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Classical Court From Perotin to Prokofiev (and beyond), performed by Caruso to Khatia, it's all here. |
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Classical Court From Perotin to Prokofiev (and beyond), performed by Caruso to Khatia, it's all here. |
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In Reply to: Not really. posted by Rick W on September 2, 2019 at 09:18:59:
As I understand your definition of "accuracy" it means accurately reproducing final masters. Since there is disparity in recordings this means timbre and everything else - even on recordings of acoustic music - may not end up sounding like what you hear live.
No - my definition of "accuracy" is more at a bird's eye level than that. I tried to give a number of examples showing what I meant, but what it comes down to is that if you hear music live, an accurate reproduction of that music will sound like your live experience (to the degree that it's possible within a home environment). I want what's input to the recording system to sound the same as what's output, prior to any adjustment with the sound/signal for "sounding good" purposes. You can always adjust the output signal at some point for personal preferences, but you have to start with an accurate rendition of what you're recording in the first place. Just because what ends up on recording MAY not end up matching what was recorded, we still have to strive to try to match it (the original sounds) as closely as possible. Therefore, the soundwaves which are fed into a recording system should match the soundwaves coming out on the playback end. Again, once you have this accuracy as a starting point, sure, you're free to do anything you want with it further on. But you must start with accuracy.
"Accurate" playback of a shitty recording will sound shitty. Some people, such as myself, prefer systems that are a tad on the forgiving side. Some "accurate" systems can make (for example) many Columbia classical recordings sound bright/shrill and damn near unlistenable. I've heard many systems like that. OTOH my system, while not turning Columbias into Deccas, allows Columbias to be very enjoyable and sound more like what I hear live. Is that "accurate"?
Again, you're talking about compensating for a recording which has been badly produced in the first place. But if you say that some recordings are bright or shrill, then I suspect that those recordings are in fact NOT accurate and NEED the compensation your system provides. But OTOH, what do you (or your "forgiving" system) do when a recording has been produced so as to be unrealistically dull, rather than unlistenably bright? I would guess that you've got yourself a problem? If a recording (i.e., the recording itself) is either unrealistically bright (or dull for that matter), I would contend that the producers and engineers have NOT captured the accuracy of the sound in the first place, unless they deliberately set out to record in a poor sounding environment - and if that's the case, a listener with sufficient experience should be able to tell. Furthermore, if one's audio system automatically compensates for a particular type of inaccurate recording, that leads to a kind of total chaos when we discuss sound quality, since someone else may have a system which automatically compensates for another kind of inaccurate recording. In that case, the various listeners discussing the recording wouldn't even have a common vocabulary, because there's no base level of understanding as to what the recording sounded like in the first place.
I find the whole "accurate" rap to be kinda ridiculous. How do you know what accuracy to a particular mic feed or master is? If you use accuracy to the sound of live acoustic instruments/vocals as the basis for judgment the sound emanating from your system may not be accurate to a poor master - and there are certainly plenty of them.
Of course, in the vast majority of cases, we DON'T know what the mic feed sounds like. But as I tried to show in my OP, you can, if you have enough experience, you know what the instruments and singers sound like under various acoustic conditions - and that's what you're judging. If one uses accuracy as the criterion for judgment of one's system, then a poor master will sound indeed like a poor master. But, once again, please don't think that I want to forbid tweaking to get a bad master to sound as good as it can on a particular system. After all, that's why we have things like balance controls and tone controls (if we want them!). ;-)
I haven't mentioned the majority of recordings, which are studio recordings with musicians/singers in booths, employ various studio effects including artificial reverb, are multi-mic recordings and mixed. Seems obvious to me that there is no way to judge how accurate the sound of a system is to a master of those recordings.
This is true - and if a recording has been produced in this way with the kind of effects you list, then all bets are off. It would be nearly impossible to judge accuracy on recordings which are more or less "synthesized" in the studio. When pushing my ideal of accuracy, I'm talking about relatively purist type recordings - and I'll tell you what: a system which reproduces such purist type recordings ACCURATELY is IMHO likely to reproduce effects-laden recordings in a more satisfying way too.
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Follow Ups
- I may be in agreement with Andy, but probably not with you - Chris from Lafayette 09/2/1914:58:20 09/2/19 (4)
- RE: I may be in agreement with Andy, but probably not with you - Tre' 18:40:50 09/5/19 (1)
- Oh man! That's an amusing article but I don't want to have to comment on it! [nt] ;-) - Chris from Lafayette 02:11:41 09/6/19 (0)
- DAMN! - Rick W 16:54:53 09/2/19 (1)
- Perhaps we aren't that far apart - we're just filing the same phenomena under different categories! [nt] ;-) - Chris from Lafayette 00:16:06 09/3/19 (0)
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