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RE: what is your most shocking wikileakesque revelations about the audio industry in the last 3 years?

>But you are wrong I do agree. The point I am trying to make is that there is no guarantee that by using unprocessed recordings one is not being fooled by subtle (or not) colorations that tend to make such recordings sound more real or more live. Also if using such a methodology is alienating other recordings (again remember my volume adjustment comment) one is selecting components with colorations that favor such recordings.<

In my experience, unprocessed recordings have less coloration. That's both a practical judgment -- they sound more natural when I listen to them -- and a matter of engineering: a relatively flat pair of microphones located at a distance from the performers produces a signal that is closer to the sound field at the listener's position than multiple microphones that are located unnaturally close to the instruments. And that's before cowboy producers start mucking with the EQ! It's almost impossible to make a convincing recording of a large ensemble with a multitude of microphones, though I've heard some pleasing ones.

One well-known example of this would be the screechy violin effect, which is a consequence of miking the string session up close and above: the violin is strongly directional at certain frequencies, and if you capture only the beam that's aimed straight up they sound screechy and hard.

>In a nutshell - surely I can't disagree that rolling off high frequencies and limiting low end extension will reduce the goodness of many high quality recordings in order to facilitate reasonable playback of the world of recorded works. It seems like a small price to pay. On the other hand I find any coloration that increases the goodness of any recording at the same time making other recordings sound bad or unlistenable to be simply intolerable.<

I certainly agree with that last. In general, I find that brightness or peakiness is much more offensive to the ear than recessive sound or sound with suckouts. For some reason, the bright sound is fatiguing.

As to rolling off the highs, well, I don't have an answer for that, but my personal inclination is to go for something that serves the main body of recordings, which, after all, are most of what I listen to. But I'd rather do it in EQ than in the speakers. There was a time when EQ circuits could be sonically deleterious, but once you've made the transition to all digital as I have you can use digital EQ, which can actually do a better job of correcting tonal balance than a speaker can and can be adjusted to accommodate various recordings and scenarios (stereo vs. multichannel, small hall vs. large one, live room vs. dead one, etc.).

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