[shep]

This isn't strickly speaking DIY but...I was listening to a good remastering of a 1976 recording, Cal Tjader
"Guarabe", then a recent one, nameless...I was/am shocked yet again at how little progress has been made in all these years. The Tjader album, probably recoded on tube/reel to reel, is wonderfully spacious, airy, colourfull, "real". The newer one, well it sucks. Period. This is an over-generalization since there are modern recordings I love. Some have more dynamics, better defined bass etc. but they are not legion and I have often noticed how sloppy recording engineers have gotten about mic. placement and heavy handed with the mixing board. Surely there are recording engeneers among us who could address my question. What's going on? Has the relative ease of digital recording made "you" careless. Pressure to get it done?
We're talking 30+ years. It's astounding that with all the knowlege at hand, the overall quality of recordings has either stagnated or gone down. When I want to know how my system sounds, I choose an analogue recording (obviously tranferred to cd since I don't have a TT) If Iwant great bass, ok I'll chose a recent recording. Your thoughts gentlemen:

[shep]

Is this such a boring topic??? Pages and pages about obscenity, Promethius, etc. Nobody interested in where the sound originates and why we have to to such lengths the make bad into better??
 

[refmedia]

I would have to say all the latest gear in the world does not make music sound good.
In today's world of Digital audio workstations the musicality can get lost very easily.
The older days with 2" 24 tracks and the like you had little editing capabilities as compared to now.
So mic placement and pre amp choices were emphasized.
"Fix it in the mix" is a common saying but the reality is if you don't record it right the first time there is not much you can really do.
Also when was this CD made? the first CD's were usually mastered on older Sony 1630's these are dreadful to say the least.
If it is newer than I think the engineers got ahead of themselves and lost touch with the tunes.
Not as uncommon as we would like to think IMHO.
Matt

[Steve Eddy]

Is this such a boring topic??? Pages and pages about obscenity, Promethius, etc. Nobody interested in where the sound originates and why we have to to such lengths the make bad into better??

Make the bad into better? I'd always been told you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. Or my favorite, you can't polish a turd.

Seriously though, perhaps it's just different tastes for a different time.

se

[Daygloworange]

Shep,

I had a long chat with a wonderful audio dealer we have here in Toronto on that very topic last night.

First, and obviously with exceptions, I find that most recordings today (at least in the more pop oriented genres) are of better quality than years ago. The bandwidth is greater, much lower noisefloor, and instruments and performers are recorded with more subtle detail than before.

Everything has improved over time. Microphones, pre-amps, recorders, monitoring, etc... Also, the methods and techniques in capturing sounds properly has improved as well.

I know a lot of people don't feel that this is true, and could provide us with many examples of recordings that leave a lot to be desired. I wouldn't dispute them. Most are probably valid.

The reasons????  Many. There are constraints on those that engineer the records, there are budgets, price performance ratios, agendas, politics. There are also shortfalls in studios. A lot of audiophiles own audio systems capable of higher resolution than studios. Studio control room acoustics are often far from ideal. Studios have constaints as well.

Also, a lot of what you hear as the final product has to do with the mastering process. A lot of time, recordings aren't mastered very well. It's not hard to butcher a good studio master 2 track. Not too long ago there were only a handful of guys that did the vast majority of mastering. That meant that whatever shortfalls they had, were spread across the vast majority of what was being released at the time.

If you're asking me if I think that today's recordings are commensurate with all the advancements in technology? Absolutely not. Far from it. Why? I don't exactly know. Is it because of the predominance of digital. Absolutely not. There is a lot of overcompression on recordings today, that certainly is something to complain about.

I grew up with analog in my decades of recording. I moved up to digital about 2 years ago. I would never go back. The latest tape formulations from 3M known as the "hot" tapes (3M 996) along with Dolby SR noise reduction were very good, but digital has still got the edge in noisefloor and all the advantages of editing, random accessibility, duplication, and easier archiving and storage.

Cheers

[konut]

The equipment is better now and more widely avaliable. That means theres a greater chance of getting it botched. Years ago only highly trained proffessionals did the work. Now any nincompoop can make a CD.

[shep]

The equipment is better now and more widely available. That means theres a greater chance of getting it botched. Years ago only highly trained professionals did the work. Now any nincompoop can make a CD.

That's kind of what I figured! When it's good, it's REALLY good. I have a reference quality cd from Curandero
"Aras" that is breathtaking. I also have plenty from big name studios and labels that are horrendous. In the old days, they seemed to care more, take better care of their gear? It's not something you wanted to botch. Referring to the Cal Tjader remastering. I think it must be after the horrid early Sony recorders (the other baddy was the Mitsubishi). Whatever they did, they did it right. This is a wonderful record in every way. I guess it must be tough to be a recording engineer, day after day, night after night, trying to get it right or simply trying to finish the job and go to bed.

