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RE: True, but IF you had subscribed for YEARS...

Posted by josh358 (P) on September 17, 2015 at 17:44:13

In Reply to: RE: True, but IF you had subscribed for YEARS... posted by John Atkinson on September 17, 2015 at 05:42:01:

John, I thnk I have to disagree with your essay. Not most of it, of course -- audio equipment and recordings almost never successfully emulate reality, designers do have to make engineering and price/performance trades, different listeners have different needs and value different sonic characteristics, and in the case of electronic or heavily processed music, there's nothing to compare the sound to except perhaps what the mixer heard on his monitors.

But when listening to recordings of acoustical music, my primary reference is how real it sounds, and my main goal is to make it as real as I can, and in my experience almost everyone -- including people who know nothing about audio -- recognize and responds to realism in music reproduction. And I think research tends to support this, that despite popular notions to the contrary, most people rank equipment similarly in blind comparisons, and that the ranking can often be traced back to qualities that correspond to accuracy -- not necessarily faith to the recoording, since conventional two channel stereo is so inadequate, but faith to the live performance.

It can be argued of course that we should aim for a sonic result that suits the practical limits of our technical oapabilities, and to some extent that may be true. Or that we should aim for better than real. The thing is, more than a few recordings have been made on the basis of that philosophy, e.g., a conductor may decide to bring up the level of the strings, and in my experience, they almost uniformly sound awful on a good system.

Conversely, the recordings that sound best to me are generally the less processed, simpler ones -- that is, the recordings that are most accurate, the ones made with a few good microphones, that seek to produce a realistic balance, that keep the signal path as clean as possible. (I think you yourself wrote recently that if you were to ask a listener what they'd like, they'd probably go for a recording made with spaced omnis.)

So call me a purist, but when listening to acoustical music recorded in a good acoustics, I think accuracy can be heard by most people who are familiar with the sound of live music and that it sounds best, even though it's far from perfect.

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