sense.

I have a short list of really solid performances, some live, some studio, but all give the illusion of "being there." Media varies by selection.

"Jazz at the Pawnshop" Proprius (vinyl)-Live

Patricia Barber, "Nightclub" Premonition (vinyl)-Live

Albert Hobbs Band, "Love Remembered" Eidolon (digital)-studio

Glenn Gould "Bach: Goldberg Variations" Zenph re-performance (digital binaural)-studio

Little Feat "Waiting for Columbus" Mobile Fidelity (vinyl)-live

Joe Jackson "Body and Soul" A&M (vinyl)-studio

Nitty Gritty Dirt Band w/ guests "Will the Circle Be Unbroken, 40th Anniversary Edition" United Artists (vinyl)-studio/live

Jascha Heifetz / Charles Munch & BSO "Beethoven Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 61) RCA (vinyl)-studio

Some of the songs literally put you in the recording space. Hopefully you will get some good ideas from this post. Happy listening!

Organ-try George Wright "Hot Pipes" his best organ recording on CD.  Great choir-Roger Wagner chorale in Green Leaves of Summer (only the Varese Sarabande CD, others are junk).  

I don't know in what numbers Robert Fulton (speaker and amplifier designer of Fulton Musical Industries---FMI, as well as recording engineer) pressed his ARK label LP's, but they are very special. Minimalist mic'ed, recorded in local Minnesota churches, Fulton managed to capture the sound of pipe organs and choirs far, far better than have most big-label engineers.

In his choir recordings, you can hear each individual voice---superb inner detail. His organ recordings are astounding, the "shudder" of the massive sound waves created by 32' pipe organs as you have rarely heard in recordings (if you have loudspeakers/subs which can reproduced 16Hz ;-). His recordings also capture the sound of the space in which they were made as well as I have ever heard.

While digging in LP bins, keep a look out for anything on the ARK label. 

chowkwan -- Yeah, I admit to being a bit tough on the label... It doesn't help that right now I'm streaming an utterly first-rate DG recording of Haydn's London Symphony via Idagio.

The McGill Percussion Ensemble* - Percussion

LP, Album
McGill University Records 77003
1978 Canada

Very realistic...

Realistic to what?  A live performance or a recording stage/studio recording?  They are so different.  I want to hear what the engineer engraved on a record or cd (or RR tape).  What I don't want it a modern, phasey, distant, over-reverberant recording.   What I want to hear in my home listening room is a performance recorded into the microphones that makes sense.  Why record a flute in the middle a concert hall (or any other smaller instrument or vocal that way).  I want immediacy to connect to the performance.   My system is high end and most of my friends have similar excellent systems which reproduce the performance and sound at the mics.   We all (about half of dozen, including a known remastering engineer) seek recordings that we can connect with, not the type previously distained.  

One can start with 78s which are direct discs.  What they lack in sound quality (frequency response, harmonic richness) they often make up in performance quality (single take) excitement and dynamic contrasts to bring one to the horn or microphone.  

@upsman 

I must agree. I remember buying a couple of them and really being Happily surprised. I then bought most every one that sounded ever remotely interesting. 

I recommended to a friend… who’s system was not all that great and he pointed out that the music wasn’t that great. I hadn’t noticed because the recordings were so amazing…

I’ll have to pull a couple of those out and resisted to,them.

In a batch response - Mapleshaderecords.com. I will not go into all the ins and outs of the founder, company and recordings, but in my humble opinion, some of the most "real" and analogue-like sounding digital recordings.available.

A very nice thread! I think nobody so far has mentioned „Midnight Sugar“ by the Tsuyoshi Yamamoto Trio , recorded 1974 in Tokyo, and published by the label TBM = three blind mice (TBM-23). You can get it in various media forms from vinyl to  CD or SACD (don‘t know about streaming) - it sounds always spectacular. Probably the „best  and most realistic sounding“ piano recording. By the way, it‘s Jazz. It‘s worth a listening for all audiophiles if you‘re not familiar with it.

Karl Richter's recording of Bach's Mass in B Minor combines great music with great recording. Some might say it is the pinnacle of Western Civ.  It is on Qobuz in CD quality. Better is Blu Ray AUDIO if you spring for the $260 Complete Karl Richter. This is a massive 100 CD collection with some Blu Ray AUDIO thrown in. The Mass in B Minor is not released separately on Blu Ray, only on CD. And LP of course. 

* I condemn blanket condemnation of Deutsche Grammophon. Some of the older recordings were great. Exhibit A above.

There is something about the “Hypnosonics” album “Drums Were Beating: Fort Apache Studios 1996”. If you like “Horns & Drums”, checkout the song “Living With You”. I like to turn this one up, just a little! To me, it sounds like the instruments are coming straight from the Mic’s. There is a 10 page insert with the album that has some interesting info, about the Band and the Studio. If anyone would care to listen to this, I would appreciate your thoughts on it.

@lordmelton several newer servers can do higher than 128 DSD, by my S10 can’t. Do you hear much difference higher than 128 DSD?

@achipo My Aurender N20 can play native DSD 512

@axeis1 

There is no Audio Gear that sounds like live music. There’s no video that looks like being there. There is no resolution that approaches real.

