"They are here" vs. "You are there"

Hi Bryon - I have just read through this entire thread now, and there are alot of very good comments by you and Al and many others about the effect of the listening room, ambience cues, etc. I would agree with most of it. However, I also agree with those near the beginning of the thread (I think Newbee was one) who stated that the recording itself is the very biggest factor in creating a "you are there" experience - a far bigger factor than these other factors under discussion for most of the thread. Someone said, and I will lazily paraphrase here, that you cannot put into your listening room something that was not in the recording in the first place. I would like to add to this by going back to my comments on mixing - you also cannot put back into the listening room something that the mikes may have picked up, but the engineer subsequently mixed out.

To take modern orchestral recording as an example - there will be at the very least several different mikes onstage, located in the middle of the orchestra. There will usually be absolutely no mikes anymore out in the hall, where an audience would be. These mikes are usually also much closer to the instruments than they were in the days of analog recording as well. This has the effect of pretty much entirely eliminating the acoustic ambience of the hall itself - in fact, many engineers don't even like to record in concert halls anymore. It is simply not a high priority for most engineers now to recreate the actual sound of the hall.

The engineer then takes these tracks, mixes them, and then adds digital reverberation to create a false ambience, one that he thinks sounds good. It may or may not sound anything like the actual space anymore. I guess my point with all this is to say that no matter how much you can make your listening room recreate the experience of a concert hall, it will not put back the sound of the original hall very closely, since the engineer has already removed that. This is not even to bring up the question of which hall would you like to recreate and why (this is another problem with the "absolute sound" concept).

This is one of the main reasons that most musicians who are audiophiles have a marked preference for the older recordings from the so-called "golden age," where folks like Mercury and RCA just hung a couple of mikes up out in the concert hall and therefore created much more of a "you are there" experience than anything recorded today. They were recording the sound of the music in that particular space.

Which leads me to another issue. Onhwy61 wrote "IMO the original question is another example of overstating the importance of soundstage/imaging in high end audio. As a system's resolution increases you'll hear more soundstage information, but in and of itself that information isn't really important to the enjoyment of listening to music. As an example, hearing Harry Belafonte's voice bounce off the different surfaces at Carnegie Hall is at most interesting. It's a good test of the lower level resolution of a system. But what does it have to do with Belafonte's performance?"

Well, my answer to that question is - a very great deal! Speaking as a performer, each different venue that we play/sing in changes our performance, sometimes radically so, much more than the typical audience member realizes. Belafonte, to use your example, must sing quite differently in Carnegie Hall than he does in the Copacabana or the Hollywood Bowl or Symphony Hall in Boston or insert your favorite jazz club/symphony hall here. To use a more personal example, if my orchestra goes on tour, as a French horn player whose bell faces "the wrong way," I have an even bigger adjustment to make than most musicians do, including the actual timing of my entrances, because of the differences in hall reverberation, liveness/deadness of the stage itself, etc. Note lengths can vary quite a bit from night to night on a tour, for another example.

So where am I going with this? Well, this is where the importance of soundstaging and imaging comes in for musicians when they are listening to a recording. I want to hear what that orchestra sounds like IN THAT SPACE. We LOVE listening to recordings of the same orchestra in different halls, or listening to different mixes of the same performance in the same hall (RCA did this in the 80's, the name of those recordings is escaping me at the moment). We like to be able, given a really good recording, to tell exactly how the orchestra was set up. One famous opera example is the recording done at the Met that Bernstein did for DG (of all companies!!) of Carmen, with Marilyn Horne in the title role. That recording has great sonics which really do create a "you are there" experience, but you need a system that has an appropriate soundstage and images well to fully experience it (a great many orchestral musicians favor horn speakers driven by tube electronics to achieve this). Or to use a jazz example, I love being able to hear the subtle differences that Ella Fitzgerald has in the same song sung at different venues on different recordings from the same label/producer. These are captured very well on those old Verve and Pablo recordings, and greatly adds to the pleasure of listening to the recreation of that particular performance (by the way Bryon, perhaps this helps explain why musicians consider recordings as performances than what I have said before). For me, these are much more important traits for a system than "neutrality," though I don't propose to start that discussion all over again. I am merely trying to explain why musicians place such a high priority on soundstaging and imaging. They are crucial to creating a "you are there" experience.

