When is enough, enough, or how to get off the bandwagon??

[DaveyF]

Not sure what Tim hears, but I'm hearing my Ernie Ball VP Jr Volume pedal creak a little bit on some of the more demanding passages. Kind of an interesting sound effect, LOL

 

[microstrip]

Recordings that capture the natural ambience of the instruments in the venue? I don't have any. That's the point. I'm not sure there really are any. Barry's experiments approach it, but if you visit his site and look at the pictures you'll see that even there, the mics are on stage with the performers, and to achieve something approaching balance in the mix, the performers are lined up in a very unnatural fashion. These recordings that capture the performance in the natural ambience of the venue, that audiophiles talk about their systems reproducing? They are near myth, as far as I can tell.

Tim

Tim,
Take any of the delightful Marlboro Music Festival 40th Anniversary recordings on the Columbia, now Sony label. If you do not hear the natural ambiance in these recordings, I will not insist.

 

[Phelonious Ponk]

Myles, you know the conversations I'm talking about and you know we're not talking about mood, but people's belief that live recordings are capturing the natural sound of the music, as heard in a particular venue, being reproduced by their systems in their homes.

Micro, maybe these recordings are the rare exception. Do you have any information about how they were recorded? Because the odds are very good that they were recorded as most live recordings are -- with the microphones recording the instruments on stage and a few more mics out in the audience to pick up those sounds, and maybe a few around the room to pic up room reverberations -- all to be mixed together with the much more direct, much drier sound of the stage mics.

A blend of a bit of hall ambience, a bit of audience noise, and a whole lot of orchestra, recorded closer than any seat in the house - an illusion, a re-creation of the event, created in the studio. not the sound of the symphony in its performance space, magically reproduced in your listening room by your high-end system.

Let's give credit where credit is due, gentlemen. That feeling that you're there, when listening to a really good live recording? It's not due to the wisdom of your shopping. It was created by the skill of recording engineers.

And micro, if you can't find any info on how the Marlboro series was recorded, there is a much easier way to determine if you're hearing a recording of the natural sound of the performance in that room, from the audience vs close mic'ing of the instruments mixed with ambience to create the illusion -- does it sound like a cheap bootleg grateful dead concert recording? Probably all natural, then.

Tim

 

[MylesBAstor]

Myles, you know the conversations I'm talking about and you know we're not talking about mood, but people's belief that live recordings are capturing the natural sound of the music, as heard in a particular venue, being reproduced by their systems in their homes.

Micro, maybe these recordings are the rare exception. Do you have any information about how they were recorded? Because the odds are very good that they were recorded as most live recordings are -- with the microphones recording the instruments on stage and a few more mics out in the audience to pick up those sounds, and maybe a few around the room to pic up room reverberations -- all to be mixed together with the much more direct, much drier sound of the stage mics.

A blend of a bit of hall ambience, a bit of audience noise, and a whole lot of orchestra, recorded closer than any seat in the house - an illusion, a re-creation of the event, created in the studio. not the sound of the symphony in its performance space, magically reproduced in your listening room by your high-end system.

Let's give credit where credit is due, gentlemen. That feeling that you're there, when listening to a really good live recording? It's not due to the wisdom of your shopping. It was created by the skill of recording engineers.

And micro, if you can't find any info on how the Marlboro series was recorded, there is a much easier way to determine if you're hearing a recording of the natural sound of the performance in that room, from the audience vs close mic'ing of the instruments mixed with ambience to create the illusion -- does it sound like a cheap bootleg grateful dead concert recording? Probably all natural, then.

Tim

Well maybe if you're listening to the current crop of digital crap that is foisted on the average listener. And you still haven't as MS requested, given any examples of what you are listening to (or haven't listened to).

Tell you what Tim. Tell me that the 60-70s Decca, EMI, RCA, EMI recordings don't capture the hall's sound. You know why Tim? Because the CSO and the BSO recordings sound very different eg. it's the hall. Of course the greateness is due to the producer and engineer; they were the ones there who are trying to give us what they heard. Tell me that you can't tell a recording was made in Kingsway Hall. Tell me that on the best systems you can't hear not only the side and back walls of the hall but the bounce off the ceiling. Isn't that the hall sound? Tell me that you can't tell the overreverbant halls of Ansermet and the OSR. If it was all witchcraft, these recordings would sound far more alike. Tell me that the best recordings aren't because these companies carried out a scorched earth policy to find the best sounding halls and get the sound right before the recording and not after.

