[bigshot]

  recordings will never sound as good as live, just a fabulous picture of a beautiful sunset will never be as good as seeing that sunset live.

 
The goal of recording isn't to recreate the live experience. That isn't possible, because there are so many aspects of a live experience that can't be captured by microphones or cameras.
 
The goal of recording is to capture music and present it in a manner that is organized to provide the optimal recorded experience. That means that the engineer takes the limitations of recorded sound and works to play to the strengths of the process, creating a virtual experience that may actually be better than live in some respects.
 
Some people think that great sound is made by pointing a mike at a performer and just recording it direct with no manipulation. But that is like trying to shoot a photograph without adjusting shutter speed or aperture or framing the picture in the viewfinder. You just end up with a lousy reproduction. The reason that mixing boards have all those equalizers and channels and volume pots and processors is so the engineer can make the sound *better*. Those tools aren't the problem. Whether or not the tool is effective at improving the sound is entirely up to the judgement of the engineer, not the equipment used.

 

[ralphp@optonline]

   
The goal of recording isn't to recreate the live experience. That isn't possible, because there are so many aspects of a live experience that can't be captured by microphones or cameras.
 
The goal of recording is to capture music and present it in a manner that is organized to provide the optimal recorded experience. That means that the engineer takes the limitations of recorded sound and works to play to the strengths of the process, creating a virtual experience that may actually be better than live in some respects.
 
Some people think that great sound is made by pointing a mike at a performer and just recording it direct with no manipulation. But that is like trying to shoot a photograph without adjusting shutter speed or aperture or framing the picture in the viewfinder. You just end up with a lousy reproduction. The reason that mixing boards have all those equalizers and channels and volume pots and processors is so the engineer can make the sound *better*. Those tools aren't the problem. Whether or not the tool is effective at improving the sound is entirely up to the judgement of the engineer, not the equipment used.

Incredibly well stated. Thanks!

 

[Golden Ears]

   
Well, most people haven't had the opportunity to directly compare the playback of a 24 track master mix down and a CD. Fortunately, I have. I have acted as a producer at recording sessions and sound mixes and have worked as a post production supervisor and a sound editor as well. I worked in the analogue era and recorded a record that was recorded on 24 track tape and distributed on both LP and CD. It was the transition period when digital audio was gradually replacing analogue.
 
I was as skeptical as anyone about digital audio back then, and I was worried that we were delivering a four track ADAT to the record label instead of the traditional four track analogue tape. I asked my engineer to rack up the original 24 track and the ADAT digital bounce down side by side so I could compare them. I closed my eyes and he switched back and forth on the board for me. Absolutely no difference.
 
The record was released on CD in the US and on vinyl in Australia (I think) because they hadn't gone all digital there yet. I got check disks on both formats. The difference between them was like night and day. Again, being the skeptical sort, I took my CD check disk and the ADAT master back to the studio we recorded and mixed at and had them rack the two up side by side so I could compare. No difference. I asked the engineer what sort of CD player he was using to play it back. He told me it was a midrange consumer Yamaha.
 
There ya go!

According to that line of reasoning , there is no reason to buy a CD payer better than  midrange consumer Yamaha. Or perhaps that the Analog playback could be bested by a midrange Yamaha CD player. I do see your point from your perspective and accept it.
 
From my perspective..
A fair test...yes... given the gear used.
But definitive.... I might not look at it that way.
 
Also I don't know what music was on the album? Was it well mic'd?  Was it considered an excellent master SQ wise? Or was it average? Was it live instruments mic'd in a good acoustic or a recent rap album with tons of compression ?
 
For the vast majority of compressed pop stuff we hear... we could get away with a lot worse codecs than 24/48 and not loose much of anything sonically - but also we feel less from the music. I think the music that is destroyed less by low fidelity becomes more popular because it is not as sonically fatiguing as music that has been harmed in the reproduction process.... take for instance..Deadmau5  you could likely compress it a lot and not greatly destroy the musical impact of that pop. But take a well recorded  orchestra and compress it the same amount...it suffers.
 
