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Does it bother you?

I'm a recording engineer who has worked in some of the world's top facilities. Let me walk you though an example signal path that you might find in a place like, say, Henson Studio A:

1. Microphone: Old. Probably a PCB inside. Copper wiring.
2. Mic cable: Constructed in house with $1/ft Canare Star Quad, solder, and a connector that might have been in the bottom of a box in the back.
3. Wall jack: Just a regular old Neutrik XLR connector on the wall.
4. Cable snake: Bundles of mic cables going to the control room.
5. Another XLR jack.
6. Another cheap mic cable.
7. Mic preamp: Old and lovely sounding. Audio going through 50 year old pots.
8. Patchbay: Another cheap copper cable is soldered into a patchbay where hundreds of connectors practically touch.
9. TT Cable: Goes from one patch to the next in the patch bay. Copper. No brand preference.
10. DB25 connector: Yes, the same connector you used to connect a modem to your computer in 1986. This is the heart and soul of studio audio transfer.
11. DB25 cable to the console: 25 strands of razor-thin copper wire, 8 channels of audio, sharing a ride.
12. The mixing console: PCB after PCB of tiny copper paths carry the audio through countless op amp chips.
13. DB25 cable to the recording device: time to travel through two more DB25 connectors as we make our way to the AD converters or tape machine.
14. AD conversion: More op amp chips.
15. Digital cable: nothing fancy, just whatever works. USB and Firewire cables are just stock.

...and this is just getting the audio into the recorder.

Also:

None of this equipment has vibration reducing rubber feet, it's just stacked haphazardly in racks. Touching.

No fancy power cables are used, just regular ol' IEC cables.

Acoustic treatment is done using scientific measurements.

Words like "soundstage" and "pace" are never uttered.

Does it bother you? Do you find it strange that the people who record the music that you listen to aren't interested in "tweaks," and expensive cables, and alarm clocks with a sticker on them? If we're not using any of this stuff to record the albums, then what are you hearing when you do use it?
trentpancakes
trentpancakes OP
13 posts
 
A reason for the better sounding recordings of the 50's and 60's may be that there is a lot less of all the little "problems" you mention in rant.

That simply isn't something that's supported by fact.

Equipment in the '50s and '60s was marked by its high THD, noise, microphonics, and nascent electrical engineering. Signal chains, instead of having loads of DB25 interconnects, had multiple generation losses on tape decks with, by today's standards, abhorrent specs. Almost every piece of equipment in the chain was a tube device that added multiple odd and even-order harmonics (which is actually perceived as pleasing to the ear, although it is, by definition, distortion).

The entire philosophy of '80s recording and engineering was to clean up the signal path of the '50s-'70s, which was considered to be extremely low fidelity.
trentpancakes OP
13 posts
 
When all is said and done when a studio/producer/engineer does adopt audiophile standards, I'm thinking Mapleshade, you do get better sounding recordings.

Thanks for the reply, and it does accurately depict what goes on in a studio. It's controlled chaos, and it's about getting a creative spark on tape FAST. There's no time to obsess over a signal chain. Take "Something in the Way" off of Nevermind, as a rock n roll example. Kurt starts strumming the song on the control room couch, and he's killing it. It sounds perfect. So Butch scrambles and throws a mic in front of him right where he's sitting, and they captured perfection. If he had stopped to employ some audiophile aesthetic, it would have been lost.

Of course studios and engineers who specialize in audiophile recording are going to produce clean sounding records. It would defy reason to say that they don't.

But it still doesn't explain how audiophile listeners only seem to find extreme positives when they listen to traditional studio recordings on expensive stereos. It's all about "big soundstages" and "less smear" and "livelier pace." It's never "revealed more noise" or "heard tuning problems" or "hum was more pronounced" or "soundstage stayed the same."

How are you getting good things that we don't hear, but aren't hearing the bad things that we DO hear?
mapman's avatar
mapman
22,305 posts
 
" Almost every piece of equipment in the chain was a tube device that added multiple odd and even-order harmonics (which is actually perceived as pleasing to the ear, although it is, by definition, distortion)."

That rings true. ALso consistent with the notions that some forms of distortion can be pleasant and others not. I do think that the tube gear used at the time, for better or for worse, has a lot to do with the unique sound of early recordings prior to when transistors took over. As does the more pervasive focus on sound quality back then and whatever went into achieving it. OFten that was a simpler approach, like in many MErcury Living PResence Recordings, or as is found in certain more modern CD labels even, like Mapleshade and Dorian.

But it wasn't that the performers were just better back then as was initially asserted. We've identified why that was a silly assertion as to why the recordings sounded the way they do. Personally, those early recordings have a unique character and tonality as a whole that I find to be pleasing, even on newer digital CD releases, especially those that are mastered well.

To answer the OPs original question, no, in most cases it does not bother me. I do not find most modern recordings as objectionable as I suspect many here might. TO me each is a unique piece of art. I would not want them all to sound the same, ie "the absolute sound". Not to say I might not have done them differently or tried to make them better if it were me. But I have no control over how recordings are made. I can only judge the results, not the details of the technology that went into making them behind the scenes. Nor do I care. If I do not like one recording, I can easily move on to the next.
trentpancakes OP
13 posts
 
The original assertion was: "many small ensemble jazz recordings in the late 1950's and early 1960's sound better (more realistic, so to speak)--- often by a wide margin --- then most recordings of today."

...which I still maintain the musicianship played a large part in. They were capturing a moment in time, in the middle of a musical revolution of sorts, with musicians that were riding a creative wave that had yet to be explored, in a studio environment that was at that time rare. To think that it wouldn't come across as a creative explosion on tape is putting too much faith in machines over man. It's the same reason psychedelic music sounds so vital and alive when you're listening to a recording from 1966. You're capturing young musicians in the eye of a creative storm, and a social movement. It's why we decorate recording studios the way that we do. It's why we want musicians to record in the same room, with every instrument bleeding into all the other mics. We want that eye contact, we want the vibe, we want emotion on tape.

5% more emotion on tape will improve the quality of the recording immeasurably over a 500% increase in fidelity. This is one of the reasons why we don't obsess too terribly much about the cables (besides the fact that our ears don't hear it). There are much easier ways to improve the quality of the album, and the results are far more tangible. Just record better performances.
onhwy61's avatar
onhwy61
5,229 posts
 
I think you're underestimating audiophiles. The more resolving your playback system the more you'll hear tape edits, mismatched overdubs, vocal soundbooths with added reverb, gates opening/closing, HVAC noise, etc. One of the landmark pieces of audiophile criticism was the dissection of "The Look Of Love" track from the "Casino Royale" soundtrack.

Part of the evolution of the audiophile mentality has been a move away from systems that tell you what's on the recording, both good and bad, towards systems that prettify whatever signal they are being fed. There are valid reasons for this shift. Does it really make much sense to spend $50k on a system that makes half your record collection sound bad?

Many recordings made in the 50s were better sounding for many reasons. Basically the technology required a simpler recording path. Since you couldn't go crazy with multi-track overdubs you actually had to have musicians who could actually play together. Without elaborate EQs and effects you eliminated superfluous wiring and had to pay serious attention to microphone selection and setup. Simply put, since you couldn't fix it in the mix, the engineers back then had to know how to record properly for good sound. And even though they didn't measure that well, tube German mics feeding custom tube mixers into tube tape machines can sound oh so sweet.
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