This goes without saying.
But often overlooked by people who spend a fortune on equipment.
Hehe I only listen to music/singers that I like. I have a complete albums of Dire Strait and Mark Knoppfler. No Patricia Barber etc etc 😛
Since I (re)married a year ago the music buying has gone mad, which is good as would rather be a music lover than the loony with more test records than real music. Relapses do occur tho...
To expand the boundaries of my original question, which was mainly concerning loudpeakers, I feel that this pursuit of stereo image effects the recordings as well.
I am a classical musician, and in studio, and concert hall recordings I have noticed a plethora of microphones used. Often every woodwind instrument has it's own mike. When I asked an engineer if this was for balance purposes, I was told "only slightly. They are spotting mikes, for letting listeners hear where the different instruments are"
This does beg the question of realism, or what people think is realism. The problem of spotting mikes is that they are close, which explains how on so many recordings the wind sound as near as the front row of the strings, or even nearer. It could be argued that the pursuit of an enhanced "realistic" stereo image, actually makes the recording less true, of what one would actually hear from row 6.
I am a classical musician, and in studio, and concert hall recordings I have noticed a plethora of microphones used. Often every woodwind instrument has it's own mike. When I asked an engineer if this was for balance purposes, I was told "only slightly. They are spotting mikes, for letting listeners hear where the different instruments are"
This does beg the question of realism, or what people think is realism. The problem of spotting mikes is that they are close, which explains how on so many recordings the wind sound as near as the front row of the strings, or even nearer. It could be argued that the pursuit of an enhanced "realistic" stereo image, actually makes the recording less true, of what one would actually hear from row 6.
I have a few recordings that I use as reference because I was sitting in front of the artist when she was actually singing the song. That way I could evaluate the recording quality of he CD. I have to say this is an invaluable resource for evaluating the playback capability of a system.
If you get a chance to hear Sara Watkins sing without amplification you will be surprised about how well recorded their album "Nickel Creek" is specifically "The Hand Song".
Although her voice has changed a bit over the years since I met her.
Exactly correct. This technique cannot recreate what is heard at a normal listening distance at a concert, whether it's classical, jazz, voice.
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I am currently enjoying the Mercury living presence 2 box set. Some very impressive recordings for the era, and done with just 3 microphones (mostly). Worth listening to just to see how good 1950s recording could be. Ok performance styles have changed and modern equipment can do a much better job if used properly, but I like it.
Many of the early stereo recordings of classical and jazz were done with simple microphone techniques, and sound the better for it.
My effort to clarify matters by example of the Renaissance painters and perceptual cues seems to have gotten lost.
The Mercury recordings were wonderful and are still wonderful. With purist mic techniques, you are capturing many of the perceptual cues and these cues are coherent because the recordings are, as adherents claim, natural... sort of.
With multi-mic (surely the Hamburger Helper of recording) the cues WILL NEVER all be coherent because the mic is sitting in the bell of the oboe (do oboes have bells?) not in the audience space - unless in 10 yrs we have DSP processors can that can forge waves that sound like Carnegie Hall when they reach your ears after bouncing around your music room.
But Mercury recordings are also cooked to produce good sound by moving the musicians around, abusing the conductor, and finagling the mic positions until the end-result on iTunes sounded like Row 6 on the aisle. Which is why live recordings (which you can hear many nights of the week on PBS) really are not the best sound and dynamics pick-ups (even if they are as delicious as fresh food grown locally).
On some recordings, you can hear little guitar sounds or players breathe. Sure, just like sitting within a few feet of the player. But what about when listening to a symphony?
Gedlee talks about "learning" and the brain needs to do lots of what might be called learning in acoustic spaces. However, there is no possibility of learning when the recording you are listening to has conflicting perceptual cues. They conflict. In practice, people work with what is the best hand they are dealt, using those cues that are most beneficial and "overlooking" the others.... or getting a headache. So we are back in the studio with the engineer fiddling with the pan-pot and one or two other tricks to give you illusory cues.
Ben
The Mercury recordings were wonderful and are still wonderful. With purist mic techniques, you are capturing many of the perceptual cues and these cues are coherent because the recordings are, as adherents claim, natural... sort of.