Jut because some people do not notice something in a  recording does not mean it is not there.  For example sometimes on better systems you will hear instruments or singers or percussion that you never realized was in the original recording. I am in NO WAY saying you have a less than optimal system...I am just saying that certain things become unearthed through better playback systems.
 
I have played back things for people and people have sworn up and down that I was playing some "New Version" with added tracks, because they heard things that they previously never knew were there. 
 
Let's say ... in the not too far future. some guy figures out a way to take 32 bit 192kHz digital ...process it and then get really great 24/48 out of it that sounds closer to live than either the 24/48 or 32/192 derived from the original feed. But he needs the headroom and information in a 32/192 signal to do it. Wouldn't it be a shame for him to only have a few 32/192 files to convert to this live sounding, processed,  24/48?
 
I understand the argument for 24/48 NOW/Today , but I just wonder if we might miss something in the future if we needed up standardizing on a  format with lower resolution.

 

[RRod]

That guy already has 32/192 at his fingertips, and we're all fine with him using it for the headroom and archiving it for future remastering. But why do the millions of people listening to the music also have to deal with that same file, when a properly downsampled and dithered 16/48 version will be inaudibly different to them?

 

[bigshot]

  According to that line of reasoning , there is no reason to buy a CD payer better than  midrange consumer Yamaha. Or perhaps that the Analog playback could be bested by a midrange Yamaha CD player.

 
That is certainly correct... for pop music, for classical music, for jazz... for any kind of music. The reason for that is that the midrange Yamaha is designed to produce sound that is more accurate than any human ears can hear.
 
The reason studios record 24/96 is so that they have latitude beyond the range of human hearing to make broad corrections to the sound. But once the mix is locked down there is no reason to lay down a file with sound quality beyond 16/44.1. 16/44.1 is audibly transparent to human ears.
 
When it comes to getting the most out of a home playback system, we are extremely fortunate nowadays. The back end of the chain has been perfected and mass produced at a very reasonable price. Midrange CD players and amps today have specs that rival or exceed the equipment I would work with in professional sound studios back in the waning days of analogue. That should be a liberating feeling for audiophiles! Imagine having a $120 one pound blu-ray player in your home that sounds as good as the fabulously expensive 24 track two inch decks they used to record the music, that were as big as a washing machine.
 
So if the electronic chain is perfect and inexpensive, why aren't all people's systems perfect sounding?
 
Because of the wild card that still remains... Transducers and physical sound. Transducers (speakers and headphones) have not gotten significantly better like electronics have. And even if they were perfect, the acoustics of the average living room would make them sound awful anyway. The areas that audiophiles should be focusing on are speakers, room acoustics and audio processing to correct for both speakers and acoustics.
 
I have a funny story about a friend of mine who owned an audiophile equipment storefront business. I went to visit him and he invited me to audition his system. He had a beautiful midcentury modern living room, tastefully decorated like something out of Architectural Digest. But the speakers were pushed out of the way against the wall, and the couch wasn't even situated in the proper listening position. The sound was mediocre and muddled, so I got up and walked to different points in the room. It was different wherever I stood. He asked me what I thought, and I told him honestly. He dejectedly agreed with me. Six months later he called me up all excited... "STEVE! STEVE! You have to come over and hear my system now! I've moved all the furniture out of the living room and put up acoustic panels!" I asked him what happened to the furniture. "My wife left me and took all of it with her. The stereo sounds great now!"
 
If someone is serious about great sound, they need REALLY GOOD speakers (that ain't cheap), they need a good sized room that is treated acoustically and set up to have as good acoustics as practically possible, they need multichannel sound to create a lifelike dimensional sound field, and they need signal processing- specifically equalization and DSPs- to correct for the remaining acoustic deficiencies in the room. But instead, audiophiles worry about wires and bitrates and sampling rates and high end DACs that don't make a lick of difference. All of these things may have mattered back in the analogue era, but today? No.
 