Tell me that KOJ doesn't capture the hall sound on RR. And if you disagree, go to Stereophile' site and search out the interviews where Keith talks about how he was inspired by the Decca tree and how he improved on it to capture the sound of the hall.

Or tell me any of the live jazz recordings made in the 50-70s don't capture the sound of the club. They most absolutely do. How about the live Bill Evans? How about the live Miles Davis?

Or take the most recent reissue by ORG of Friday Night in San Francisco. Tell me there's no hall sound there!

And the list goes on.

But more than that Tim, you HAVEN'T heard the original tapes and as has been discussed before, don't really know what the recordings you are referring actually sound like. So until you can listen about the original tape (or hard drive), you really don't know whether what you're talking about is actually the recording or the mastering of the CD or LP (well not in this case). You might be dumbfounded to hear what's on those original tapes.

 

[Phelonious Ponk]

I'm not talking about any crap or gold, Myles, I'm talking about the way recordings are made. If someone "captured the ambience of the venue," I'll bet the farm that they did it exactly as I described -- mics on stage, up close, for instruments, mics in the hall, to pick up the reverb, all mixed back together (mostly the stage mics, by the way) in post to create the feeling of live in your listening space. It is not the natural ambience you hear when in that space, listening live, it is an approximation created for you through technology.

Do the best live recordists get something wonderful, something that captures their idea of what that space sounds like? Of course. It's still constructed. Assembled. And any magic your system brings to the party to bring that illusion to life in your home has to do with its ability to accurately reproduce the that which was constructed and assembled on the recording.

Anything else is a preference for what your system and your room add to the recording, and are unrelated to the ambience of the venue. If you like it, fine, if you want to pretend that it is somehow closer to the original event, enjoy that conceit.

Tim

 

[MylesBAstor]

I'm not talking about any crap or gold, Myles, I'm talking about the way recordings are made. If someone "captured the ambience of the venue," I'll bet the farm that they did it exactly as I described -- mics on stage, up close, for instruments, mics in the hall, to pick up the reverb, all mixed back together (mostly the stage mics, by the way) in post to create the feeling of live in your listening space. It is not the natural ambience you hear when in that space, listening live, it is an approximation created for you through technology.

Do the best live recordists get something wonderful, something that captures their idea of what that space sounds like? Of course. It's still constructed. Assembled. And any magic your system brings to the party to bring that illusion to life in your home has to do with its ability to accurately reproduce the that which was constructed and assembled on the recording.

Anything else is a preference for what your system and your room add to the recording, and are unrelated to the ambience of the venue. If you like it, fine, if you want to pretend that it is somehow closer to the original event, enjoy that conceit.

Tim

Have you listened to any of the recordings I've mentioned? Don't speculate like you always do. If you haven't heard these recordings, then you're not qualified to comment.

 

[DaveyF]

Just to jump in here, I think both Myles and Tim have valid points about the recreation of ambience and what we hear of ambience in our systems. Perhaps one has to realize that the ambience we hear over our systems is a semblance of the way one would hear the same effect in the hall. This semblance is accrued by among other things, the microphones ability to pick up what they heard in the particular location(s) that they were placed in the hall on the particular day that the recording was made. I would argue that from any other location in the same hall, the sound could and would be different leading to a possibly different centralization and impression of how the hall ambience sounded. OTOH, Tim's seeming insistence that ambience is NOT re-created in the recording chain and therefore is not to be found on the software (digital or analog) of the re-created event isn't accurate either, IMHO. Whether or not the sound of ambience is exactly the same as a seated listener's memory of said sound in the hall at the time of the recording is another matter. However, that's not to say that the sound of ambience from where the microphones were placed isn't accurate.

 

[mep]

If someone "captured the ambience of the venue," I'll bet the farm that they did it exactly as I described -- mics on stage, up close, for instruments, mics in the hall, to pick up the reverb, all mixed back together (mostly the stage mics, by the way) in post to create the feeling of live in your listening space. It is not the natural ambience you hear when in that space, listening live, it is an approximation created for you through technology.

So what? The fact is that through good engineering practices, great recordings do bring us as much of the ambience of the venue as the engineers can capture. You keep trying to turn a positive into a negative, but that seems to be your job here on WBF. The fact is that many live recordings have the ambience of the venue imbedded in them. You can argue that it’s really not there, or it’s there but it’s not real, but you are wrong.

 

[Phelonious Ponk]

Have you listened to any of the recordings I've mentioned? Don't speculate like you always do. If you haven't heard these recordings, then you're not qualified to comment.