With multi-mic (surely the Hamburger Helper of recording) the cues WILL NEVER all be coherent because the mic is sitting in the bell of the oboe (do oboes have bells?) not in the audience space - unless in 10 yrs we have DSP processors can that can forge waves that sound like Carnegie Hall when they reach your ears after bouncing around your music room.
But Mercury recordings are also cooked to produce good sound by moving the musicians around, abusing the conductor, and finagling the mic positions until the end-result on iTunes sounded like Row 6 on the aisle. Which is why live recordings (which you can hear many nights of the week on PBS) really are not the best sound and dynamics pick-ups (even if they are as delicious as fresh food grown locally).
On some recordings, you can hear little guitar sounds or players breathe. Sure, just like sitting within a few feet of the player. But what about when listening to a symphony?
Gedlee talks about "learning" and the brain needs to do lots of what might be called learning in acoustic spaces. However, there is no possibility of learning when the recording you are listening to has conflicting perceptual cues. They conflict. In practice, people work with what is the best hand they are dealt, using those cues that are most beneficial and "overlooking" the others.... or getting a headache. So we are back in the studio with the engineer fiddling with the pan-pot and one or two other tricks to give you illusory cues.
Ben
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I am not sure Mr and Mrs Fine cared about iTunes when they originally recorded them, or when Wilma did the CD transfers. I used to listen to a lot of live performances on the BBC when younger, until they went optimod mad and decided to compress the feed to gunge. Things are much better now.
Interestingly I went to a PROM this year, and as soon as I got home, streamed it off the internet. I have to say I was impressed by the job that the BBC team did, given the programme (which included the saint saens organ symphony). Of course it didn't sound the same, but standing in a crowd below stage level in a hall with famed rubbish accoustics I wouldn't have expected it. BUT I recognised it as the performance I had heard.
I will reiterate that we need to learn to separate the art from the reproduction. We started talking about imaging in the reproduction but now we are talking about the art, the recording process. When these discussion jump from one side of a topic to the other they tend to get diluted down becoming confusing and meaningless.
Not to mention that this Forum is about loudspeakers not recording techniques.
Not to mention that this Forum is about loudspeakers not recording techniques.
Hmm I may need to examine one of my long held assumptions then. Given the number of different techniques used to record acoustic music I had always thought that different compromises in the speaker design would favour different recording approaches. Your assertion is that this is not the case. Need to think on this.
In my mind the 2 sides go hand in hand.
But staying with the speakers, I'm very curious what Dr Geddes thinks is necessary for a speaker system to reproduce the correct soundfield.
Low very early reflections are essential for imaging. This should be done via directivity and room design with a very smooth, near flat, direct field response. The impulse response of the speakers should be compact, i.e. no group delay. Many speakers will image well in a very dead space - there aren't a lot of early reflections to mess things up - but then the space sounds dead - no spaciousness. It takes a narrow directivity, that must be constant of course, pointed such that the first reflections are minimized and a fairly lively room. This will yield good imaging AND good spaciousness simultaneously.
And yes, I do believe that a good loudspeaker/room setup is independent of the recording technique. Some setups may mask poor recordings, but that's not really an incompatibility as much as it is just a bad reproduction.
And I don't think that recording and reproduction go "hand-in-hand". I only do one, and I take the other as a given. I find no problems with that approach. I appreciate the talents of the recording engineer - he is an artist! Me I am just a scientist, I leave the art to the other guys.
And yes, I do believe that a good loudspeaker/room setup is independent of the recording technique. Some setups may mask poor recordings, but that's not really an incompatibility as much as it is just a bad reproduction.
And I don't think that recording and reproduction go "hand-in-hand". I only do one, and I take the other as a given. I find no problems with that approach. I appreciate the talents of the recording engineer - he is an artist! Me I am just a scientist, I leave the art to the other guys.
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I've not had row 6 tickets, but from where I usually sit in the symphony I have a great view of the orchestra and sit fairly central. I don't find there to be a lot of spatial information, the sound 'fills' the hall.
These may be why I have retreated to mono listening, where the cues I hear are 'real' - they are from the room I'm listening in.
Right both comments. But the norm of recording is to provide a fun ping-pong experience, more like Row 6. It is also a norm to provide great soundscapes, like some DGG recordings (Michael Tilson-Thomas' astonishing recording of Winter Dreams). In real halls, can't have both but on recordings, the artistic engineer (as gedlee puts it), gives you both... on a good day.