Understanding how home audio works is the best way to optimize if for peak performance. You know what matters and what doesn't.

 

[mikeaj]

Well said, bigshot. Some people know of the above but don't believe it, but a lot of people don't even realize what's going on. Some speaker / headphone measurements and at different positions really should be a wake-up call.
 
 

  Extra bits are certainly useful if the end-user wants to do his own processing, but that's pretty specialized a justification for throwing out extra 1s and 0s to the masses. [snip]

 
Now you're making me wonder how many times in the history of ever have people clamored for higher bit depths (and/or sampling rates) for more headroom to apply their EQs, crossfeed, or whatever else. I'm pretty sure the format camp tends to heavily be purists who don't believe in some thing, or at least there's some very statistically significant correlation.

 

[bigshot]

The thing is, acoustics and room treatment aren't absolutes like specs are. You have to balance acoustics with livability. I see photos of home theater setups that look completely sterile and ugly, and I wonder how anyone would want something that looks like a mall shoebox theater in their home. Then I read the description and find out the theater has been banished to a damp basement or drafty garage. Concrete adds a whole other level of problems to getting decent sound.
 
The photos of listening rooms and home theaters that I find the most interesting are ones that look like normal living rooms. I get lots of great ideas for furniture placement and prioritized room treatment from those, as opposed to brute force modified basements. I am really happy with my room because it looks like a really fun living room, but at the push of a button the screen comes down the lights dim and the sound kicks in and it is a first class screening room. It took a lot of balancing and compromising and experimenting to get there.
 
The room is the vast unexplored territory in high end audio. People spend all their time focused on black boxes in a rack and totally ignore the aspect that makes or breaks the sound of the entire system.

 

[RRod]

  Well said, bigshot. Some people know of the above but don't believe it, but a lot of people don't even realize what's going on. Some speaker / headphone measurements and at different positions really should be a wake-up call.
 
 
 
Now you're making me wonder how many times in the history of ever have people clamored for higher bit depths (and/or sampling rates) for more headroom to apply their EQs, crossfeed, or whatever else. I'm pretty sure the format camp tends to heavily be purists who don't believe in some thing, or at least there's some very statistically significant correlation.

 
I saw it mentioned as a rationale on here once before. I would never "clamor" for it, as 16bits already fills my pot and I don't think throwing my music/movies through an EQ or HRTF or two will degrade much. Still, it's a better rationale than "I want my square waves purtier."

 

[bigshot]

Most end user EQ doesn't even get close to the broad corrections a mixer makes. As long as you EQ subtractively and don't get into clipping, there is no reason why you would need higher rates.

 

[Golden Ears]

I also want to make sure that the room with the speakers is "livable" or you make an audio graveyard that seldom gets used.
 
I do hear very large differences with DACs. I have  tested the Wadia 171, aRcam RDAC, Lynx Studio Hilo DAC, Apogee Mini DAC, Apogee  Duet, Apogee Duet 2, Meridian Explorer, Wadia 860, Chord Qute, E.A.R. , ..and well thought I would wish them to all be the same and "perfect" they all sound very different to me.The Hilo for example has incredible High frequency sound staging, but doesn't do vocals as well as some others. The Explorer has good tonality but does't do depth very well,  and so on.
 
For those who can enjoy music to the fullest and can use lamp wire, a $120 Blu-ray, and Sony speakers form Best buy... in some ways they are far luckier than I am.
 
I found that as my system got better I was able to enjoy a wider range of music and more songs on each album became enjoyable. even songs which seemed to be useless before had meaning- mostly because the fidelity allowed me to understand what was going on. Instead of being nicknamed "Golden Ears" maybe they should have called me "deaf guy" because I do need a certain amount of fidelity to really enjoy music. Women with their superior hearings can party to a clock radio (Seen it happen at Wellesley college way too many times) you would never see guys playing air guitar to a clock radio.
 
