Yes, this is exactly the aim of mixers and masterers, and should a) make us more generously appreciative of their professional skills; and b) lay to rest once and for all various misguided notions like the "circle of confusion" and "can't appreciate the product unless we have the same speakers and room as the engineer." The whole point is to make the product "sound good" everywhere, not just in the production environment.
I have a fairly extensive collection of Baroque and Early music myself. But let's not kid ourselves, it's not exactly a mainstream preference.
With a good record of those genres, the difference will be that the better the system, the better the detail. However, well-recorded Bach or Monteverdi should sound relatively well even over a cell phone speaker.
Reality is overrated when it comes to anything. When we accept that even the mathematical based realms of science like the Standard Model are incomplete, therefore not a "true" representation of nature, even though aspects are accurate to 14 decimal places, it still can't reconcile the very small with the very large mechanics of nature. So, is reality the accuracy that we can measure and predict, like Q.E.D. or the fact that it can't explain Dark Matter, Dark Energy or cover the spread consistently in Vegas? The first page of Max Tegmark's book "Our Mathematical Universe", relates his near death experience (reality) in a personal anecdote. Sure, you can take on Feynman, Tegmark, Bell, etc... if you want... I don't have the chops for that. Or as objectivists, we can accept that reality is incomplete and even in light of hyper accurate measurements and predictability, is still subjective. Reality has never been what "we" ever thought it was, otherwise, we'd know what makes the universe tick and what happened a second before the big bang... and we simply don't.This article appeared a while back in an on-line audiophile review site. (The type I'd guess most people here wouldn't visit).
I thought it was quite insightful as a message from a recording engineer/mixer/producer to audiophiles wanting naturalistic recordings and realism.
It does cover aspects of discussions here and in most audiophile forums. But it was nice to see it sort of tied up in a bow in an article:
Reality Is Overrated When It Comes to Recordings:
How Recordings Are Produced, and What It Means to Your Hi-Fi | The Ivory Tower
Hi-Fi news, gear reviews, and interviewsparttimeaudiophile.com
My take: Assuming one agrees with the gist of the article, it does make sense of the approach of those audiophiles (typical of ASR members I think) where you just want to accurately reproduce the recording. All the production choices and effects in so much recorded music is what it is: artistic choices for the most part, and that's what one wants to hear, not some enforced "realism" per se. (But also, if a recording is meant to sound natural, it should come across that way in an accurate system).
Personally I generally agree: I consider all the production choices and artificiality to be part of the artistic content (which they obviously are). And, as cliche as it may be to say, so many of those "audiophile recordings" - minimalist micing, low compression yadda, yadda - often come across as pretty bland. I remember when a pal of mine who was a guitarist in a local artsy pop/folksy band became an audiophile and convinced the band and recording engineers to go for a more audiophile-approved "natural" minimally mic'd presentation. Well, yeah, it sounded a bit more "real" or natural in some aspects, but artistically it took a step back and just sort of "sat there" in that bland way of many audiophile recordings. To my ears it was a failure relative to their previously produced recordings.
(BTW, I'm on record here on being fascinated by live vs reproduced sound, and wanting to nudge my sound a bit more towards "natural/real" in some ways, but not in some fool's errand goal of everything sounding truly real, just enough flavour to taste, without losing the distinctive character of different recordings).
I'm curious about other people's thoughts on the article or subject.
I think its fair to seek out recordings that strive to capture that realism. I know when I finally acquired a nice system in a dedicated space I appreciated that style of recording much more and reached more frequently for those recordings. So if that's the standard you apply to the recordings you seek to playback, there are no issues.
I'd say the true innovator of studio as instrument was Les Paul, the first to master overdubbing:
Agree. The best rock live band sounds I've heard have been where only the vocals are amplified through the PA. It only works for smallish venues, but man, nothing beats a truly live cranked marshal stack.
I extensively recorded [mostly concerts] Baroque/Early music as the recording engineer for the San Francisco Early Music Society, a decade in the 1990s. This kind of music is usually best recorded with an ORTF pair like Neumanns or Schoeps [the Colette series is about as good as it gets for harpsichords], and the only real adjustment one has is microphone location and angle. Very small movements of the microphone stand made noticeable, audible differences. But other than positioning the microphone stand and selecting the microphones, there isn't all that much one has to do to get first rate results with a minimalist technique like this. Orchestra or choral recordings usually need room microphones as well [I used small diaphragm omni condensers] and sometimes I'd use a few additional spot microphones, but purist techniques mean a lot less microphones and manipulation of the recording than in pop productions. I think part of the reason music like Baroque chamber music and Chamber Jazz is associated with "audiophile" sound is that it's easier to record and play back. Rock, however, is heavily manipulated to sound good on the type of gear it's likely to be listened on. I've noticed a lot of complaints about Adele's productions. However, my sense is that she is the first superstar of the Smartphone era, and her recordings are intended to sound good over the speakers of smartphones. Bach mostly will sound like crap over the speaker of a smartphone.
Yup. Math that can evoke emotion...
I agree completely. I like to bring an aesthetic to my mixes as well.
A genre I happen to love very much. I will often listen to Steely Dan and then let some Pitch Black roll through. I am often having to defend electronica to people who feel that it isn't music at all and any idiot with a computer and a samples library can make good electronica. I have consistently challenged these critics to put their money where their mouth is and create electronic music that others enjoy. To this point, nobody has taken me up on it. I actually think that I almost now prefer electronic music.
You might like to spend time there, but by what measure is it big?
