OK, back from a nice trip with the grandchildren.
Firstly the microphone feed sounds like the sound at the microphone position. People listen to classical music much further away from the orchestra than even the simple old microphone techniques using a crosser pair ORTF pair Decca tree and so forth. Nowadays multiple microphones are recorded and mixed down to stereo later but tend to be mounted far closer to the instruments than any concertgoer's ears ever would be.
Recording engineers manipulate the resulting channels and mix to stereo.
I prefer the older methods using only 2 microphones, personally, which is worse for noise but better for everything else IMHO.
Back in the day a pair of sensitive microphones above and behind the conductor's head produced a microphone output far closer to that a concert goer would hear but still a front of stalls balance.
When I first started recording seriously I was surprised that the standard alignment for a tape recorder was done at -20 dB and decided I would use 0dB because the signal is not often at -20dB and often peaking at +7 dB. I learned a lot then. There was no way the recorder could achieve a level frequency response at 0dB. In fact analogue recorders I have used all roll off the high frequencies at levels above -20 dB.
So does sitting further from the orchestra than the recording microphones...
I have only heard of one reel to reel recorder which has even frequency response in the bass.
There is a lot of experience needed to cut an LP, involving certain manipulations of the original recording, which change the sound.
Firstly the bass must be mono to ensure a continuous groove if the level goes high. This is of benefit on playback since both speakers and amps are handling the bass.
Secondly the LP medium does not have a high signal to noise potential so the low level sounds are almost always amplified relative to the average level to make sure the quiet parts of the music don't descend too close to the LP noise. This has the beneficial effect on playback of the hall ambience being more audible relative to the average level.
The maximum level which can be cut in the top octave is less than that at medium frequencies due to cutter limitations.
So overall there is no way an LP is likely to sound like the microphone feed.
I have not written that the LP is "grossly coloured" but it is coloured in ways that are nice, euphonic and maybe/probably in a way which is similar to the sound change one gets by being quite a long way from the orchestra in a concert.
Whilst it is true that quite a lot of people prefer the sound of LPs, I would be surprised if it is a majority of music lovers even if there is a hard core of audiophile enthusiasts who feel that way.
If that sounds more real to some people that is fine and dandy.
It is, IMHO, fortunate happenstance though, not any inherent superiority of LPs, the shortcomings of which, as I wrote before, sound nice and have been known about and fully explained for decades.
In fact the flat disc was invented to make music cheaper to distribute than tape, not for sound quality and the original analogue or digital recording is of much higher accuracy than the LP cut from it.
Thank you f1eng for this long and detailed response to my set of questions. Just the other night I went to the BSO and sat further back than I usually do. I am usually in the 7th row, center aisle. The other night I was back in the 22nd row, center aisle. I much prefer the closer seats for the immediacy, higher degree of detail, and the more distinct sound of the individual instruments. Interestingly, the type of music that I like to listen to, namely smaller scale chamber classical such as string quartets and violin, cello and piano concertos, sound more like the analog recordings I have of those from my 7th row seats than they do from the 22nd row. The perspective was too distant for my taste and not what I hear in my LP collection.
Perhaps this impression is chiefly because of the closer micing of my particular recordings. I have long felt that I, and others who listen to a lot of live acoustic music, tailor our individual systems to sound most like what we hear when we hear live music, and that includes the listener perspective relative to the performance. To mention just one example, a recording of a Heifetz violin concerto sounds much more like what I hear in row 7 than it does in row 22, I presume because of the mic location.
I can see how the mic position, and I suppose the mic type, can indeed play the major role in this.
The difference between one example of analog and digital was again made clear to me the other day when comparing the much mentioned Janaki String Trio. It is a very close mic'd recording. The spacial information, hall sound and incredible resolution responsible for subjectively very accurate timbre and dynamics were much more evident on the LP than they were on a quad DSD digital file through the same system. So I wonder if this perception is due to the mic and its position which was used in the recording or something else like the mastering adjustments made for the vinyl process. Assuming the mic picked up all of that information which was heard on the LP, somewhere along the chain of the digital replay, it was lost, softened, and made to sound less real. Of course, I was not at the recording session, so perhaps, alternatively, what I think sounds real about those string instruments was actually an exaggeration, heightening and manipulation of the signal. What is certain, though, is that they did indeed sound very different from each other.
