Which speakers are the Classical Music Pros using?

[Newman]

On what basis is it “worth seeking out”? There are so many done with more mics and no worse or possibly better, surely? So, why pick this one?

 

[amadeuswus]

On what basis is it “worth seeking out”? There are so many done with more mics and no worse or possibly better, surely? So, why pick this one?

From your prior posts in this thread about multi-mike techniques, maybe you would prefer a more typical presentation. I like "purist" recordings with the mikes placed at a comfortable distance from the performers. To me it sounds more real and less hyped, but of course it's a matter of taste.

 

[Newman]

It’s a matter of cognitive bias, not taste, if you are preferring outputs based on inputs. Classic hifi hobbyist error.

 

[amadeuswus]

It’s a matter of cognitive bias, not taste, if you are preferring outputs based on inputs. Classic hifi hobbyist error.

Ok, maybe it's worth seeking out this Grieg recording on Simax if you are prone to this sort of cognitive bias/hobbyist error. [Edit: It can be streamed on Amazon Music and Tidal.]

 

[tuga]

From your prior posts in this thread about multi-mike techniques, maybe you would prefer a more typical presentation. I like "purist" recordings with the mikes placed at a comfortable distance from the performers. To me it sounds more real and less hyped, but of course it's a matter of taste.

You're not allowed to have any taste that is not the accepted taste.

 

[Blumlein 88]

I have done several different mikings concurrently on a small musical group's practice sessions. There were two sessions, but in the same moderate sized church and the musicians in the same positions.

My preference was for spaced omnis. Followed by a Jecklin pair with flanking omnis which I slightly preferred to an ORTF pair with flanking omnis. Next I preferred multi-miking. Last were a crossed pair of figure 8s and worst an MS pair (with or without flanking omnis). The latter two seemed to trail the others considerably in my preference ranking.

I played the spaced omnis, multi-miked, ortf and figure 8's for the musicians. All preferred the multi-miking. Then a slight preference for spaced omnis over the ORTF w/omnis. All disliked the crossed figure 8's. The figure 8 pair just had too much room sound even though I had placed them where I thought they might be too close.

I also using a different playback system used spaced omnis and flanking omnis over 4 speakers. Two up front and two in the rear. That was probably the best to me. And of course using the flanking omnis over the rear speakers seemed to help the Jecklin disc and ORTF as well.

So the musicians were single blind, I didn't tell them what was different just let them listen to 4 different things and pick. I was sighted about it all.

FWIW etc etc.

I wanted to try multi-miking with all omnis. I spread the musicians out further apart. When I did that it messed with them hearing each other and the timing between them too much. So the performance suffered.

 

[amadeuswus]

I have done several different mikings concurrently on a small musical group's practice sessions. There were two sessions, but in the same moderate sized church and the musicians in the same positions.

My preference was for spaced omnis. Followed by a Jecklin pair with flanking omnis which I slightly preferred to an ORTF pair with flanking omnis. Next I preferred multi-miking. Last were a crossed pair of figure 8s and worst an MS pair (with or without flanking omnis). The latter two seemed to trail the others considerably in my preference ranking.

I played the spaced omnis, multi-miked, ortf and figure 8's for the musicians. All preferred the multi-miking. Then a slight preference for spaced omnis over the ORTF w/omnis. All disliked the crossed figure 8's. The figure 8 pair just had too much room sound even though I had placed them where I thought they might be too close.

I also using a different playback system used spaced omnis and flanking omnis over 4 speakers. Two up front and two in the rear. That was probably the best to me. And of course using the flanking omnis over the rear speakers seemed to help the Jecklin disc and ORTF as well.

So the musicians were single blind, I didn't tell them what was different just let them listen to 4 different things and pick. I was sighted about it all.

FWIW etc etc.

I wanted to try multi-miking with all omnis. I spread the musicians out further apart. When I did that it messed with them hearing each other and the timing between them too much. So the performance suffered.

(We've drifted far from Tuga's original post, but he hasn't complained within the last few posts, so here goes...)

A preference test like this could mean many things. Among other things, perhaps the musicians in this group especially liked the multi-miking because it sounds, to them, the closest to the way they hear other in their normal setup. Or because each person can hear himself or herself the most clearly (musicians being as vain as artists are in general)?

Suppose you had asked each member in turn to sit in the church at a normal (reasonable distance) audience location to listen to the rest of the group perform. After each pass, you quickly usher the member who sat out to the monitor room to compare live vs. recorded over your high-quality system. Critically, you ask, not what each person prefers, but which of the unidentified versions comes closest to the live experience from the audience location. Would "all" the musicians still vote for the multi-miking? I doubt it.

