[ARSCLIST] How not to mike an orchestra/the death of high fidelity

[Marcos Sueiro Bal <mls2137@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Happy New Year

I found the two threads above related and thought I would combine them.

In recent years musicians and engineers have become very obsessed with 
"perfecting" sound through micro-editing, using digital tools and 
multi-miking, which allow "greater flexibility" when creating the final 
product. As said by others, this destroys the character of the recording 
and in the long run compromises the musicianship of the artists. I still 
would like to think that most people pick character if exposed to it, 
although there are still those who prefer Velveeta to P'tit Basque cheese.

For Christmas I got the new Simon Rattle/Berlin playing Haydn's 
symphonies 88-92 on EMI. I do not know if I like the performance: I 
could not get past how bizarrely flat (as in "lacking depth") the 
recording sounded, which seems to indicate multi-miking (and perhaps 
compression)(*). I agree with Peter Hirsch that there is not a "right" 
way to record an orchestra (thank heavens!), but I like a sense of 
place, a character, a uniqueness --what wine growers call terroir. This 
seems to be lost in much modern recording. The "presence" in "Living 
Presence" was about "You are there!", not about "They are here!" (they 
being the musicians), which is what makes those recordings wonderful.

As a market engine, over-compression and saturation may actually work 
wonderfully, at least in the short run: if I cannot stand a CD after one 
listen, I will go out next week and get me a new hit. This is the 
principle which makes MacDonald's work so well: one is hungry an hour 
after having left the place. You want more.

I am using food and wine parallels because I feel that music is behind 
the ball in terms of aesthetics (probably due to its reduced relevance 
in our world). Recent trends in food (eat locally; your baker's 
multi-grain is better than Wonder bread; the rise of micro-brewing) show 
that people are finding that the over-sugarized, over-salted, 
brightly-packaged items in our big supermarkets are ultimately less 
satisfying. Yet we are still being fed Froot Loops and Budweiser over 
our speakers.

I can only hope that the majority of listeners will some day rebel and 
reclaim what makes music exciting. Music will benefit, even if the 
market suffers. Then again, it may be precisely what the market needs.

Cheers,

marcos

(*) Which is too bad, as some of my favourite recordings come from 
(earlier times at) EMI. If anyone has any inside stories on how this was 
recorded, I would love to hear them.