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

[Roger and Allison Kulp <thorenstd124@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Tom,

Sounds to me like you learned a lot from your parents.Sometimes I think it's too bad that you didn't stay in the family business,you might have been just as good at it !

You should see some of the posts at the Google classical recordings group a lot of us belong to.There are certain folks over there,who are always chastising us "audiophools",who prefer to listen to 50 year old Mercurys,or bluebacks,or 75 year old Victor scrolls,or whatever,saying that recording technology has improved so much  since the fifties.Frankly,I don't know what they are talking about.As I said over there,and was promptly whacked like the proverbial mole,stereo sounded great from the start.So did electrical recording.It took digital nearly twenty years to sound musical,and the best sounding digitally recorded music, today is done as broadcasts/webcasts of concerts,not for CDs.

There is a reason people who make indie vinyl restore,and rescue vintage studio equipment.and make new records with it.There was a reason Paul McCartney got Bob Ludwig to master the vinyl of "Memory Almost Full".Go back to the article, on rollingstone.com,and look for what Michael Fremer,of Stereophile wrote.As he said,newer is not always better.

                                       Roger

Tom Fine <tflists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: Hi Steve:

I agree very much with your points.

There seems to be an engineer/technologist driven lust for clinical or "perfect" sound nowadays, 
especially in carefully-made classical products. This may well be a "super-fidelity" version of what 
took place at that recording session, but I'd argue it usually isn't very exciting or gut-grabbing 
like the great older recordings.

If you're a fan of the "classics," take your favorites among them and given them a good listen with 
fresh ears -- consider it a New Year's gift to yourself. Then think about this -- exactly what seat 
in any concert hall would you sit in to get that same aural/emotional experience? I'd argue -- NONE! 
That's the whole point of a great recording, to give you a super-realistic experience so you can 
play it many times in many places on many playback setups and get the same feelings. Thus, the music 
has to be much more polished than most live performances can hope to be. And the very best 
conductors understood how to imprint their distinct personality on the recording without going off 
the cliff; when they pulled it off, they have the listener's emotions under their complete control. 
And, the recording should be cleaner and clearer than the sound would ever be in a roomful of 
shuffling, sniffling, sound-muffling people. And the perspective of the recording will usually be 
sharper and, for lack of a better term, bigger than is heard from any one seat in the venue -- in 
the best cases it is all the good of all the good seats with no drawbacks.

So what is this magic? My goodness, it's PRODUCTION. Yep, your favorite recordings were most 
definitely PRODUCED, not "documented" by white-coated lab technicians with calibration-grade 
equipment carefully placed in theoretical positions. The whole problem with too many modern 
classical recordings is that there seem to be one of two bad goals from the outset -- 1) to produce 
a complete artificial reality, using many mics and all sorts of mixing and production techniques but 
discarding the age-old values of ambient room-tone, conductor-controlled dynamics and giving 
acoustic instruments the air and space for their sounds to flower. Or, 2) to "document" a 
performance with clinical-cold "perfect" equipment and yet manage to capture not one ounce of the 
soul and vibrance of a human being playing a beautiful piece of music with passion. I think also 
there is either a lower level of skill and art or a false modesty among too many conductors and 
orchestras. They just don't let it rip anymore!

This is all one man's perspective, but I will say I've listened to MANY classical recordings, and 
listened very carefully. What I seek in the listening experience is to be uplifted and touched, for 
the recording medium to transmit to my soul what the musicians were "saying" that day the recorder 
rolled. You can't fake it with over-production and you can easily miss it with a clinical-technician 
approach. Somewhere in the middle live the best recordings, the ones that stand the test of time.

Happy New Year to all of you.

-- Tom Fine 


       
---------------------------------
Be a better friend, newshound, and know-it-all with Yahoo! Mobile.  Try it now.