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In Reply to: I have a question: why is it so difficult to record piano? posted by Joel_Waterman on March 10, 2007 at 16:06:34:
Arguably pianos are the hardest, but I think the one we most always recognize as "recorded" is the human voice.Pianos are this hellish combination of primary percussion (hammer hitting string), with brutal transients and dynamics, and all of this harmonic interplay across all of those octaves. Then there are all of these pieces and parts vibrating their little hearts out.
Analog, whatever your feelings about the attractiveness of its euphonies, simply lacks the huevos. It never gets the leading edge right and 60db of dynamic range is simply inadequate to the task.
Clearly superior to the best analog, 44.1k and 96k PCM digital, DSD - Direct Stream Digital (SACD) offers a flat frequency response from essentially DC to 100,000k, and a usable dynamic range of over 110db (compared to about 60db for the best analog). If you want to know what that means, ask a recording engineer about compression of solo piano recordings.
Using a short path (no more than 50' of microphone cable to preamplifiers, no mixing board, and appropriate microphony (such as the Sennheiser MKH-800) ... feeding a DSD recorder, the results of the actual recording and live microphone feed are indistinguishable.
I have been there, and heard that, in analog and PCM, and many times with DSD. Talk to someone who has actually heard the microphone feed/master recording relationship (as opposed to someone who simply has an opinion, uninformed by empirical fact) and they will tell you the same thing; DSD done correctly is indistinguishable from the microphone feed.
And yet, here we are, nearly a decade later, nattering away about recording distribution formats, I-pods and other such complete nonsense, and perhaps pissing away the best chance we have ever had for being able to record pianos (and everything else) properly.
And don’t even bother to try to bait me in to a “mine is bigger than yours,” flame war. When you have actually had the experience, you will have a reason to speak.
The Good (if frustrated) Doctor
Follow Ups:
this presumes that the "indistinguishable" DSD copy of the microphone feed is completely indistinguishable from the sound of the actual piano being recorded. I would maintain that most listeners could easily identify nearly all recordings of a piano as such when compared to the sound of the instrument itself. Charles Hansen's post below pointed this out first, but to elaborate, the majority of piano recordings suffer for two reasons: the microphones used simply are inadequate, and they are placed poorly.The best attempts at portraying the sound of the piano — in my experience anyway — are on a few of the Opus 3 recordings, and the Harry James releases for Sheffield (these are all recorded in analog, BTW). IMHO, these succeed because of the minimalist placement techniques used. "Talk of the Town" on the Opus 3 Showcase SACD may, in fact, be the single best recording of a jazz piano.
Of course, on the other end of the spectrum are the mostly terrible sounding Concord Jazz recordings that unabashedly spread the piano across the entire soundfield.
The discussion point was "recordings," not reality. The perception of a thing, and the thing itself are always, irrevocably, different.A recording of an event is not the event itself, but another catagory of experience. The "absolute reference" is a catagorical emphemera. A representation of a thing, cannnot the thing itself. The map is not the territory, nor is the play, or the movie, or the photograph. A painting of something is not a lesser catagory of reality, it is simply different from the original event.
The only useful reference for evaluating a recording is the variation from what is recorded, and what was in the microphone feed.
My illustration with the human voice was just that, an illustration of how hard it is to "fool" human perceptions with recordings of human voices.
You may LIKE certain recordings, or families of recordings, but the simple physical fact is that both analog and lesser digital lack both the frequency response and dynamic range to capture even what the microphones can hear.
Try this ... compare two excellent piano recordings, Malcolm Frager's Chopin and the SACD of Manfredo Fest playing Jobim on a first rate SACD player and system. I truly believe you will hear what I am describing.
In the case of the PCM Chopin recording, you will literally hear them "stuffing" that huge Bosendorf into the recording, like a shoe horn and fat feet into too small shoes. The Fest recording, sparkles with this ease and breath that effects you physically. You can relax, sit back and not clench or grit your teeth, subconciously.
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I thing overall the bigger difference though is when I switched over to the Monitor Audio GS10s from the B&W 603S2s. The GS10s aren't speakers that are real costly either.The ECM label seems to do a very good job with reproduction of the piano for jazz. And overall on classical music on other labels, its much more pleasing to listen to Chopin and also piano concertos from other composers.
This doesn't address the difficulty in recording the piano but I guess I shouldn't be all that surprised that the speakers and CDP utilized in my case made a whole heck of a difference.
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