Pretty sure we're all in agreement on this thought.

With everything I've learned, I don't doubt that it is possible to recreate a sound like live music, though. In other words, it gets the listener close enough. That doesn't it mean it is exactly like live music. I get that. That's what prompted my initial question. I was curious to hear from others who have been doing this longer than I if they've ever had an experience that ever resembled a live sound. Our brains are clever enough that we can "suspend disbelief" if we let it and it can feel live.

Will we ever get to the point that a system absolutely fools me into believing that real life musicians playing real instruments and singing are there when they really aren't? I guess we'll see. It feels like we have some ways to go yet. With the feedback I've gotten here, it sounds like some people have nearly had such an experience and that's pretty exciting to me. Live sound is a full-body experience, not just an experience for our ears. I think it would be cool to experience that from a sound system just for the fun of it.

@axeis1

Thank god. I love the quiet and comfort of my home… the venue of live concerts can frequently ruin the sonics, or the sound engineer, or the amplification… people… unless there are assigned seats I do not enjoy the experience. Fortunately I have had season tickets in ideal seats at the symphony for over a decade.

There is no Audio Gear that sounds like live music. There’s no video that looks like being there. There is no resolution that approaches real.

Dee Dee Bridgewater .. Live at Yoshi’s.

Track 2 has the most realistic tambourine I've heard on digital and I use it a lot as a sanity check for realism

Just about anything recorded/produced by Günther Pauler at Stockfisch Records in Germany.  My favorites include:

- Chris Jones - Roadhouses and Automobiles; Moonstruck; Moving Air; etc.

- Allan Taylor - Colour to the Moon; Behind the Mix; Hotels & Dreamers; etc.

- Sara K - Water Falls; Nautilus Tour; Hell or High Water (all with Chris Jones)

Also mentioned previously - Jazz at the Pawn Shop

Archie Shepp - True Ballads

Educational Thread!   Thanks!

Speaking of Joe Jackson; Body and Soul. Joe went out looking for the perfect venue in New York to make the recording. He found an all wood stage… or whatever and specifically tried to make the best recording possible. It is drop dead gorgeous… two notes in it is instantly obvious. It comes in all formats including a 45 rpm heavy vinyl. I will order it now. Been one of my favorite recording since it came out… both sound quality and content.

Very grateful to everyone for the many new recommendations!

And, yes, it does seem to lend to the idea that if the recording is not directly of instruments or voices (i.e., no singing/playing into microphones that are then reproduced through a PA, which is then captured by a recording mic; no digital synthesizer; etc.), then it would be difficult to produce a "live" sound. Maybe I'm over-constraining the opportunity.

It also seems likely that a direct-to-disc recording would have the least amount of processing involved as well, which could possibly capture the most untainted signal. However, I sincerely appreciate that there are many recommendations here that have made it to the digital form (i.e., CD) and yet still have some of that magic preserved. I'm admittedly a newbie when it comes to vinyl though I've heard the many wonderful characteristics. I've also only started getting into the DSD variety.

Finally, I really am capturing all these recommendations into a spreadsheet that I plan to share with everyone. Given some of the missing pieces of data, it may seem sparse in some places, but hopefully I've captured everyone's recommendations so far clearly enough for one to do find the album/track/label.

While I love the Rock & Pop genre, there’s not many recordings that really just sound like a band in a room. The few that come to mind from the early 80’s are:

Joe Jackson - Big World (live to 2-track... this is a high-end recording)

Talking Heads - The Name of this band is Talking Heads (live)

B-52’s - first record... sounds like the band right there in your room.

For sure Patricia Barber, "Companion".  Also, Blue Coast DSD recordings.

This one even more...

Not sure if this is issued on a album, but ceratinly would like if it is....

This one is not bad, either

I would add this album, live recording

So many to choose from!  However, a few of my "go-to" test albums for live music are:

1.  Patricia Barber, Companion, XRCD . . . Particularly "Use Me" for the intro bass line!

2.  Hot Tuna Live at the New Orleans House Berkeley.

3.  Little Feat Waiting for Columbus, MoFi recording.

Although I am a huge Led Zeppelin fan, I would not call any of their albums true "test recordings," much as I love How the West Was Won.  They do show what a system does with not great recordings though . . . does it highlight the flaws or make them sound good?

Interesting the emphasis on digital recordings here.

I would posit that "realistic" primarily must refer to acoustic instruments or vocals since anything that is heard live as amplified (e.g. electric guitar) is already beyond the sound produced only by mechanical means.

Going one step further, consider that a purely analog chain is desirable for the most "realistic" possible reproduction of acoustic. Or at least that no exploration of the OP’s question is complete without a pure-analog investigation. (Speaking as someone who listens 98% to my DACs).

Further, consider that any mastering or post-performance engineering also interferes with "realism."

With that in mind, try some Direct-to-Disc vinyl recordings. I have two: one by Charlie Byrd (it’s not handy, can’t give title) and the other is the Direct Disc Sound of the Glen Miller Orchestra.

Those have a real palpable feel to them. Maybe it’s a novelty, but worth experiencing.

Enjoy!