[WEEZ]

konut...I couldn't agree with you more.

[Daygloworange]

The equipment is better now and more widely avaliable. That means theres a greater chance of getting it botched. Years ago only highly trained proffessionals did the work. Now any nincompoop can make a CD.

Amateurs are not the ones responsible for the more popular recordings. I don't think Shep is referring to independant garage bands who have got their hands on recording equipment. 

In the old days, they seemed to care more, take better care of their gear?

There is no maintenance(per se) to be performed that affects sonic performance in the modern day digital studio. In analog days, 24 track tape machines needed to be calibrated and biased constantly. Heads needed to be cleaned, de-gaussed, aligned. Capstan, pinch rollers cleaned.

Digital doesn't have the wow and flutter, aliasing, rumble, hissing, oversaturation, distortion, dropouts, compression, print through, pitch problems, or crosstalk of the analog tape medium.

There are not the miles of cables to interconnect outboard processors via patchbays to the mixer. The signal paths are much, much shorter. A lot of "outboard" processing is done nowadays via "plug ins" in the digital domain. No need to run signals outside the mixer through long lengths of cable, connectors, and multiple gain stages to do any Eq, compression, or effects processing.

I think it must be after the horrid early Sony recorders (the other baddy was the Mitsubishi).

The AD/DA converters on those machines were not as good as the ones we have now, no.

I guess it must be tough to be a recording engineer, day after day, night after night, trying to get it right or simply trying to finish the job and go to bed.

It's not an easy job, no. Especially when there are budget constraints. An engineer would love to spend as much time as possible substituting (expensive)microphones and playing with positioning till they achieve the magic sound. Problem is, that costs a lot of money. You can spend literally days on just a drum kit, substituting mics, drums, drum heads, playing with various tunings, muffling, blending of mics, positioning mics, altering room acoustics with moveable goboes.

With a classical recording, the scale is a lot larger. The studio must be a large one (ie: very, very expensive). Union scale paid to all the performers in the orchestra, whether they are playing or not. The conductors fee. The fees add up real quick.

There are a lot of factors at play in why recordings are not as good as they could be.

But, a lot of the so called amateur recording engineers are really raising the bar, and the pro's must step up their game as well. I think it will keep getting better.

Cheers

[Scotty]

I blame the poor sound of recordings since the advent of 33.3 LPs forward to today on inexperience, bad judgement,and outright stupidity by the people in a position to influence how a recording sounds.  Miles Davis, Kind of Blue was recorded over forty years ago and except for ultimate low level detail content and treble extension, sounds fantastic.  No obvious colorations,compression,thin sound ,tape saturation or other problems which can reduce the real sounding aspect of the recording and make it hard to enjoy the musical content. In contrast from the same era consider the first recordings by the Beatles,a simple four man group.
They could have sounded as good as the Jazz recordings from the same era.
Oh Well!  Engineers usually don't have creative control over how an artist sounds or is recorded they are technicians who follow the directions of someone else. Recording company executives,producers and sometimes the artists themselves are responsible for how a recording sounds. Recordings of Classical music should be much more difficult to do and any number of marvelous recordings exist that show that this harder task can be done well. There are even Classical recordings from the awkward transistion period in the recording  studio between mature tube technology and primitive transistor technology that sound very good and I still don't know how those results were achieved. 
 Some of the responsiblilty for a terrible sounding recording has to borne
directly by record executives and producers who see the artist as cash cow with a short shelf life and not someone who might create enduring art with intrinsic value. The industry as a whole has become more exploitive over the last fifty years. As near as I can tell we are stuck living with the sonic consequenses of greed and misapplied technology. Perhaps the best thing we can do is vote with our pocketbook and return recordings as defective if they
sound bad and demand a refund. I did this with ASIA's first recording on vinyl.
No one cared but at least I got my money back.
Scotty

[JLM]

This is all good stuff.

Consider is who the intended audience is.  The bulk of the market nowadays goes to MP3 and FM heard in automobiles.  So take imaging/soundstaging out of the picture and compress the dynamics.

Another consideration is the overuse of technology.  Current technology allows for almost unlimited number of channels, try mixing that into something that will sound right in 2 channels.  And the non-purist "games" that can be played is almost endless.

Spending thousands on a sound playback system is often an excerise in fustration.  This is what may kill high end audio.

[shep]

"Spending thousands on a sound playback system is often an excerise in fustration.  This is what may kill high end audio." I concur. I have some hundreds of cd's; Out of those maybe 10% are correctly recorded and only 1% are truely audiophile quality. I don't have to tell you guys what I mean by that! I spend a lot of time listening around the bad stuff, trying to pretend it isn't there just so I'm not stuck with the same music. As much as I love the gear (boy toys); the thought and love that goes into it's conception and construction, I know in my gut that an awful lot has unconsciously to do with trying to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. The prettier the gear (and some of it is drop-dead gorgious..you SET lovers aa) the less likely we are to notice the rotten sound. Don't scream at me please, I had my ears cleaned!