Maybe most people wouldn't want the audience-location live sound at home even if they could have it. But it doesn't seem crazy to be in the minority who like it, if that's what you happen to like!

 

[tuga]

Maybe most people wouldn't want the audience-location live sound at home even if they could have it. But it doesn't seem crazy to be in the minority who like it, if that's what you happen to like!

I do think that we are a very small minority.
Close mic'ing gives an immediacy and presence that you can't get with a distant minimalist setup and makes the reproducion more exciting.

 

[Blumlein 88]

(We've drifted far from Tuga's original post, but he hasn't complained within the last few posts, so here goes...)

A preference test like this could mean many things. Among other things, perhaps the musicians in this group especially liked the multi-miking because it sounds, to them, the closest to the way they hear other in their normal setup. Or because each person can hear himself or herself the most clearly (musicians being as vain as artists are in general)?

Suppose you had asked each member in turn to sit in the church at a normal (reasonable distance) audience location to listen to the rest of the group perform. After each pass, you quickly usher the member who sat out to the monitor room to compare live vs. recorded over your high-quality system. Critically, you ask, not what each person prefers, but which of the unidentified versions comes closest to the live experience from the audience location. Would "all" the musicians still vote for the multi-miking? I doubt it.

Maybe most people wouldn't want the audience-location live sound at home even if they could have it. But it doesn't seem crazy to be in the minority who like it, if that's what you happen to like!

One of the first things that was like a slap in the face it was so obvious when I did some recording was about this idea of artist's intent, and them being the arbiter of what sounded right. They are holding their own instrument and among other musicians listening to each other. They have NO IDEA how they or the group sound 10 meters away or what that should sound like. In a studio recording which is artificial sure, they should say how they want it to sound. As arbiters of an attempt at realistic sound....they are the last people who would know.

Yes for the most part they want to hear themselves and how the group together was working. Quite understandable really. How could us audiophiles have been so foolish to think otherwise.

As an audiophile I love it when a good recording sounds like it opens up the end of my listening room to seem like a good facsimile of a larger space. To hear music in the space in which it was performed. Gives it a sense of realism. Almost everyone else and doubly so for musicians don't even want that. To them it is noise added to the music and they only want to hear the music. So the sound of space is somewhere between being of no value to them or being detrimental. Now what they do like is processing to use the sonic-scape as an artistic tool being part of the music. Like say Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. Or the way such things are used in movies. For non-audiophiles the music without the space is what they are listening to hear. Close miking to hear it with more vibrancy is preferable to reality.

The other thing is good minimalist recordings that are unadulterated by compression or other processing sound good in my listening room late at night with a pretty good gear. Or in a quiet environment with excellent phones. Anywhere else they are effectively unusable. Everyone wants to hear the music while listening in their car or similar environments. When I was younger almost everyone had a stereo even if not a good one. Now nearly no one does. The one in their car is probably the best they have, and a few, not many might have a soundbar on their TV. Otherwise they are listening over cheap earbuds over their phone. Well done minimalist recordings don't have a place effectively.

Obviously not everything has to be for everywhere and everytime or all the time. You can also use some tasteful compression and a few other tricks to make such a recording at least marginally useful in places like your car. Such recordings are more niche that ever before and I don't see that changing.

 

[Yannick Willox]

The other thing is good minimalist recordings that are unadulterated by compression or other processing sound good in my listening room late at night with a pretty good gear. Or in a quiet environment with excellent phones. Anywhere else they are effectively unusable. Everyone wants to hear the music while listening in their car or similar environments. When I was younger almost everyone had a stereo even if not a good one. Now nearly no one does. The one in their car is probably the best they have, and a few, not many might have a soundbar on their TV. Otherwise they are listening over cheap earbuds over their phone. Well done minimalist recordings don't have a place effectively.

Indeed. But no.
i check my recordings on ipad pro and megaboom 3 speakers, and they sound great.
On these devices I can still clearly hear the problems of many recordings, or the qualities of good recordings.

it is my point entirely that a good recording, being minimalist or a big multimic approach, can sound convincing on cheap playback devices.
however, the minimalist, you are there recording, can go wrong badly on a weird “audiophile” system.

 

[Blumlein 88]

Indeed. But no.
i check my recordings on ipad pro and megaboom 3 speakers, and they sound great.
On these devices I can still clearly hear the problems of many recordings, or the qualities of good recordings.

it is my point entirely that a good recording, being minimalist or a big multimic approach, can sound convincing on cheap playback devices.
however, the minimalist, you are there recording, can go wrong badly on a weird “audiophile” system.

