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RE: I understand your logic, but there's a hitch. Or two.

Hi Clark

You are a fine writer I see, good enough to do that professionally.
Often I feel like the “bulldozer chasing a butterfly” when I write, unsure if what I mean will make it through the arrangement of words that came to mind.
As a professional, it appears you have a “posture” that you write to and that makes sense.

I am struck that you wouldn’t be able to audition a digital source and never use headphones however.

To be clear, I’m not who you write for, I don’t care about what the industry believes, if I ever buy hifi gear it is used, most of my life I have built or repaired / resurrected the electronics and built many of the speakers I have had. I work in audio and have most of my life but I am not the hifi market.
As an inventor I have had to follow a different path, one where you frequently compare things side by side. Doing this, one finds that “technical reality” is a changing landscape one must accommodate the latest information, the thought that “nothing has changed” since the early CD days seems sort of like a “flat earth” or fundamentalist position.

Given that you write for a living, I’m not sure if it would be beneficial for you to get a clearer grasp or not.
If you want an eye opening experience try the following and “make it real compared to what”

Get a decent but not high end digital recorder. I can personally recommend a Korg D1200 MKII, much of what I have been recording to develop the microphone I am working on was using my daughters Korg , a decent “MI” grade recorder.
Get a good instrumentation microphone, I use M-30’s and pre’s but others of similar performance will do (these are omni directional) and to keep things simple, only record in mono, one mic to start (as there is no ideal stereo technique).
http://www.earthworksaudio.com/25.html

DO NOT use conventional recording microphones “known to sound good”, it is critical to use one like this, an omni with a very wide flat bandwidth and no coloration (IE: an instrumentation microphone).

Now, get the hang of what proper max levels are (well below zero dB) just record things around your house, environmental sounds are sometimes better than music as they tend to be more dynamic not to be non-harmonic in structure and so, shows up both odd and even harmonic crud better. Play back at home in mono so not to bring “stereo mic technique” into it.
If you have a way to record any kind of live performance, so much the better.
What you will undoubtedly find (if you do this experiment) that you can make vastly more real sounding recordings than you ever find commercially.
Sure they will only be of things around the house or outside or what ever you manage to capture, but you will be impressed how real some of them are.

Given the fact that the recording is then burnt to a CD and the effect stays, pretty much says the limitation is not the format it self.

Your probably thinking yeah but what does he listen through pa speakers.
Occasionally hifi people get to hear our “pa speakers” (hifi for a crowd )
http://www.audioasylum.com/forums/hug/messages/13/134216.html
http://www.audioasylum.com/forums/hug/messages/13/134237.html


As a concession to practical monitoring, get a good pair of closed headphones, I find the Senheiser HD280’s to be faithful enough.

It’s too bad you can’t listen to CD files, I have an uncompressed recording of some fireworks from two years ago from my backyard (about a half mile away from fireworks). This has a peak level 70 odd dB above the lowest signals and a peak to average ratio of about 40 dB.
There is NO WAY one could have captured this spectrum or dynamic range with analogue tape and no way it could have been transferred to a record and rarely can a playback system using speakers reproduce it all.
Fireworks and other noises at.

http://www.danleysoundlabs.com/technical%20downloads.html

Best,
Tom Danley

Get a good instrumentation mic, try recording with a modern recorder and then draw a conclusion.



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  • RE: I understand your logic, but there's a hitch. Or two. - tomservo 06/7/0811:31:47 06/7/08 (0)

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