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In Reply to: Re: The answer lies in the nature of the thing posted by Dr. S on March 10, 2007 at 19:23:03:
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.
Follow Ups:
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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