Music reproduction is art

I would like to hear from people who mix tracks and recording engineers. This group of people have so much influence on what we hear but are never seen on audiophile websites. As end users, we are just picking up the pieces.

They have many rules such as reverb on no more than 1 track. Legend has it, they have better than "audiophile" ears.

Art, craft. style, design, technologies....fortunately, 'umans are still involved....
...for now. ;)

Back in SF, spouse 'n self were peeling layers of paint off of plaster walls in our '09 Vic bungalow.....admiring the mottled pattern of colors, textures, and the ragged edges that it now wore...then had it mudded over and painted.

Not long after, we discovered that walls with 'That LOOK' had become very popular in NYC...

"'Peel it, clearcoat it, and be an 'It'! "

Timing is all, sometimes....*rue L*

@cdc ...I'd be interested in that....could hold my keys in pause for the cause... 👍

cdc OP

I would like to hear from people who mix tracks and recording engineers. This group of people have so much influence on what we hear

They have better than "audiophile" ears.

All mics are noisy (veiled & bright). It can be an art that recording engineers have created many beautiful music with these noisy mics. I wonder what they will do with a new technology clean natural sound mic.

I’ll be meeting recording studio people from Hollywood area with my clean sound microphone next week. The question is "will artists record again" for a clean natural sound recording. I guess they are forced to record again. More job for recording studios and REs. That will bring a new wave for recording and audio industry. alex/WTA

I get it now, asvjerry's trippy writing is the left over from his Grateful Dead's days in San Francisco. 

Check out Evan Eisenberg's book The Recording Angel (much admired by John Atkinson of Stereophile, among others). Eisenberg's thesis is that the recording engineer or producer is very much an artist, and the recording is indeed a work of art. A sampling:

“The word ‘record’ is misleading. Only live recordings record an event; studio recordings, which are the great majority, record nothing. Pieced together from bits of actual events, they construct an ideal event.”

“One is supposed to judge a stereo system by comparing its sound to live music. If the music one listens to is pure phonography—a pure audio product—that is impossible.” 

“Even in the classical sphere, live music is only one touchstone of recorded sound. Fidelity itself is a vexatious concept.”

Eisenberg goes on to compare the role of the recording producer to that of a movie director. Live recordings are analogous to filming a stage play, while studio recordings are “like movie making as we usually understand it”: an art in its own right, a way of “exercising artistic judgment.” The first half or so of the long central chapter on "Phonography" focuses on giving examples of this art from classical music (some of which really amazed me—for instance, that in the recordings of the very famous Wagnerian soprano Kirsten Flagstad, the most beloved Isolde of all, her “top notes” were actually sung by Elizabeth Schwartzkopf and dubbed in!); the latter half offers examples from jazz, blues, rock and pop music.