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PlayClassics TRT v2.0 master file giveaway for ASR members

NorthSky

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Thanks for all the latest links Mario...it gives us another great perspective towards what efforts went into those transparent music recordings. :cool:
 
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amirm

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As I was typing the above post, the drum solos finished downloading. I have been doing my listening with my (new) etymotic in ear monitors so I need to re-listen on the main system.

For now, this track also highlights the benefits of Mario's recording technique. My son plays drums and the sound when he is playing is always so different than what I hear in recorded music. This recording however reminds of him playing live for me.

What is nailed here is clarity and purity of the recording. It sounds a bit flat perhaps due to that but it also very, very clean.

Ambiance of the recording venue is definitely a plus.

My sense based on this limited data is that the format excels best when there are not too many competing instruments.

Again, great work Mario.
 
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Mario Martinez

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Hi Amir,

yes, it might be interesting to listen to those experimental samples. They are just straight takes we made to see how our technology would work with different genres.

We have some flamenco (voice and guitar) some drums solos (drums set of 11 pieces) and some instrumental rock (guitar, bass, drums)

The piano, the guitar and the drums are probably in opposite sides of the "good practice recording manual" but we are recording them all the same way. We are using the same mics at the same distance (12 feet apart from the instruments) So I think listening to all these instruments on the recordings pretty much gives you a feeling of what this technology is all about.

If anybody wants to try please say so and I will PM the links to download these experimental samples.
 
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amirm

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Thanks Mario. It seems to me that once you forego cooking the mix in studio, then it becomes important how the instruments are placed in the room. So perhaps further manipulation of the rock instruments would result in something better.

What was the reaction of the rock group to the recording?
 

Vincent Kars

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I have been doing my listening with my (new) etymotic in ear monitors so I need to re-listen on the main system.

ERP4?
I love them for their excellent noise isolation, one can even listen to classical on planes and trains.
Very revealing, excellent to listen to a recording
The down side is that they are very unforgiving
 
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Mario Martinez

Mario Martinez

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Thanks Mario. It seems to me that once you forego cooking the mix in studio, then it becomes important how the instruments are placed in the room. So perhaps further manipulation of the rock instruments would result in something better.

The purpose of our setup is to record the musical event exactly the way it happened, it is a documentary approach. This type of recording is very demanding on the musicians. Here the artists are responsible for the balance between instruments, just like they would be in an acoustic live performance without any amplification. Once we capture that performance, there is nothing we can do to alter that balance. The artists have to be able to control their dynamics to balance out the performance for themselves.

Classical music artists are used to doing this. They do it at every performance. But what happens when you try to record other genres?

Rock or even flamenco is always recorded using close miking techniques. They are used to having the engineer balance their performance at the mixing table.

This musicians (the rock and the flamenco) were just here for a while (they were doing us a favor, we did not keep them long) Had they been here long enough, I am sure we would have gotten much better results. We would have had time to try different arrangements and they would have had time to adapt their instruments to the sound of our hall.

This experimental samples are just sound tests that we were recording for ourselves. We would take all the time in the world if we were to make an album :)
 

amirm

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ERP4?
I love them for their excellent noise isolation, one can even listen to classical on planes and trains.
Very revealing, excellent to listen to a recording
The down side is that they are very unforgiving
It is the new ER4 SR. And they are all that indeed. I had bought my last pair 15 years ago! It still worked great but the cord had become sticky. So I thought it was time for a new one.
 
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Mario Martinez

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I would like to explain something about the Drums samples. This might only affect people who are using large stereo setups to reproduce these recordings (by large I mean the distance from the listening point to the speakers)

You might find that when you playback the Drums samples on your systems, the image of the Drums set is bigger than it should be in relation to the playback image of the piano.

I know Thomas likes my pictures :) so I have taken the time to draw some more see if I could explain why this is happening.


Here is a sketch of how all our piano recordings are made. The picture on the left corresponds to the recording setup. The picture on the right would be the image produced on your systems:
drums1.png

As you can see, the recording setup is built so that we can achieve a realistic size image during playback.


Now, here is a sketch of how we should have recorded the drums:
drums2.png

Had we done it this way, the playback image of the drums would have had a realistic size too (at least compared to the playback image on the piano recordings)


But this is what we did:
drums3.png

We were lazy enough not to move the piano out of the stage (guess we should have) so we ended up recording the drums closer to the mic than they should have been. That is the reason for the playback image of the Drums samples being a little bigger than it should (specially if you compare it to the piano recordings)

I hope this makes sense :)
 
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