Don't know what to say. Does not match my experience. I don't think I'm using weird audiophile systems.

 

[Yannick Willox]

No such confusion in my mind: I only mentioned ‘one mic in the audience seat position’ as an example of people being purist about how a recording is made.

But no matter where you put that one mic, and no matter how much you personally love the result, the result can be easily surpassed with competent multi-mic recording technique. Look up Dr Mark Waldrep (PhD in music, lifelong studio owner and recorder, university lecturer in sound recording) who says that an A/B of best single mic and best multi mic will result in the latter winning easily.

Personal experience is not the way to decide these things: it will only reveal your cognitive biases.

If you read my post more accurately, you will see my main point is that being purist about inputs is tail-wagging-dog.

cheers, and welcome to ASR!

i would surely hope to have cognitive bias, after making professional recordings for 29 years. It helps me get through soundchecks quicker, getting onto producing/recording quicker.

I do not suffer from your inputs go to outputs cognitive bias, if that even is a thing.
I gladly put one or three or seventeen spot mics, if needed.
Only, when my mix is done, the end result will still sound to you as a minimalist one mic recording, because that is simply the aesthetic I strive for.

My workflow and goals may be personal, but I have no unhappy clients. Usually I get responses like, “finally I have a recording that sounds like me”. Yes, they can even hear it at home on their crappy system, as 99% of all musicians have.

That kind of response does not make me happy, it shows how big the problem is in the classical recording business.

I will look up Dr Mark Waldrep, but if you can point me to good literature that would help. All I find in a couple of minutes is a book for audiophiles, something I would never write myself. Maybe one day a good book on purist recoding and production techniques, orrecording psychology. I do not see the point in writing for audiophiles, when so much still can be done on the recording side.

 

[amadeuswus]

As an audiophile I love it when a good recording sounds like it opens up the end of my listening room to seem like a good facsimile of a larger space. To hear music in the space in which it was performed. Gives it a sense of realism. Almost everyone else and doubly so for musicians don't even want that. To them it is noise added to the music and they only want to hear the music. So the sound of space is somewhere between being of no value to them or being detrimental.

I couldn't agree more with the first part of this quote from your post. I want to believe that I am there, not here in my little room listening to the spot-lit sound of the ensemble. (On a different subject, what's the point of having multi-channel surround, which I like, if it's obvious from your front speakers that you are right on top of the musicians?)

As for musicians not wanting the audience location sound, maybe it's true of most musicians. But not of me, at any rate (I've played violin in dozens of commercial orchestral recordings). I wonder if more people would warm up to the purist approach if there were more well recorded examples out there. But we have the prevailing practice, and it's all that most people know.

 

[NTK]

An except from this paper by Dr. David Griesinger. (Note: The paper is focused on producing recordings intended to be listened to by more than 1 listeners.)

http://www.davidgriesinger.com/threedpm.pdf

Main microphones and the Hall Radius​

​

The problems of typical main microphones are even more profound. We are taught - correctly - that we cannot pick up the direct sound from an instrument with a microphone that is at a distance greater than the hall radius (critical distance). (The hall radius is the distance at which the direct sound and the reverberant sound are equal in power.) Yet we are also taught to use main microphones. These two teachings cannot be true at the same time!​

​

Many halls have a hall radius of less than five meters, and a stage house typically has a hall radius of less than three meters. Most instruments in an orchestra are more than five meters from any main microphone position. If we made a recording with the main microphone alone, the result would be unusable. Nearly all the instruments will sound too far away. Every practicing engineer knows this fact.​

​

So we add "support microphones" to pick up the missing direct sound and add it to the recording. These microphones are close enough to the instruments to pick up the direct sound without too much reflected energy. But if the support microphones are supplying the direct sound – why are they called “support”? They are really the main microphones!​

​

We can easily prove the importance of the “support” microphones. When the main microphone is separated from a particular instrument by several hall radii, The direct sound is almost inaudible. The total loudness for a particular instrument comes from the sum of the reflected energy. In practice we are told to bring up the level of the “support” microphone until we easily hear it. In this case the direct sound from the “support” will be stronger than the direct sound in the “main” by many decibels. If fact, if the recording is to have the clarity and separation most conductors demand in a commercial recording, the energy from the “support” microphone from any ONE particular instrument will be greater than the total energy in the “main” microphone for this instrument.​

​

In fact, in nearly any successful commercial recording the front image is supplied entirely by the “support” microphones, and the main microphone merely supplies some of the reflected energy and reverberation. The main microphone increases the apparent distance and blend of some of the instruments – but it does not work well for all of them. There is a better way to achieve the same result.​