[Russell Dawkins]

" I have some hundreds of cd's; Out of those maybe 10% are correctly recorded and only 1% are truely audiophile quality. I don't have to tell you guys what I mean by that!

Well I'm not sure I know exactly what you mean - and I would like to know!

After all, you and others like you form a significant part of the group that engineers are working to please.

Picture it from our point of view as engineers, whether mixing or mastering. We are trying to please 3 or 4 different people: the artist, the producer, ourselves and (in absentia) the consumer. Among the "consumers" are a small number of audiophiles.

Personally, I choose my compromises somewhat in favor of the audiophile component, even though it represents a miniscule percentage, for a couple of reasons:
1. They deserve to be catered to because they actually care about these things.
2. My feeling is that as the technology advances, realistic playback will become more and more common, so I am, as it were, mixing for the future as much as the present.

As to the extent to which an engineer is willing to compromise personal values to please the client, typically in "making it louder", that's an on-going challenge the engineer faces. The growing "democratization" of the process may also be partly responsible in that the engineer may have people present at the process of mixing or mastering who don't at all understand the implications of what they are asking for, and probably shouldn't be there at all. In the old days referred to above, the client received a copy of the mixed and edited product for approval near the end of the process which would be listened to and small adjustments would then be made.

All was not roses, though. Depending on which label you were working with as an artist, you may or may not have bass on your record (I'm talking vinyl), as the first thing the typical vinyl mastering engineer did was to selectively carve away energy in the mid bass on down to allow for decent play length on a side while permitting good levels (for signal to groove noise considerations) without potentially kicking the stylus out of the groove. For this, of course the lowest common denominator had to be catered to as regards stylus trackability.

If bass were not managed and monoed, the country would be awash in jumping stylii, and the client "would not be amused".

So vinyl mastering engineers were constantly trying to accomplish this while still preserving the impression of real bass. This is all moot with CD, though bass is still "managed" to a greater degree than may be obvious.

And by the way Shep, I don't think there is such a thing as "correctly" recorded. Recording is an artifice and all recordings should be seen as creative attempts to bridge the gap between stark reality and entertainment. Notice I said "creative". There is considerable artistic judgement at play in the recording and mixing process. Even such mundane processes as compression involve high level creative choices, not to speak of EQ and balancing.

The preconception I had to un-learn earliest in my last 20 years recording was that my target sound was the replication of reality. I spent about three years more or less trying that, then I had to admit that none of my clients wanted that - they wanted something that sounded "like a good record" - that is, a little flattering. Ever since that epiphany, all my recordings have been compromises between over-produced and un-produced, and the same must be true for almost all other engineers out there, the difference between them being the specific nature of the compromise being made.

[WEEZ]

Russell,

Do you think there is less compression used today? Or more?

WEEZ

[konut]

'A chain is as strong as its' weakest link'

At any point in the recording proccess something can be screwed up. Weather its the mastering engineer taking orders from the studio exec to go for maximum loudness all the time(no dynamics), to the producer who trying to make a folk singer sound like Frank Sinatra(over produced with 101 strings), to the recording engineer who records too 'hot', at any point a train wreck can occur.
     Its important to look at context.The Beatles were mentioned. The early albums were done in the B studios that 2nd and 3rd tier artists got because they didn't rate the A studio. Back in the day they sounded really good because George Martin was a classical engineer and he really knew his onions. By todays standards they sound thin and lifeless. Back then they sounded better than 90% of what you heard on the radio at the time. Most of you haven't heard the shlock that filled the airwaves at the time because the material, and recordings, don't hold up.
   A great recording is not easy to do. The great producers and engineers are as much artists as the musicians they record. The 1000s of choices that need to be made to get it right only come from experience , luck, and good teachers. Like any vituoso they make it LOOK easy.

[Russell Dawkins]

WEEZ, that's rather a big question since it really needs to be qualified by type of music and by global region.

I will say that never have such powerful tools been so widely available for elaborate (multiband) compression as there have been in the last 8 years or so, starting, in my mind, with the TC electronic Finalizer. This was a relatively affordable and good sounding multiband compressor which was used (and abused) a lot up 'till recently.

I know a lot of people in the industry are getting sick of thrashing mixes with excessive compression just to please the client who comes in with some loud CD  to be matched in level. I also sense that this is a passing phase and that soon everyone will be sick of this thick loud mush, including the least discerning clients, and the race will then be towards sounding "good", not "loud".

I personally see a parallel between this and a young kid getting his (I say "his" intentionally) first car.