Your second comment is actually quite profound and can best be understood using the Renaissance illustration. When you look at an oil painting, you are seeing shiny oil paint on a flat canvas while also "seeing" the Roman Forum in depth, sort of.
Listening in to a single speaker (and this might make good sense to gedlee), you are putting all your brain power into interpreting the many sound cues in your room and they all coherently indicate a point source in a single loudspeaker. Sounds great, like an orchestra playing through a hole.
Unlike stereo, there is no trickery. What you hear is what you get in the sense that you are getting a single source and all the cues agree. (I am not sure how to think about two speakers trying to create a point source - might or might not be physically possible even with the best dispersion control.)
Speakers can be designed so that their dispersion is a nice compromise and are coordinated to (some) recordings. But there is no physically necessarily correct dispersion because there is no way to re-create Carnegie Hall in a room at home. Only good compromises.
Ben
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Stereo imaging is a waste of time in large part. Many people wouldn't know it if it bit both earlobes -- they'd be just as satisfied with mono, as long as it came through both earbuds. A good deal of music just isn't suited to stereo listening. Pop music and such has no more impact stereo than it does in mono. Also, very few people have equipment that can reproduce the auditory cues that create stereo imaging. And even those that do can't get accurate imaging. The best they can get is a synthesized semi-circle of relative loudness from left and right. The synthesized depth cues create placement somewhere behind a point on that semi-circle. Accurate imaging of an orchestra for instance, simply can't be done. In real life you locate every source in space. You can focus on one and ignore the others, in the manner of "the cocktail party effect". It's a rare recording and reproduction system that can allow you to do the same, and still you can't accurate image the percussion section when they were playing up on risers. And then there are those for whom it's not important, and they listen to mono rather than have any stereo information altering the instruments' tones. However, there are a few of us, we happy few, for whom it matters a great deal. Stereo imaging is a technique, just as much as adjusting relative volumes of sources going into a mix. I play a stereo guitar -- two pickups each with its own output. I can play it with both amps set the same and have a fuller sound, or I can set them for different sounds and synthesize a duet. When I play a mono guitar, I play through an effects system that creates stereo effects. Flanging and phasing take on a very different character when done in stereo. And when I record live, I use "stereo" mikes -- the two channels are actually a highly directional center and a "surround" element for picking up ambience signals. I end up with direct and amibent signals for left and right, and can then mix them down in the manner of psychoacoustics and make the stereo image sound as though it is wider than the distance between the speakers. When I do my mix downs, I am playing my mixer no less than any other instrument. This is extremely important to me. There are those few out there who can hear this and take note. I do this for them as well as myself. So do people like Mike Oldfield and Jean-Michel Jarre. So what if 90 some percent of listeners don't get it or don't care? They still get the music. The rest of us get the Easter egg, and we can enjoy the fact that there are those out there making music by playing *all* of their equipment. It is a point of artistry, or at least the attempt at it, that is an extension of musicianship to all the related technology. If the majority of listeners can't hear it or don't care, it's their loss. We're still going to do it for the few who can and do.
How many of us really have our main listening position at the optimal spot for best stereo imaging?
Add to that, much of what we hear is reflected sound
In any any event, how does one describe "less decent" speakers as they pertain to stereo imaging and how they effect it?
Are we confusing what is now know as "sound stage" ( I hate that term) with stereo imaging?
Stereo imaging is just a recoding engineer's idea of what to do with two channels and ignores reflected sounds.
BTW there is no stereo imaging is any live performance.... just good, clear sounding music and that is all that really concerns me .
After all, isn't that what it is really all about ? 🙂
Add to that, much of what we hear is reflected sound
In any any event, how does one describe "less decent" speakers as they pertain to stereo imaging and how they effect it?
Are we confusing what is now know as "sound stage" ( I hate that term) with stereo imaging?
Stereo imaging is just a recoding engineer's idea of what to do with two channels and ignores reflected sounds.
BTW there is no stereo imaging is any live performance.... just good, clear sounding music and that is all that really concerns me .
After all, isn't that what it is really all about ? 🙂
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