It's not audio snobbery- in a way it is a financial hardship. And just like a handicapped person might derive great joy from having a well fitted high performance prosthetic arm on so do my ears and brain enjoy music more with a great audio system.
 
I have spent way to much time with DACs to think they sound the same. In the 1990's I had pretty much given up on trying to listen to digital without being distracted so I started a digital system for my car. And hunting for a CD player I ended up buying a Wadia 860...which I could not bear to chop up to fit into my car....and it sounded good enough for the home.
 
not every $$$$ Cd player sounds great. I heard some DCS systems that I did to like at all. This is personal preference since some people seem to love them. I liked a $2500 DAC I used at a show a few weeks ago that I would prefer to listen to a highly stylized  a $20,000 DAC we had at a show a few years ago. So to me they really don't sound the same.
 
This site , I would assume, is filled with those looking for better sound. not just a better deal on headphones group buys. And I can say with certainty you could play a song on my Wadia and ten hot swap in other CD players and I could tell you blind every time which one was my Wadia 860x.  I can't say I could identify every player dow to the model number  100% of the time (it's not a skill I care to try to learn) but I could tell you which was was better or worse in terms of being closer to live sound  fairly quickly with source material I know well.
 
Its true that speakers an the room add much more distortion... but distortion is something we can here through other things. For instance the ear typically hears the louder of two sounds,  but distortion is so small...how could it possibly hear small amounts of distortion, particularly when the room distortion is so much higher? Well we can. We just can. We don't need a perfect listening room to hear it.
 
But then if you put  it in a  subway station at rush hour.....we can' tell.. there are limits.
 
I for instance, have pretty limited appreciation for classical art. I couldn't identify the valuable excellent paintings from average ones.  It doesn't make me less of a person, it just means that those things don't concern me enough to feel or learn the difference. For some people seeing art in a  book is just as good as seeing it in person. for me... there is no difference. I'd say "all those pictures look pretty much the same , I don't see the reason for using a more expensive canvass or paints or brushes."
 
and there are likely a lot of people like me. But I would to say that canvasses or brushes or paints did not make a difference in artwork. or that all paints have evolved and canvases and even brushes that there could be no further improvement and that the lighting in a  museum makes more of a difference in appreciating the artwork than the artist.. Even though I can't tell the difference in art  , I will not doubt those who can and do for a living. There are many people who sell art successfully without an appreciation for it. 
 
So I say , if it is worth it to record at very high rez and then make available the best sounding format..that is ha should be done. but unlike analog where you can get an incrementally better playback system- digital is locked.... so you should be careful not to lock in the resolution for playback at too low a rate....unless you want to buy the entire catalog again like is being done now with HD tracks.

 

[SpaceQuest]

 
The goal of recording isn't to recreate the live experience. That isn't possible, because there are so many aspects of a live experience that can't be captured by microphones or cameras.
 
The goal of recording is to capture music and present it in a manner that is organized to provide the optimal recorded experience. That means that the engineer takes the limitations of recorded sound and works to play to the strengths of the process, creating a virtual experience that may actually be better than live in some respects.
 
Some people think that great sound is made by pointing a mike at a performer and just recording it direct with no manipulation. But that is like trying to shoot a photograph without adjusting shutter speed or aperture or framing the picture in the viewfinder. You just end up with a lousy reproduction. The reason that mixing boards have all those equalizers and channels and volume pots and processors is so the engineer can make the sound *better*. Those tools aren't the problem. Whether or not the tool is effective at improving the sound is entirely up to the judgement of the engineer, not the equipment used.

 



I think the goal of recording Live concerts IS to capture the live athmo, TOO !
Could be done by a Multichannel Recording, ( Recording Engeneers in the past
didn't have that and have to use stereo setups ) Read you have a home theatre,
why did all big companys put DSP power in their amps to simulate those live rooms ?
Could it be, that they want to give you a experience back that bad recordings missed ?
For good recordings, i prefer to switch those DSPs off.

