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Which speakers are the Classical Music Pros using?

Sokel

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If you love that period of RCA Living Stereo more generally, this 2-cd set from the 1990s may be of interest. Mohr/Layton were behind some of the best Reiner/CSO recordings, but Pfeiffer also produced his fair share.

51mLGfl0hRL._SX425_.jpg
I don't only prefer,I pick and treasure everything I can find,CD's,vinyls,(I also have a reel-tape master copy of Scheherazade,gift from a dear friend and nothing to play it to ).
Great suggestion,thanks!
 

amadeuswus

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Will it be too much to try to know in which speakers and electronics the nice recordings of Fritz Reiner and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra were made?
There are amongst my absolute loved ones (ok,it's the performance mostly,but... ).
To get my response to your post back on track... according to the booklet that came with BMG's SACD reissue of Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade (and I believe other releases in the same series), the three-track RCA Living Stereo recordings used "tube-amplifier Ampex 300-3 1/2" machines running at 15ips and in later years at 30ips." "Neumann U-47 cardioid and M-49/50 omnidirectional microphones were favored, as were RCA-designed LC-1A 15" duo-cone speakers in the control room."

I imagine the speakers were the weakest link (some engineers still use the Neumann M-49 mic, for example!), but the recording teams managed back then, somehow.
 

Sokel

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To get my response to your post back on track... according to the booklet that came with BMG's SACD reissue of Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade (and I believe other releases in the same series), the three-track RCA Living Stereo recordings used "tube-amplifier Ampex 300-3 1/2" machines running at 15ips and in later years at 30ips." "Neumann U-47 cardioid and M-49/50 omnidirectional microphones were favored, as were RCA-designed LC-1A 15" duo-cone speakers in the control room."

I imagine the speakers were the weakest link (some engineers still use the Neumann M-49 mic, for example!), but the recording teams managed back then, somehow.
Now you got me tempted... :

(no luck with the amp)

Thanks again!
 

Descartes

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B&W wall-to-wall, it seems. (CD booklets from Decca and other classical labels used to say something like "Recorded using B&W loudspeakers.")

Looking at the BIS Studio 1 front wall with the inset TV monitor (?), I wonder if the front wall is covered with thick fiberglass absorbers, as the angled sides of the opening may suggest.
I used to have 3 800D2 and 6 802D2 sold them all and bought KEF!
 

Descartes

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An ex-Decca mastering engineer pal of mine (he left Decca UK when the Belsize Road concern closed and the Decca tape store and archive vaults was moved out of town) told me their B&W 801's and later M801's were basically given to them by B&W. He 'inherited' his 801's when the 'M801' series were introduced - his work power amp was a large HH MOS-FET I remember - V800 I think). Some Polygram 'pop' stuff was mastered in adjacent rooms and the main chap there used NS1000's. Abbey Road were delighted to use ATC 150A's many years back I was told until the 'B&W Invasion' but no idea if either of these were purchased or not.

Old 801's in a modern domestic setting can sound very impressive, even if not lifted off the floor as they were in said pal's mastering room (he turned the stands on their sides to gain some needed extra height), but I remember disliking the N801's when I heard them as it was all bass and lower mids, the 'presence' range kind-of missing - these in a large space well clear of walls and long before my ear infections which have left their scars..
Abbey Road gets them for free so Sound United can get free advertising!
 
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Every time I hear a loud bright master, I put a simple EQ and the recording actually sounds fine. I wish those B&W mastering rooms would vanish ...
It is somewhere in this thread. The sheer stupidity of equipping the control room with "polite" speakers to compensate for the bright string sound picked up by elevated mic positions. One can easily use lower mic positions, combined with not so bright mics. Or heaven forbid, EQ on the spot mics !

Even plenty of pop masters suffer from the same. The cure is the same. The "mastered" recording passes the OK of the musicians and the label, because at first glance, it sounds more impressive/louder. Louder always wins in quick decisions ... The label wants more loud more bright anyway, not quality per se.
 

Waxx

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I'm in no way a pro in sound engineering classical music, but in my student years 25 years ago) i worked freelance as assistant for the VRT (dutch speaking Belgian broadcast company) and assisted at quiet a few classical recordings at that time, sometimes in the VRT studio's in Brussels, sometimes in concert halls or churches. They were mostly using Klein & Hummel O300 and O500 speakers and ORTF mic setups with a few spot mics (for the solists mostly) at that time. What they use now, i don't know. I'm out of it since a few decades. It was only a student job...