​

So… we will talk about how to make a terrific recording without assuming the listener is centered between the speakers. That means finding solutions which work within the constraints listed above. Perhaps, when we are through, our recording will be even better when the listener is centered. But this is not our goal.​

 

[youngho]

Suppose you had asked each member in turn to sit in the church at a normal (reasonable distance) audience location to listen to the rest of the group perform. After each pass, you quickly usher the member who sat out to the monitor room to compare live vs. recorded over your high-quality system. Critically, you ask, not what each person prefers, but which of the unidentified versions comes closest to the live experience from the audience location. Would "all" the musicians still vote for the multi-miking? I doubt it.

I have brought up in another forum a previous objection about individual performer preference when it comes to recording practices (there is the classic story of Rubinstein wanting to hear more and more of himself: https://www.hifinews.com/content/recording-classics-page-2, also Glenn Gould's wish to capture only the sound of the piano itself: http://attention.princeton.edu/issues/how-musicians-think-about-space/4-acoustic-orchestrations). Also interesting is the perspective of some classical guitar recording engineers ("Now, I wouldn’t go as far as to say that you’ll get a perfectly good recording by putting up a pair of mics several rows back from the stage in a concert hall—such a recording would almost certainly sound impossibly dim and distant"), where there does seem to be some input from the artists themselves ("I find that most players still want a recording that sounds realistic and natural"): https://classicalguitarmagazine.com...-john-taylor-norbert-kraft-and-ricardo-marui/

Something along these lines of @amadeuswus proposed seems to be what occurred at the BBC decades ago, but not in terms of recording technique but rather in terms of loudspeaker development, where the studio engineers were able to pop out into the studio and compare what they were hearing in the control room with what they could hear in the studio. However, I have been attempting to learn more about the history of this, and from what I can tell, Studio 1 at Maida Vale (https://www.bbc.com/historyofthebbc/buildings/maida-vale/ and https://www.soundonsound.com/music-business/bbc-maida-vale-studios) was the primary studio for classical orchestral recording. In a cursory search, I could not find much about the control room for Studio 1, except for this description from the report regarding the development of the LS5/8 (http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rd/pubs/reports/1979-22.pdf): "the studio control room has a rather adverse acoustic; as well as the usual control desk, equipment bays, and asymmmetrically placed window, it has a sloped ceiling." The report does note that the other room in the initial development was a listening room that "attempt[ed] to create an ideal listening environment" (I wonder whether this is the one referenced in reports like http://www.keith-snook.info/wireles...s-World-1968/Stereophonic Image Sharpness.pdf, since I've seen the room diagram elsewhere) and that "subsequent field trials [were] carried out in a variety of listening environments."

A "high-quality system" was mentioned, but I was surprised to read this description of BBC's Maida Vale Studio One control room itself. Any additional information regarding Studio One's control room in the era of the BBC LS series speaker development would be much appreciated.

Young-Ho

 

[Geert]

also Glenn Gould's wish to capture only the sound of the piano itself: http://attention.princeton.edu/issues/how-musicians-think-about-space/4-acoustic-orchestrations).

In this podcast you here it from a famous musician. The more room sound is being captured, the more detail you loose. So it's not about what 'sounds real', it's about what sounds best. Sometimes it's better to give nature a helping hand.

 

[youngho]

In this podcast you here it from a famous musician. The more room sound is being captured, the more detail you loose. So it's not about what 'sounds real', it's about what sounds best. Sometimes it's better to give nature a helping hand.

I'm not sure that I would extrapolate from Glenn Gould's own personal preferences, as the proximity of the microphone placement could allow for the captured detail to include his humming. Similarly, I sometimes find the excessive breathing noises of violinists to be distracting.

 

[Geert]

I'm not sure that I would extrapolate from Glenn Gould's own personal preferences, as the proximity of the microphone placement could allow for the captured detail to include his humming. Similarly, I sometimes find the excessive breathing noises of violinists to be distracting.

Extremes are to be avoided of course. Gould's project mentioned in the podcast shows on average the truth is in the middle.

 

[Frgirard]

In this podcast you here it from a famous musician. The more room sound is being captured, the more detail you loose. So it's not about what 'sounds real', it's about what sounds best. Sometimes it's better to give nature a helping hand.

Gould was probably the loudest pianist sitting in a loud chair, sometimes playing loud pianos. gould was a poet and there was a long way from intention to action.

 

[ahofer]

Keith Jarrett is another noisy player.