The old J Gordon Holt mic story made me think some more. This whole listening/evaluating thing is incredibly complex. Nothing new, known about it since like forever. What's hard is trying to put into words what I've been doing this whole time.
It comes down I think to pattern recognition. Everything has its own unique sonic signature or fundamental character, whatever you want to call it. Like, when you hear someone's voice, anyone you have heard before, you know who it is. Some of them, a wife or mother for example, you will know even coming to you far off in the distance, through a storm, over a cell phone, no problem. So we can recognize these things even when distorted all kinds of different ways.
The way I see it, what we are doing when evaluating a system is not so much trying to say it sounds like it did originally. We can't ever really know what that was. Not exactly. We can't ever really know all the stuff that happened before it went down on tape. That is kind of like mom yelling in the storm, we can sort of tell the wind was blowing, rain, etc but we have to sort of put that aside. That part is nothing we can do anything about. The recording is what the recording is. All we can do is try and evaluate our end of it.
So like I said hard to explain. But I think we are trying to listen for those patterns that are "true" to the whatever it was, and then do something very demanding. We have to somehow put aside all the many different aspects that came before our system, because we can do nothing about them. But then focus on the aspects that come after, because that is our system and that we can do something about.
Learning to sort those out. One of the bigger keys to the kingdom.
It comes down I think to pattern recognition. Everything has its own unique sonic signature or fundamental character, whatever you want to call it. Like, when you hear someone's voice, anyone you have heard before, you know who it is. Some of them, a wife or mother for example, you will know even coming to you far off in the distance, through a storm, over a cell phone, no problem. So we can recognize these things even when distorted all kinds of different ways.
The way I see it, what we are doing when evaluating a system is not so much trying to say it sounds like it did originally. We can't ever really know what that was. Not exactly. We can't ever really know all the stuff that happened before it went down on tape. That is kind of like mom yelling in the storm, we can sort of tell the wind was blowing, rain, etc but we have to sort of put that aside. That part is nothing we can do anything about. The recording is what the recording is. All we can do is try and evaluate our end of it.
So like I said hard to explain. But I think we are trying to listen for those patterns that are "true" to the whatever it was, and then do something very demanding. We have to somehow put aside all the many different aspects that came before our system, because we can do nothing about them. But then focus on the aspects that come after, because that is our system and that we can do something about.
Learning to sort those out. One of the bigger keys to the kingdom.