FWIW, I sort of agree with Byron's last paragraph, but mostly wherein he stresses the importance of 'resolution'. Not so much neutrality, which for me is as much about tonality as anything else, but this is a can of worms not worthy of discussion at this time. And for me, resolution is found in the absence of distortions in the equipment and set up, assuming the capability of the speakers and electronics to actually reproduce the micro information in the recording in the first place. "Detail" is to me a false god for the tyro who might think that enhanced information in the high(er) frequencies is really balanced. Just MHO of course.

And, FWIW, I agree with most all of Learsfool's observations. Unfortunately all of the professional musicians I know have little interest in high end audio, just like most of my friends.

Hi Bryon - we are generally in agreement here. Where I would differ with you would be on the subject of the listening room being much of a factor at all in picking up what you are calling "ambient cues" in the recording. The listening room is of course a big factor in the sound of a system as a whole, however I would disagree that it has much effect on this specific issue, depending of course on the type of recording. The equipment would have a much greater effect on it in general, particularly if we are speaking about vinyl (which I almost always am). If we are speaking of digital, then there are much less "real" "ambient cues" on the recording, but there are many more of them on orchestral recordings up until they became mostly digital in the late 80's. Particularly up until the mid 60's or so, just about all of the "ambient cues" on an orchestral recording will be "real" rather than "virtual." After that, even the good labels started using more and more mikes, though there were notable exceptions, such as Decca London's ffrr stuff, which sounds better than anything else done in the 70's (speaking very generally, of course) as far as regards this specific issue.

What you say about the room having more of an effect would be true, however, in the case of some of the multi-channel recordings out there which some others mentioned earlier on in the thread. Then you have more speakers to deal with, and the whole would be more influenced by the room itself. However, they have yet to make a multi-channel recording that any professional classical musician I know has ever thought sounded at all realistic, so I remain very skeptical about such recordings. Frankly, most of them end up sounding quite similar to a Bose -type system, where the music sounds like it's traveling in all sorts of crazy directions, which I guess some think sounds cool, but it certainly doesn't sound like a "real" acoustic space. But that's really not part of this discussion.

Newbee, I would say to you that it has always puzzled me when people state that musicians are not interested in good sound. As another fellow musician who contributes here on audiogon, Frogman, recently stated in a different thread, there are probably many more audiophiles proportionately among musicians than there are in any other single profession. It must be admitted that audiophiles are a VERY small percentage of the general population - the percentage of musicians interested in good sound is MUCH larger in comparison, even if it isn't a majority, a point I am not sure I would concede. A great many musicians simply cannot afford a high-end system - (I am one of the lucky ones with a full-time job with decent benefits, and my system is certainly nothing to brag about cost-wise compared to much of the folks hanging out on this site!) but that doesn't mean they don't appreciate a good system when they hear it. Most professional musicians have to put at least as much money into their instruments alone as many folks on audiogon put into their systems, not to mention other costs, and there just isn't enough left over for most to justify buying a high-end audio system. The total dollar value of the instruments you are listening to if you attend a professional orchestral concert would stagger you, and that is of course where our priorities must lie.

Learsfool, FWIW, I did not say that musicians, or for that matter non-musicians, didn't have some interest in audio. I referred to 'high end' audio in the context that we use that term.

In my mind, those that use the term high end, myself included, are 'audio' hobbyists. Amongst my friends, family members, and guests, I can find no one really interested in the hobby aspect, beyond making a socially correct observation about my system or music collection, although we will often discuss music itself or the music scene.

My comment was of course nothing more than a personal observation based on personal experience, and I should have known better than to have trotted out what amounted to an old canard in the presence of a professional musician who also happens to be an audio hobbyist. My apologies. :-)