[Housteau]

What is better than listening to live unamplified acoustic music on a fine VMPS system?  That would be listening to live unamplified acoustic music on a fine VMPS system that you have recorded yourself.  I say this because no matter how fine a commercial recording is, they could have been that much better, since I almost always notice an artificial flavor added in somewhere that removes it from being real to me. 

I really like a lot of the Mapleshade recordings though.  I used to wonder what it is that they do to have them sound that way.  Then, I realized that the answer was really simple.  They don't do a darn thing.  They just preserve a good recording as a good recording and don't jack with it. 

I believe that artificial boxes have been presented to the marketplace where just about all commercial mastering engineers are predestined to manipulate the music so it will fit into one of them.  Loudness, dynamics and tonal qualities are altered to a point where it really isn't the music that matters anymore.  It becomes just a product to sell being based upon false and detrimental benchmarks set by previous bad ideas of what things should sound like.  It is a spiral downwards.

Recording has been a hobby of mine for quite a while, but only recently have I had the time to get more into it.  I believe in keeping things natural and real.  Are commercial recordings often better in many ways than what I do?  Sure they are, but not in all ways and not all the time.  The point is that I should not be able to best them at all, and yet often I do.  Since I am doing it mostly just for myself and those I record there is a lot of freedom away from those standard marketing practices.  So, I maintain the recordings at high resolution and without compression.  The sound is live, sometimes raw and it is real with a you are there feel to it.  I love listening to music where you could swear the perforer was right there in the room with you. 

Then, there are the times when they are actually in my room to have a listen to what they sound like on a decent system in a good listening space.  They are floored by how real they find that they sound.  And having them there just speaking to me in that room allows a direct comparrison to the recordings of their voices for me.  You see I don't believe in a lot of reverb either, unless the artist insists.  Sometimes they like to compare the studio CDs they have paid a lot of money for of themselves to my simple live recordings.  This is usually the first time when they get the true feel of how artificial their studio work turned out and what they were talked into as being the standard practice was not so great. 

There is absolutely no reason why a professional studio and engineers cannot get the real back into their recordings.  The only reason that I see that most do not is that the choice has been made not to in favor of these bad precedents previously set by others.

Dave

[Stimpy]

Some years ago, I had the privilege of working at a CD/DVD replication plant.  15 years spent in the Premastering department alone.  This included time spent as a Cutting Lathe Tech and a Mastering engineer.

One of the nice things about our plant was that we were an independent company.  As such, we were able to press CD runs for projects small and large.  So, because of that, we picked up quite a bit of work from many of the small audiophile CD labels, including Nimbus Records, Chesky, Water Lily, DCC Compact Classics, and Mapleshade.  I even had the pleasure of meeting Pierre Sprey, of Mapleshade, when he visited our plant.  A very passionate man concerning audio. 

During our meeting, I asked Pierre about his recording techniques.  Pierre told me that he records in a natural environment, and not in a studio.  That he basically used a large, older frame farm house as a studio.  Pierre told me that he had modified the walls to be removable or collapsible, as needed, to control the amount of natural reverberation in the space.  Nothing added in the mix or in later mastering.  Pierre was also fanatical about eliminating AC line noise.  All recording equipment was powered through PS Audio filters.  Also, anything in the house, that could induce hash back into the AC was physically unplugged during recording, including AC units, refrigerators, microwaves, and washers and dryers.  Pierre even stated that he only recorded at certain times during the day, around peak power usage, just to further help control AC fluctuations during recording.

One other thing about Pierre.  When he visited our plant that 1st time, we produced a test stamper, for his initial CD run.  Prior to production, Pierre had that test stamper mounted on every press that we had, in order to produce CD samples from each production line.  After listening tests, of the various samples, Pierre found one pressing line that he felt produced better sounding CD's than the other lines.  After that, Pierre had every subsequent production run, that he ordered though us, pressed on that particular press!  He only wanted the best for his product!

[Housteau]

Yes.  That is impressive what specialty labels can do and how they put their hearts into their work.  I mentioned Mapleshade in my opening post, but my intention was to incude these non-mainstream labels.  My general statements were targeted on the popular music and some jazz mainstream releases that are so horribly over compressed.  I should have stated that better.

Converting a pure recording from high resolution wave, or DSD down to standard CD takes a lot of know how to keep all of that event fully intact.  I have not mastered that one.

[Stimpy]

I definitely know about over compression, as most of my mastering clients were only interested in producing and releasing as loud a CD as possible!  Sound quality usually wasn't discussed.  Just how loud I could make the final master sound!  Sad! 

I even had one client that had already had their project mastered by Bob Katz at Digital Domain, which is one of the best mastering houses in the country.  (And Bob is an engineer that doesn't believe in over compression, for the sake of volume, at the expense of sound quality).  Well, said client was still unhappy with their master, since it still wasn't loud enough, to their liking.  So, as the in-house mastering engineer, I had to re-eq and over compress their project, to please them, even though it sounded better as-is!  I hated doing it, as I had worked with Bob in the past on other projects, and greatly respected his work.  I didn't stay in the mastering business too long after that.  Too many hacks out there, willing to ruin a project, just for money.  I guess I realized that I wasn't one of them!

[John Casler]

I have a few of Dave's recordings, and have to say they are a level above most commercially available "live" products.

Dave looking forward to seeing you in Vegas.

[Housteau]

Thanks John.  I hope to be able to make it to be seen.  Hopefully the logistics will work out this year.