The real truth about recordings


I was trying to post a link to a good article but was blocked. New rules?

It's from Stereophile, called: 

On Assessing Sonic Illusions
Jim Austin  |  Mar 12, 2024

mashif

Very interesting article that correspond to my acoustic experiments in a way...

Thanks to the OP for this article EVERYONE must read and meditate... 😊

This say it all ...

 

Yet the experience of playing a record is best thought of not as an act of recreation but as an act of original creation. Even a recording of a live event—even if there was an experience in the real world that was captured on tape—what’s on the record is so far removed from what happened then and there that it makes sense to think of it as something new.

 

quoting Evan Eisenberg’s book The Recording Angel: Explorations in Phonography: "In the great majority of cases," JA quoted, "there is no original musical event that a record records or reproduces."

We must understood that any recording trade-off choices by mic type and location choices among other things dont capture the original acoustic event but a perspective on it.... Then at the end of the playback chain , your system/room TRANSLATE acoustically for the specific ears/brain of the owner the first acoustic trade off perspective... There is no pure high fidelity REPRODUCTION... It is marketing not acoustics ... It is acoustic TRANSLATION with a loss and also with a gain because of the selected accentuation of some aspects of sounds picked by the recording engineer and also which fact is forgotten some trade-off specific set of acoustic choices from the owner room/system tool for this playback translation ...

Finally, the crux of the issue. We audiophiles and serious music listeners are most satisfied (whether we know it or not) not when engineers intervene as little as possible but when they are most successful in pulling the wool over our eyes—when the illusion is complete. Often, that is best achieved with more intervention—more manipulation—not less.

Recording, then, is an act of artistic creation, starting with the earliest and most basic of audio-engineering tasks: positioning the microphones. Tom again: "A spaced-omni setup is probably among the most dependent on the listening aesthetic of the engineer and producer."

I use VPN and I was blocked this morning. Pausing the VPN allowed me to post.