I'm not talking about whether or not they sound good or convincing, Myles, I'm talking about whether or not they actually capture that ambience of the venue or they create a facsimile of it through manipulation of at least 3 elements -- 1) recordings of the music captured much closer to the musicans than any seat in the hall 2) recordings of crowd noise from the hall 3) recordings of the hall's reverb, captured by a thrid set of mics.

I don't need to hear your favorite live recordings (I have my own, thanks) to be qualified to comment; you need to understand how they were made.

If you can confirm that they were made with a single pair of mics from a seat in the house, then yes, I'd love to hear them. Those kinds of recordings are exceedingly rare and I'm not sure I ever heard one that sounded as good, or as "natural," as the best aforementiond unnatural re-constructions of elements. I'd love to not only hear it, but know how it was done.

Tim

 

[Phelonious Ponk]

So what? The fact is that through good engineering practices, great recordings do bring us as much of the ambience of the venue as the engineers can capture. You keep trying to turn a positive into a negative, but that seems to be your job here on WBF. The fact is that many live recordings have the ambience of the venue imbedded in them. You can argue that it’s really not there, or it’s there but it’s not real, but you are wrong.

It is a big so what, Mark. Keywords in bold above. The fact that it is such a big so what is what makes me scratch my head over Audiophiles who insist that their beloved systems are bringing the true ambience of the venue into their living rooms and will arge to death's door against the limitations of recording technology and refuse to accept that what they are getting is not only fully in the recording, is has more to do with the recording, and the recording technique than it does with the venue. The one thing you do get is some of the hall's reverb, mixed back in. A good thing. Probably better than electronic reverb added after the fact in some cases. Is that the ambience of the venue embedded in the recording? OK....

Tim

 

[mep]

The ironic thing is that for precisely the reasons you laid out, engineers have captured the sound of the venue. You keep arguing for some type of “perfect” ambience that doesn’t exist, but in the meantime, we do have some really good ambience captured in many recordings.

And also what you fail to grasp because you are listening through a very narrow window of headphones and small desktop speakers is the fact that as a system improves, the more detail you will hear from your recordings including the ambience of the venue in live recordings. So of course audiophiles with great systems will talk about things they can actually hear on their systems that seem to elude you and you want to argue therefore they don’t exist. It’s a circular logic that is highly flawed.

 

[microstrip]

(...)

Micro, maybe these recordings are the rare exception. Do you have any information about how they were recorded? Because the odds are very good that they were recorded as most live recordings are -- with the microphones recording the instruments on stage and a few more mics out in the audience
to pick up those sounds, and maybe a few around the room to pic up room reverberations -- all to be mixed together with the much more direct, much drier sound of the stage mics.

A blend of a bit of hall ambience, a bit of audience noise, and a whole lot of orchestra, recorded closer than any seat in the house - an illusion, a re-creation of the event, created in the studio. not the sound of the symphony in its performance space, magically reproduced in your listening room by your high-end system.

Let's give credit where credit is due, gentlemen. That feeling that you're there, when listening to a really good live recording? It's not due to the wisdom of your shopping. It was created by the skill of recording engineers.

And micro, if you can't find any info on how the Marlboro series was recorded, there is a much easier way to determine if you're hearing a recording of the natural sound of the performance in that room, from the audience vs close mic'ing of the instruments mixed with ambience to create the illusion -- does it sound like a cheap bootleg grateful dead concert recording? Probably all natural, then.

Tim

Tim,

You are in good way to find the truth - surely the ambiance was either preserved or created by the sound engineers - the professional sound industry as F. Toole calls it. I have written it several times in the past. I do not mind what was the origin of it - the end result is what matters. But it seems that preserving is a much better tool that adding it later - but most people always use enhancements at the producing stage.

Where we disagree is about being exception or rule. Perhaps I am a happy man, as most of my recordings, including those recorded in studios, have ambiance information. If you have a high resolution system, you will find ambiance and reality clues even in the way the instruments sound - it is not
only echo's and reverberation. IMHO ambiance and spaciousness are different things - although spaciousness can help ambiance.

Anyway, I am disappointed you bring the cheap bootleg grateful dead concert comparisons before listening to these fine Marlboro live recordings. Non audiophile, surely. But the people who recorded and produced most of them knew about their business. It was a great surprise to me how good they could sound in a high quality system.