Some great Recordings are recorded by simply pointing a mic at a performer,
DIRECT with NO manipulation. I really prefer this method, but it is not always the best.

Yes, i can drive to a recording session and plug my Browner Mics plus a Vovox Cable
into my MetricHalo and NO more Mastering is needed, if is is a DeathMetal session in a old
fabric Hall. In a Studio, im going to select the mics more carefully to get rid of room modes and use the Mic specs for doing EQ. So, if i do the job with a well selection of mics i have NOT to EQ something, too. There are sadly only a few recording engeneers, and these are well trained who use only a pure setup. Mastering Studios love their work. Using a EQ at a recording is always a compromise; well setuped levels, well choosen equipment is best.

The better the equipment you are using, the better and often faster you can work with
less stress to the sound.
Think of a magnifier glass to see details sharp, with muddy equipment you only
see mud. This is why the recording and playback chain is so important. The bad thing
about a very good chain is the price...

 

[castleofargh]

 

  Well said, bigshot. Some people know of the above but don't believe it, but a lot of people don't even realize what's going on. Some speaker / headphone measurements and at different positions really should be a wake-up call.
 
 
 
Now you're making me wonder how many times in the history of ever have people clamored for higher bit depths (and/or sampling rates) for more headroom to apply their EQs, crossfeed, or whatever else. I'm pretty sure the format camp tends to heavily be purists who don't believe in some thing, or at least there's some very statistically significant correlation.

 
I saw it mentioned as a rationale on here once before. I would never "clamor" for it, as 16bits already fills my pot and I don't think throwing my music/movies through an EQ or HRTF or two will degrade much. Still, it's a better rationale than "I want my square waves purtier."

square waves are mighty important, else you can't shape the song to look like you're playing super mario on an oscilloscope.

 

[bigshot]

  I do hear very large differences with DACs. I have  tested the Wadia 171, aRcam RDAC, Lynx Studio Hilo DAC, Apogee Mini DAC, Apogee  Duet, Apogee Duet 2, Meridian Explorer, Wadia 860, Chord Qute, E.A.R. , ..and well thought I would wish them to all be the same and "perfect" they all sound very different to me.The Hilo for example has incredible High frequency sound staging, but doesn't do vocals as well as some others. The Explorer has good tonality but does't do depth very well,  and so on.
 
For those who can enjoy music to the fullest and can use lamp wire, a $120 Blu-ray, and Sony speakers form Best buy... in some ways they are far luckier than I am.

 
The thing about high end equipment is that it is MUCH more likely to be deliberately hobbled to create a "house sound" than midrange equipment is. The market for midrange equipment is very competitive, and the manufacturers are all vying to make the most accurate and perfect design possible. They manufacture in mass quantities, and they don't want to be stuck with a bunch of unsalable inventory if tastes fluctuate..
 
High end audio is an entirely different market. They vie to make *unique* sound. They actually WANT to sound different. They manufacture in small batches at very high markups, so they can cater to specific requests for imbalances. A lot of audiophiles refuse to use equalizers and try to create combinations of colored equipment that cancel out the imbalances in their listening room. It is a very costly, imprecise and ineffective way of addressing the problem, but that is what they choose to do. So boutique manufacturers create different response curves, so people can mix and match to find the combo that works for them.
 
My approach is different. I want to start from an accurate baseline and do my corrections as the last step in the chain using EQ. That way, any transparent player that I plug in sounds exactly the same, because they are all totally neutral and they are all going through the same EQ correction. I can plug in a $120 Sony blu-ray player, a $40 Coby CD player or an iPod and they all sound *perfect*. If your player is colored and your amp is colored too, then the only possible combination that works is the one you've settled on. God forbid your player should give up the ghost on you! You're back to swapping a half dozen different brands and models in to find the one that works with your peculiar sound signature. For me, it's easy. I had a $120 Sony blu-ray player and I bought an Oppo BDP103D to replace it. All of my DSPs and EQ curves worked with the Oppo right out of the box.
 
