Robin L
Master Contributor
I particularly notice the presence factor of live music with drums 'n' bass. I'm not talking about stadium PA, where everything is ultimately determined by the house sound system, getting homogenized in the process. But being in the kind of proximity of an unamplified drum kit and an electric bass one would experience in a small club really sorts out the textures of the sound in a way that all recordings dilute.I get that and I see a lot of audiophiles say "most live shows have crap sound compared to my home system, so why would I care about live?"
I feel differently. Certainly I've been to shows with truly terrible sound (and some of those have been the giant concerts - in fact they are more prone to that IMO). But even when instruments are amplified, I still find live sound generally more compelling in character.
I used to play keyboards and sometimes bass in a very large funk band - up to 15 members sometimes, including percussion, horn sections, 4 singers etc. We had some pretty good PA systems and I used to marvel at how great it sounded - whether it was the horns or my keyboards through the system, there was a liveness and even timbral richness, not to mention dynamic quality - that outdid any "hi fi" system I knew.
I live near a strip of clubs and bars with tons of live music - folk, pop, country, rock, jazz, everything in between. Whether it's mixes of live instruments and amplified, or when they've amplified everything, I still find more richness in the live sound.
I think if you play an instrument that is usually amplified - keyboards or bass in my case, or electric guitar - the sound coming from your cabinet is "the sound" of your instrument, and that direct sound has quite a lot of timbral character and richness. But once you go in to the recordings studio and record it, and then mix it in with other stuff, it gets diluted in every way - complexity, dynamics, presence. It's just limpid compared to the real thing, even though the real thing was amplified. So I hear more richness in someone playing an amplified Fender Rhodes, or Hammond, or modern keyboard, or their guitar or even amplified drums, in many live gigs, than I do from hi fi systems. IMO of course.