 

[Phelonious Ponk]

Tim,

You are in good way to find the truth - surely the ambiance was either preserved or created by the sound engineers - the professional sound industry as F. Toole calls it. I have written it several times in the past. I do not mind what was the origin of it - the end result is what matters. But it seems that preserving is a much better tool that adding it later - but most people always use enhancements at the producing stage.

Preserving is better when possible, no doubt. I just think it is our best interests to understand that most of the time "preserving" means capturing some reverb from the venue and mixing that back into the much closer recording of the instruments. I just don't see how the hobby is served by fooling itself into believing that a bit of natural reverb mixed into close-mic'ed recordings of instruments is a real capture of venue ambience.

Where we disagree is about being exception or rule. Perhaps I am a happy man, as most of my recordings, including those recorded in studios, have ambiance information.

Of course. Regardless of how close the mic is the only recording with no ambient information is the one made in an anechoic chamber. And it is often very easy to hear, even from pretty modest systems.

Anyway, I am disappointed you bring the cheap bootleg grateful dead concert comparisons before listening to these fine Marlboro live recordings. Non audiophile, surely. But the people who recorded and produced most of them knew about their business. It was a great surprise to me how good they could sound in a high quality system.

And I'm disappointed I wasn't a lot more clear. I wasn't trying to say the Marlboro recordings sound like Grateful Dead bootlegs, I was trying to say if they weren't carefully recorded and mixed as described above, that's probably what they would sound like. I'm sure they're lovely. And I'd bet the odds are 99% that they weren't recorded with mics out in the middle of the venue capturing the "natural ambience" of the hall. That's what will get you the Grateful Dead bootleg sound.

The point of all of this is that the best live recordings, with that beautiful sense of ambience, are not the result of some systems being able to reproduce the real ambience of the event hidden in the recording, and others not being capable of revealing this unmeasurable goodness. These recordings are, like studio efforts, the result of a combination of recording techniques used to create a facsimile of the event by the engineers. And the techniques they use are not that different than studio recording; specifically, the sound of the instruments is recorded up close, not "in venue." If your system is better at reproducing these recordings than most, congratulations, but that's not the result of it "finding" the venue building's ambience and revealing it, it is simply that your system is better at accurately reproducing the recording.

It sounds like semantics, now. But it has sounded very different, very much like some secret Audiophile handshake, in many other discussions about "ambient information."

Tim

 

[Phelonious Ponk]

The ironic thing is that for precisely the reasons you laid out, engineers have captured the sound of the venue. You keep arguing for some type of “perfect” ambience that doesn’t exist, but in the meantime, we do have some really good ambience captured in many recordings.

And also what you fail to grasp because you are listening through a very narrow window of headphones and small desktop speakers is the fact that as a system improves, the more detail you will hear from your recordings including the ambience of the venue in live recordings. So of course audiophiles with great systems will talk about things they can actually hear on their systems that seem to elude you and you want to argue therefore they don’t exist. It’s a circular logic that is highly flawed.

And what you fail to grasp (acknowledge?), though I've told you several times, is that not long ago I listened to big Martin Logans, B&Ws, Viennas and Def Techs every day. I not only know exactly what I'm missing in my headphones and monitors, I know what you're missing in your Def Techs. I may have logged more time on your speakers in 2011 than you did. I sold a lot of them.

You also fail to grasp that a mixture of a some natural room reverb with close-mic'ed instruments is not "capturing the sound of the venue," and a bigger better system will not change that. It will only reveal more of what's on the recording.

I don't want to quote anyone's posts here and make this too personal, but I think we both know that the conversation around the reproduction of ambient information here has never acknowledged that our beloved live recordings are a little ambient information and crowd noise mixed into close-mic'ed instruments that, by themselves, are not much different from what you'd get in the studio. Folks want to believe they have brought the concert hall into their living room. Can't say that I blame them. It's a lovely dream.

Tim

 

[NorthStar]

---Sweet Dreams are made of this. :b

Many live recordings (not all) sound awful, and some (several) studio ones sound delightful ...

 

[rockitman]

I just purchased Wilson X-2's today...enough is enough save for another phono cart or two...lol

 

[MylesBAstor]

I just purchased Wilson X-2's today...enough is enough save for another phono cart or two...lol

You can have them shipped here and I'll break them in for you

 

[Mike Lavigne]

I just purchased Wilson X-2's today...enough is enough save for another phono cart or two...lol

Congrats Christian, very cool!

 

[rockitman]

Congrats Christian, very cool!

Thanks Mike. I am very excited to reach the next level in repro....

 

[NorthStar]

---Great Christian; tell us all about it (your deepest listening impressions & emotions). :b