resolution and imaging

There have been some odd comments in this thread today - one can't hear instrumental timbre from the back of the hall??? No localization??? You should be able to hear where an instrument is located on the stage from any seat in the hall. Many composers rely very much on the audience's ability to localize sound, on and off the stage, most obviously Henry Brant and other composers of "spatial" music. This is what many audiophiles mean by "imaging", the ability to pinpoint the location of an instrument. And granting we are trained to blend our sounds together as much as possible, you should be able to distinguish different instrumental timbres from each other!!

And yes, there is an equivalent of what audiophiles call soundstaging in any hall - the sound of a great concert hall is very specifically designed by acousticians (with greatly varying levels of success, of course), and the recreation of this in a recording is an important part of "soundstaging." The best recordings do give you a sense of what the specific hall they were recorded in sounds like, though of course it can never be the same as hearing it live. Carnegie Hall presents a very different "soundstage" to Avery Fisher, for example (and a far better one, too), and this has a HUGE effect on what the music sounds like. If an orchestra goes on tour and plays in several different halls over the course of a few weeks, sometimes very big adjustments must be made to account for the different sound, or "soundstage" if you will, of each hall. Another example of how the "soundstage" can change in the same hall is if the orchestra changes their set-up, as they often do. Placing sections on different levels of risers or keeping everyone on the floor makes a very big difference to the sound out in the hall. Or moving a shell backwards or forwards so that there is more or less room on the stage (thus making the distance between players change). Or having movable side panels. All of these things will greatly affect the "soundstage" that is presented to the audience in the hall, and many modern halls are designed with many such features, so that the hall can sound different from week to week.

And for a trained musician, it is indeed possible to pick out an individual member of a violin section, even from the last row, though certainly most concertgoers would not be able to do this. It is easier to pick out individual players of the brass or woodwind sections, especially if you attend concerts by the same orchestra on a regular basis. And speaking of seating location, I hope, Mr. Tennis, that your favored last row is not under an overhang of any kind. If it is, this might indeed interfere with your ability to perceive the music as the performers are intending, for various acoustical reasons, and I would suggest that you change your seat if this is the case.

I did not mean to suggest that soundstaging and imaging are more important than accurate realization of instrumental timbre, of course, just that as Sns originally posted, these things do matter in the attempt to reproduce live music as much as can be done via recording. Goodnight, and enjoy the music!

Nice thread - proper imaging and soundstaging is an extremely high priority for me, as I am a professional orchestral musician. I believe a recording engineer should try to recreate the sound of the orchestra in the hall as well as possible, but most of them do not actually even attempt to do this anymore in this digital age. And I should also point out that the "imaging" of live music may sound very different depending on where you are sitting in the hall. Sitting as close as row D would not be the best perspective in most halls. To grossly generalize, sound travels up and back through the hall, so in a great hall, very often the best seats are towards the back and higher up in the hall, though maybe not the nosebleeds. In many of the great sounding orchestral recordings made before the digital era, this is where the mikes were placed. Even Mercury, which usually placed them above the orchestra instead of out in the hall, placed them at least a good 15 feet higher than the orchestra, and often higher yet. You almost never see recording engineers placing mikes anywhere near the back of the hall anymore, or that high either. And when they place different mikes on every section, or even on every individual instrument, on separate tracks, and then mix all of it together later, almost always this results in a complete loss of the sense of the original space, and there is nothing any playback system can do to remedy this - Humpty-Dumpty is broken, and you can't put him back together.

All of that said, though, I also whole-heartedly agree with those who said that the performance is the main thing - a recording can have incredible sonics, but if I strongly dislike the performance, I'm not going to pull it out very often. One should be able to enjoy a great performance, even if it wasn't recorded very well, or is played back on a mediocre system. OK, I'm done rambling for tonight. Goodnight, and enjoy the music!

Newbee, I just re-read what I posted, and that does sound crazy (I really should stop making these posts so late at night). If the whole orchestra is playing, and all of the violins are playing in unison, then no, it should be nearly impossible to distinguish an individual member of the violin section, unless, as you say, there is someone very out of tune or playing a wrong note, or an open E string when they shouldn't be. But if it is a very quiet passage, and say someone is vibrating differently than the rest of the section, or is playing too loudly compared to the rest, this can be audible. This is the type of thing I was thinking of when I wrote that.

Timbre does also refer to the tone of an individual instrument, it is not just a general term, though you would usually use the word "tone" when speaking of it in that way. From the back of the hall, an experienced listener should be able to pick out the timbre of the violins as opposed to the violas, even if they are playing in unison and at the same volume, which certainly does happen often. Picking out the tone of an individual violin within the section, however, would be extremely difficult, as you say, and identifying the make of a specific violin would be quite a feat indeed. If one was a violinist, perhaps this could be done, if the violin section was playing by itself. Being a horn player, I could come reasonably close to identifying the make of instrument if I heard it live. With wind instruments, this is quite a bit easier, as our tones are quite a bit more individual than those of a string instrument. I could certainly identify any of my wind-playing colleagues tones in my orchestra instantly upon hearing them, whereas it would be much more difficult for me to do so with my string-playing colleagues, who I almost never hear playing by themselves, except for the principals.

However, I hope it goes without saying that it would be silly for a concertgoer to even attempt to try to identify individual violinst's tones. Why I went there, I have no idea, re-reading that. I plead guilty, with a side of sleep-deprivation. Even to concentrate on a single section would be detrimental to your overall experience of the music. Only music students need to do this. The main thing one should try to do, besides enjoying the whole texture of the music, is to try to isolate the main melody or thematic components from the accompanying ideas, and follow these things throughout the orchestra. The composer assumes his listeners are trying to do this, and of course helps by carefully balancing the sonorities he creates. There is a great book on the subject actually, written by the famous American composer Aaron Copland, called "What To Listen For In Music." I highly recommend it to all who are interested, which I hope anyone perusing this site would be. He asks two questions - Are you hearing everything that is going on, and are you really being sensitive to it. Whatever sort of music you like to listen to, this book will really deepen your understanding and enjoyment of it. Goodnight, and enjoy the music!

I think that Sns and Mapman are both correct. Sound reproduction should attempt to mirror the effects of live music as closely as possible, however it will never achieve this goal because of all the variables involved, not the least of which is a bad recording job in the first place. I know I have said this before, but I think too many audiophiles are too quick to blame their systems instead of the recording. The bottom line is you need to have a system that you like the sound of. And many of us cannot afford to buy the equipment we might really like. It's all a compromise of some sort. Shouldn't stop you from enjoying the music.

Newbee is right that often live music must be played in very inappropriate rooms, which makes it hard for the performers to adjust. Just last night, for instance, my orchestra performed in a church gymnasium, ooh aah. And at both of the schools I went to, the orchestra had to perform in a hall too small for it, though both were great for chamber music and recitals.

By the way, Sns, does anyone ever play any concerts in Hill Auditorium there in Ann Arbor anymore, or has it fallen into disuse/disrepair? I had the pleasure of playing in that hall back in the mid-eighties. It would be a shame if that great old hall died.