The first preoccupation is with sheer power - it's such a novelty! After a while, the driver gets to see the advantage in other attributes, such as handing and brakes, then quietness, smoothness and comfort.

Well pop music aimed at the younger listener will probably always favour power and superficial flash over more subtle content.

It may be my imagination, but I sense a little mutiny in the air as regards meekly following clients' instructions. Maybe that's wishful thinking!

[WEEZ]

Russell, I hope you're right. 

Echoing a few comments here from earlier..I've got jazz recordings from the late 50's up thru the mid 60's that are just plain awesome. I've got some recent ones that are pretty good too. There seemed to be a period (mostly during the 70's, it seems) when recordings got, well, let's say, less than good 

I like to find live recordings when I can nowadays. Seem to have more dynamic range.....

[Russell Dawkins]

For the record, my personal check for whether I am using too much compression is to turn it up towards live levels. If it gets painful or objectionable before I get to natural levels, I know I am using too much compression - and make no mistake - I don't use a lot. On the other hand I almost always use some.

The rare exceptions might be something that was already miked at a distance, and already sounded complex and thick, like an outdoor orchestral recording I did recently in Armenia. The basic effect compression has is to bring the background forward and, in the process, reduce the sensation of front to back depth.

Some of that is good, but a little goes a long way and the engineer has to exercise restraint since more compression always pleases the client, especially if make-up gain is automatically added (as it often is these days with the clever plug-ins). This results in more compression creating a louder mix and, as any unscrupulous hi-fi salesman can tell you, a little louder always sounds better even if everything else is equal.

[shep]

"And by the way Shep, I don't think there is such a thing as "correctly" recorded. Recording is an artifice and all recordings should be seen as creative attempts to bridge the gap between stark reality and entertainment" Ok good point, well put. I want to backtrack, if you will indulge me. When Tas was a serious mag. with serious discussions going on, there were a lot, on as digital began to make it's first inroads. In essence it said the following (I'm paraphrasing from a deficient memory): the human brain/audio perception has an affinity for analogue (wave forms) which it "reads" as pleasant, musical. The digital "media" is about pulses...on/off, plus/minus. The brain has to do some tricky, and not always successfull decoding to make this input read as pleasant/musical. If this sounds like bunk, well it sure seemed to make sense at the time and was a far more complex discussion than my paltry paraphrase. Another way of saying this is the comparison of vinyl to redbook. Based on personal experience, the digital artifacts (is this the right word?) can be down-right ugly and unnerving. The analogue ones are usually only irritating and easier to hear thru to the musical event. (forgiving is another word that comes to mind) I don't want to start up an old and endless shoot out about this but I have extensively listened to both types. I would (rashly) say that out of my vinyl collection, 20% are excellent and the rest are good/mundane/bad. Obviously it is blissfull to forget about noisy, warped, off-centered records (to say nothing of that little pest that kept whispering "try the VTA just one more time") I have no intention of going back but something was lost along the way, something soulfull. I am not knocking the good work, both technically and artistically, that goes into today's recordings. I suspect economic pressures (what the French call "rentabilité") have a lot to do with what I perceive as a downward trend. Also I suspect recording engineers were more attuned to the the artists, were more relaxed and took more pleasure in their work back then. The actual period was very short, from the mid-60's to the late 80's. One slight correction in my lengthy talk-fest. I do not knock digital at all. On the contrary. I have a nicely modded Marantz, with no high-end pretensions, and sometimes it get's it so right that I know it can be done, I know real progress has been made. My reference cd for this experience is "Aras" by Corendero. This is supremely musical, transparent, Delicious. I never had a TT that could do what happens on this cd and I know I would have to spend very serious money to do so. (there goes my old TAS story out the window)
I don't know how to answer the question about what constitutes an audiophile recording. It just cries out and says "yes".

[Daygloworange]

The digital "media" is about pulses...on/off, plus/minus. The brain has to do some tricky, and not always successfull decoding to make this input read as pleasant/musical.

Total bunk. Easily proveable. You could edit out quite a bit of binary 0's and 1's in a recording, and put it next to an un-altered one and I'd like to see someone pick it out in an A/B comparison.

Now it's common knowledge that motion picture film's "sample rate" is 24 frames per second. Nobody I know has ever complained that the image was "choppy". CD's are at a sample rate of 44100 snapshots per second. 1837.5 times higher sample rate than that used for motion picture.

You can adjust frequency cutoff during the "sampling" phase of digital recording. Choose a lower cutoff frequency, and it'll alter the sample rate. Enabling you to have more memory( and record longer, anagalous to slowing down the speed of a reel to reel recorder and getting more record time). Sometimes it's even hard to hear the difference with a lower sample rate, even though there is a ton of information not being recorded.

Can someone hear the difference between digital and analogue. Yes. Can someone hear a few samples missing in a sample rate of 44.1k???

 

Cheers