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The problem with the music

There are lots of people who frequent this site that have spent significant amounts of money to buy the gear that they use to reproduce their music. I would never suggest that you should not have done that, but I wonder if the music industry is not working against you, or at least, not with you.

For the most part studios are using expensive gear to record with, but is it really all that good? Do the people doing the recording have good systems that can reproduce soundstage, detail and all the other things that audiophiles desire, or do they even care about playback?

I know there are labels that are sympathetic to our obsessions, but does Sony/Columbia, Mercury, or RCA etc. give a rats #$%&@ about what we want?

Recordings (digital) have gotten a lot better since the garbage released in the mid 80's. Some of them are even listenable! BUT lots of people are spending lots of money to get great music when the studios don't seem that interested in doing good recordings. Mike Large, director of operations for Real Worl Studios said "The aim of the music is to connect with you on an emotional level; and I'd be prepared to bet that the system you have at home does that better than any of the systems we make records on."

Do recording engineers even care about relating the emotion of the music, or are they just concerned about the mechanics?

What do you think, and can/ should anything be done about it?
128x128nrchy
eldartford
4,262 posts
 
Go buy a TACET or MDG DVDA or SACD. Bring about $30 a pop. Will do more for your system than ten grand in electronics. As in just about everything else Europe is ahead of us in audio. Just my opinion of course.
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cinematic_systems
282 posts
 
Nrchy,

Although the components in your systems are all excellent, they are a very poor match.

The combination of equipment you own will on a few occasions be spectacular but most of the time on most average recordings be grating and harsh. LP's are probably good but that's the easy part. CD quality is outstanding here of late, I have just bought 50 cd's from megadeth to Keb Mo to Gergiev SACD and they were all excellent. Your system is the problem not the recordings.

Please don't think this is a personal attack or a cheap shot because if you came to see me and you described your system, I would tell some stuff has gotta change.

If you want specifics i'll give them to you, let me state you don't need better equipment you need different equipment.
mprime
92 posts
 
Slappy nailed it. My A&R friends are saying as much.
albertporter's avatar
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albertporter
4,949 posts
 
We are forgetting the issue that the recording people are "THERE," at the original event.

To make an analogy with photography, even a guy with a crappy $199.00 point and shoot digital from CompUSA (at the original event) will go home with better quality images than what's printed in the newspaper the next morning.

Point I'm making, these guys have a great job and even with very good (forget state of the art) equipment, they will capture the artist with more fidelity than most formats the record companies are throwing at us today.

Don't believe me? Get someone in the business to run you off a copy of a analog master tape on half track, 15 IPS or 30 IPS and compare with SACD, Redbook or even the best LP. You will be amazed.

I am currently working on my fifth and sixth master dupes, (Pink Floyd and Art Garfunkel). I never liked Aerosmith until I owned a master dupe, now I listen to the group and hear things I never knew existed.

I am scheduled to record some classical musicians associated with the Dallas Symphony this fall.

It WILL be with a high speed analog tape machine and large diaphragm tube microphones. I can't wait to see if my system can reproduce what I hear live.
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