Congratulations! How do you know it's sounding the way it really should?
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I’ve played the Mercury Living Presence sampler “You are There” on all incarnations of my setup for many years. With each improvement of my rig it’s sounded better. Until now, finally it’s sounding the way it really should. It’s a great confirmation that I’m doing things right after many years of experimenting, with advice from this forum.
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+1, @onhwy61 You beat me to it…IME, we really don’t…not with absolute certainty. There’s just too many variables at play. IMHO, you’ll never know exactly what the artist or recording engineer intended. But you can strive to build a system and environment that prioritizes transparency, emotion and engagement with music and that might be as close as any of us can reasonably get. |
Congratulations. Anything you did in particular that brought your rig to its current level of performance?
Great album, I'm listening to it now. Great liner notes about the speed wars and background. One of the great albums recorded in the '57 to early 60's from the golden age of recording... great rich sound. |
It's a nasty can of worms we open when we decide that our rigs need to sound like they are supposed to. I've had several recording engineers to my house over the years. They do not care! When I get goose bumps from the sound, I am happy. I'm getting close with my present system. Not quite there yet. I'll have to cue up the Mercury sampler. Congratulations from me as well rvpiano. |
@rvpiano. I understood what you meant after reading just your original post: it sounded the way YOU like it and that’s all that matters. We all perceive sound differently to a certain extent and even in our lifetime, there will be variations due to aging and mood. Happy for you. |
@rvpiano Yes there’s that point where the room “gets pressurised” and the music comes alive when the volume gets turned up enough ( but not too too much). Subs sure help. My system test https://open.qobuz.com/playlist/3511772 Rock on |
@rv, I hope and wish you well, always. It is wonderful when you can enjoy the music through the rig. What I find the engineers, producers and the artists do right, and this requires a very fine ear, is the ability to take each individual track (studio recordings specifically) and synchronize it all, resembling each performer playing live, together, in sync......of course this is why I listen, for the musicianship. The composition is the music, the musicianship is the expressiveness by them, of the composition. Most listeners concentrate on the "sound" of an instrument/voice, or the "space" they are in, but the only "given", is the "performance". It is all important, no doubt, but realistically imo, the recording is always the bottleneck of what we are listening to. I say this because I also use headphones some of the time (ever get a headphone rig?). Of course, the speaker / room / system set up, is crucially important. My rant is over. Enjoy! MrD. |
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Thank you. I used to have a bunch of classical CDs from BMG music! I had a few Living Presence. Prokofiev, Nutcracker suite. Compared well with the Living Stereo series. I had forgotten about them. I have no physical media anymore. I will look them up. I too think my system is real good! I've said that about 10 times! The streamer and DAC upgrade plus switching to Qobuz was a good improvement. Enjoy the music! |
. . . I remember once in the late '90s I had the house to myself for a few days and I did a rare sampling of a cannabis product and then I put on Lou Reed/Rock And Roll Animal and cranked it way up until I thought the speakers might explode as it played through the guitar intro track to Sweet Jane and then Sweet Jane, and before Heroin had completely played through, I thought, "I've finally got it." It was a great feeling. . . . |
Ah, but that’s the complete opposite of what Mercury did for the Living Presence series! When you have a full orchestra of say 100 players, it is impossible to individually place a microphone for each player. Mercury took the opposite approach and just used three microphones in a line, for left, centre and right. These were mixed down for stereo records and later for CDs by adding the centre signal to both left and right channels. Much later, their SACD releases contained all three original channels but as DSD rather than PCM. (When I play the SACDs, my preprocessor adds the centre channel to left and right because I chose not to use a centre speaker) Once Mercury had the microphones set up and the recording equipment (either tape or film) set for maximum volume, they did no further mixing or synchronisation. The conductor and orchestra did the rest, with a contribution from the venue! So the recording is an unadulterated version of a real performance from a listening point just back and slightly above the conductor. Regular concert goers quickly learn what a real unadulterated orchestra sounds like in a real acoustic. The recording engineers for Mercury, and these days for 2L, don’t interfere in any way with the artistry of the performance, once they have the equipment working properly! I very nearly attended a Mercury original performance in 1962, when to quote Mercury’s notes, "Antal Dorati ... electrified a capacity audience at London’s Royal Festival Hall with a stunning performance of Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle." which was sung in Hungarian. I still remember the soprano Olga Szonyi cutting through the entire orchestra towards the agonising end. Mercury shortly afterwards hired the Watford Town Hall for a recorded re-run, using 35-mm film as the sound medium. This performance has just been re-released (again) in March 2025 ...
