All that said, this is of course true. There are good mics and bad mics, but still, even the best mic on the planet hooked up to the best mic pre on the planet, is only going to give us a pretty sorry excuse of the actual event.
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Limitations of blind testing procedures
- Thread starter oivavoi
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All that said, this is of course true. There are good mics and bad mics, but still, even the best mic on the planet hooked up to the best mic pre on the planet, is only going to give us a pretty sorry excuse of the actual event.
Microphones look a lot like our ears, so I don't think they are problematic for the reasons you are implying. Where they fail is in capturing the information that we take for granted when we move our heads. Small movements help us to build up a more complex image of the 'scene'. To reproduce it, we would need to be able to track the listener's head and reproduce the acoustics at every position and angle - this can only really be done practically by synthesising the result from first principles. (The gaming industry already does this).
Ironically, people who wish to 'remove the room' from their audio, are seeking to remove something that ameliorates the problem of playing back a recording made with static mics and does give us some illusion of being in a real space that responds when we turn our heads.
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Surely it's the playback that is the limiting factor here..? As long as it doesn't overload, the mic will record the pressure variations that fall upon it. If we wish to reproduce the drumkit at realistic volume, we need some meaty speakers.
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Agreed.
And the only way to get it back is to buy super expensive cables that send audio signals with the speed of light!
As Cosmik stated, it is playback limitations. Physics of speakers have nothing to do with it; but the ability of the amplifier to drive the speakers well has everything to do with it - an audio show blast of drums on bigger Dynaudio speakers, driven by amplifiers that behaved themselves, gave an excellent rendition of the "real thing" - most amps are incompetent at high volumes, and trying to reproduce these sort of instruments at realistic SPLs makes this very obvious.
"Removing the room" is not a problem - there are enough cues and ambient information in recordings, if well reproduced, for the mind to build a picture of "real space" that corresponds to the ones captured in the recordings, whether natural or added in the studio. For most, it would require experiencing a system working well enough to appreciate this - but of course this happens very rarely "in the wild" ...
Don't forget the risers. Elevate them cables.
So what you're saying is that you've never heard a band performing live. Makes sense.
Youtube is awesome though.
Well, I take zero notice of the crappy rubbish coming through a PA system, which aims to destroy the maximum number of ear drums in its vicinity ... but I have been to endless band rehearsal get togethers, where all you hear is the raw sound of the musicians' gear: guitar amps, drums, etc. Sorta like what they do in a recording studio ...
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Did I mention PA systems?
The point I'm making is that a competent playback system should be able to reproduce the energy and drive of a group like that - maybe not to the peak SPLs, for a particular setup, but one could assemble such a rig, if you want to ...
watchnerd
Grand Contributor
1. Physics has to do with everything
2. Amps don't have a volume absent a speaker interface. Perhaps you mean output.
3. How do you measure "incompetence"?
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