In Reply to: RE: People compressing or advocating compressing classical music should be shot. posted by jazz1 on June 13, 2012 at 01:17:08:
The "Living Stereo" recordings should not be used as a reference to discuss dynamic range. They are great recordings, to be sure, but they show the technical limitations of the era.
The classic RCA "Living Stereo" recordings were made on magnetic tape. Because of limited dynamic range in this pre-Dolby period most of these recordings had fortissimo passages at high levels, which caused the tape to dynamically compress these peaks. In extreme cases, there is tape saturation distortion. This is obvious in the Reiner Mahler 4, for example, where tape distortion is present in every format of this recording that I have, starting with pre-recorded tape and LP. (I don't have the SACD.)
IMO, it is inappropriate to use any analog tape sourced recordings from this era as a benchmark for natural dynamic range. What you hear is not what the musicians played unless you are also hearing a lot of tape hiss, indicating that the engineer preferred noise over distortion and compression. When I was in college I worked at a radio station and used to record Boston Symphony concerts over leased lines live from Symphony Hall and Sanders Theater. The tapes we made (using Ampex full track 601 and 350 recorders) were never equivalent to the live microphone feed because of noise, distortion and dynamic compression. Today, one can achieve a high level of transparency with digital recordings, e.g. with DSD128.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
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Follow Ups
- RE: People compressing or advocating compressing classical music should be shot. - Tony Lauck 07:37:42 06/13/12 (1)
- RE: People compressing or advocating compressing classical music should be shot. - jazz1 09:23:38 06/13/12 (0)