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@Richardbrand +1 I find the best recordings are done this way. They get the venue / ambience correct. Like you are in attendance. I was reading an album cover recently... the notes went on and on about was a great recording this was, the great hall it was recorded in and how it captures the ambience and hall so well. I started listening... it was terrible... there was no ambiance. I went back to the notes and read on... there were diagrams how they erected partitions between individual and small groups and placed microphones. I don’t know what these idiots were smoking... this was exactly the opposite of what they were advertising. On the other hand one of my favorite albums is by Joe Jackson (not classical) Body and Soul. He went out looking for a venue that would be part of the recordings... found an all wood stage. I can’t remember the rest of the details...I think minimally miked. But from the first notes you hear the venue as an integral part of the performance it sounds like you are in the audience... with exceptional sonics. |
@richardbrand, as this thread is based on Mercury recordings, and classical for that matter, I likely should not have said anything at all, as I totally agree and concur with everything you said. "Multi Track" recordings are what I was referring to, as I listen to and have been involved with multi track recording (studio stuff). Sorry, I should have specified that.....my bad |
@rvpiano , I asked about headphones, as you created a thread about having an interest in a great headphone system. I have a few studio headphones, all closed back (Sony, Denon, Audio Technica), as this has been my preference so far, however, I do own a Headroom Max, which has brought me glorious music. Possibly old school by now, but I enjoy it. MrD. |
Sorry, two critiques. First, Janos Starker's cello just doesn't sound right to my ears—it's lean and dull—in Tchaikovsky's Variations on a Rococo Theme (#3) from this collection. If you go back to the original recording this excerpt comes from, the cello sounds much more natural. Second, the left and right channels seem overly separated, with literally nothing or a very thin center image—this is not good mixing. This Mahler No. 2 recording is one of the best I’ve come across for testing.
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The criticisms I’ve heard of the Mercury sound in general are that it is ’dry’, it lacks a lot of warmth from the venue! That probably stems from the relatively close positioning of the microphones in relation to the conductor? I have heard that a well-known British label is known to increase ambience by playing the original recording in a church, and adding reverberations back in. Getting back to your recording, Gilbert Kaplan was a successful businessman, and got himself taught to conduct just to play this one symphony of Mahler’s. He was pretty darned good at it too, toured the world as an amateur and gave over 100 performances. He then learned the adagio from #5, doubling his repertoire. I have CDs of his performance with the London Symphony Orchestra, which definitely does not use a small orchestra! I remember hearing a stunning performance in the Melbourne Concert Hall. (Melbourne and Sydney have intense rivalries, including Concert Halls! Whereas Sydney’s has a world famous exterior but a bare-bones interior, Melbourne’s has no real exterior, being sunk into a huge hole by the Yarra River, but a sumptuous inside). There was a standing ovation, and the guy next to me turned and said he "wished his stereo sounded like that". I had just been thinking "this sounds exactly like my system". Mahler 2 was the main work played after the $100-m refit of the Sydney Concert Hall, mainly done to fix the acoustics. Much of the refit is sculpted wood paneling to break up reflections! It worked ....
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No worries! I will point out that 2L in Norway do something similar to Mercury's approach for their stunning multi-track recordings, although they typically move the orchestra into a rough circle around their microphone tree. They often record in large churches, but that is to keep any wall reflections distant, not for the reverberation. I would be very interested in any light you can throw on how multi-microphone recordings are mixed, especially with digital techniques. For example, are PCM signals combined as raw PCM, or is there some intermediate higher resolution format? |
I’ve been playing several Mercury CDs lately. I find the three microphone approach works very well in capturing an orchestra. I used to think the Mercury sound was dry and brittle, but on my current setup it’s not antiseptic, but full-bodied and natural. I concede there is a lack of hall sound, but it’s as though you’re sitting in the middle of the orchestra, or in the first few rows of the auditorium. |