Transparency and accuracy is a very good thing! It can save you a lot of money and effort.
 
Recording studios use studio monitors that are carefully calibrated to have a flat response. The engineer mixes and balances to that standard. Every good studio uses the same sort of set up, so you can start a mix in New York and finish in LA without hearing completely different things on each coast. The closer you can get your home system to matching the calibration and presentation used in recording studios, the more music will sound *right* to you. My primary goal in my system was to try to duplicate the sound I hear in the studio as closely as possible. I use many of the same kinds of speakers, and they are calibrated to the same sort of response. As a result, I can put on SACDs or BD-A disks of classical multichannel mixes recoded in DSD and they will sound the best they possibly can. And I can put on CDs of Caruso records recorded acoustically before WWI that have been mastered by Mark Obert Thorne and they will sound the best they possibly can.
 
I always hear people saying that a particular component or system is better at playing audiophile recordings than rock... or better at classical than jazz. That just tells me that there is an imbalance in the system that different kinds of recordings or music reveals. If they were truly balanced, *everything* would sound great.

 

[bigshot]

  I think the goal of recording Live concerts IS to capture the live athmo, TOO !
Could be done by a Multichannel Recording, ( Recording Engeneers in the past
didn't have that and have to use stereo setups ) Read you have a home theatre,
why did all big companys put DSP power in their amps to simulate those live rooms ?
Could it be, that they want to give you a experience back that bad recordings missed ?
For good recordings, i prefer to switch those DSPs off.

 
Generally, recorded live music that seems live has been recorded with numerous mikes and mixed together to sound live. Classical music is an exception to that sometimes, because classical music is balanced by the conductor, so the engineer doesn't have to do as much. But even then, the sound field of a multichannel mix isn't recorded with 5 mikes in the same positions as your speakers. That sound field is manufactured in the mix.
 
I always work with Neumann and Shure mikes (plus whatever the mixer is used to working with) and I've found as good as a U-87 is, the placement of the mike and the processing (EQ, compression, etc) are MUCH more important than the quality of the mike itself. Also, if you ask the engineer about his mike pres, he will tell you all about the sophisticated and clean noise gates and processing they do on the fly. A lot of things are happening under the surface. It isn't just a flat recording with a straight line from mike to record.
 
DSPs are the future of audio in the home. The difference that the proper DSP makes in my system is like night and day. I have a Yamaha AV receiver and Yamaha is on the forefront of DSP design. Someday, you will get equipment with the right DSP and you will try it, and never go back to bypass again.

 

[SpaceQuest]

 
Generally, recorded live music that seems live has been recorded with numerous mikes and mixed together to sound live. Classical music is an exception to that sometimes, because classical music is balanced by the conductor, so the engineer doesn't have to do as much. But even then, the sound field of a multichannel mix isn't recorded with 5 mikes in the same positions as your speakers. That sound field is manufactured in the mix.
 
DSPs are the future of audio in the home. The difference that the proper DSP makes in my system is like night and day. I have a Yamaha AV receiver and Yamaha is on the forefront of DSP design. Someday, you will get equipment with the right DSP and you will try it, and never go back to bypass again.

 


Oh, i own a "Big Block Yamaha" (Z11), but the DSP processing is only real fun for some big Blockbusters. Using these
Soundfields for Music i tent to let them off or use only a quad field for reproduction. I like pure sound !

At my Studio i use 2 Lipinski L-707 with 2 Pass X-250 and no DSP. For Multichannel Production i use a
TC Electronic System 6000 + the icon remote as DSP processor and for Surround Processing a z-K6 K-Surround
Processor. So these DSPs are more enjoyable for me than the Yamaha stuff.