The O300 became the Neumann KH310 and the O500 is the bigger brother of the O410 that became the Neumann KH420 now after Neumann took over the Klein & Hummel brand in 2005. Speakers did not change much but the name and amp IC's used btw. The layout and drivers are largely the same since then. Klein & Hummel were a great speaker company, but with very bad marketing and distribution outside Germany...
 

DJBonoBobo

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I'm in no way a pro in sound engineering classical music, but in my student years 25 years ago) i worked freelance as assistant for the VRT (dutch speaking Belgian broadcast company) and assisted at quiet a few classical recordings at that time, sometimes in the VRT studio's in Brussels, sometimes in concert halls or churches. They were mostly using Klein & Hummel O300 and O500 speakers and ORTF mic setups with a few spot mics (for the solists mostly) at that time. What they use now, i don't know. I'm out of it since a few decades. It was only a student job...

The O300 became the Neumann KH310 and the O500 is the bigger brother of the O410 that became the Neumann KH420 now after Neumann took over the Klein & Hummel brand in 2005. Speakers did not change much but the name and amp IC's used btw. The layout and drivers are largely the same since then. Klein & Hummel were a great speaker company, but with very bad marketing and distribution outside Germany...
Here is a 20 17 year old catalogue from Klein + Hummel, complete with full measurement sets of all their speakers. They were very good indeed: https://docplayer.org/161611834-Decoding-the-dna-of-sound-klein-hummel-studio-monitore.html
 
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sejarzo

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Even plenty of pop masters suffer from the same. The cure is the same. The "mastered" recording passes the OK of the musicians and the label, because at first glance, it sounds more impressive/louder. Louder always wins in quick decisions ... The label wants more loud more bright anyway, not quality per se.

My take is that it's rare that a pop master isn't overly bright. I listen primarily on Senn HD6XX EQ'd via convolution that makes them sound as close to correct on a variety of orchestral/wind band/acoustic recordings, and then add a broad 2-4 kHz cut (as much as 5 dB) with an additional -2 db shelf from there up to 20 kHz for pop/rock.

What baffles me about it is that I am 65, have a bit of tinnitus, plus known 6-8 kHz loss from my years working as an engineer in loud production facilities, even with proper PPE--not to mention, way too many years of listening to crappy Radio Shack headphones on cheap gear at inordinately high levels as a teen. With all that, I still find pop music is always way too bright. Even more baffling is that I see so many younger folks listening on earbuds with no seal that can't possibly result in proper bass reproduction. That has to sound like crap.
 
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My take is that it's rare that a pop master isn't overly bright. I listen primarily on Senn HD6XX EQ'd via convolution that makes them sound as close to correct on a variety of orchestral/wind band/acoustic recordings, and then add a broad 2-4 kHz cut (as much as 5 dB) with an additional -2 db shelf from there up to 20 kHz for pop/rock.

What baffles me about it is that I am 65, have a bit of tinnitus, plus known 6-8 kHz loss from my years working as an engineer in loud production facilities, even with proper PPE--not to mention, way too many years of listening to crappy Radio Shack headphones on cheap gear at inordinately high levels as a teen. With all that, I still find pop music is always way too bright. Even more baffling is that I see so many younger folks listening on earbuds with no seal that can't possibly result in proper bass reproduction. That has to sound like crap.
My conclusion would be :

1. many mastering studio have a flawed speaker/room interface
2. many mastering engineers have ear damaging

or. 3. They just have plain bad taste and or give in to financial pressure.

and then some younger radio stations still find the need to compress and brighten even more when putting stuff on air, while a lot of those engineers are actually quite young.

as a side anecdote, the first pop concert I went to with my kids, was disgustingly loud and bright, even with earplugs. Mixing was a young guy, the mixer of the band, using loudness measurement which actually showed levels that were at least 20 dB lower than what I was hearing ! That guy was seriously deaf, and must have “recalibrated” his measuring rig !
In Belgium you can actually get up to 2 years effective for this If people get hurt.
 
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tuga

tuga

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My conclusion would be :

1. many mastering studio have a flawed speaker/room interface
2. many mastering engineers have ear damaging

or. 3. They just have plain bad taste and or give in to financial pressure.

and then some younger radio stations still find the need to compress and brighten even more when putting stuff on air, while a lot of those engineers are actually quite young.

as a side anecdote, the first pop concert I went to with my kids, was disgustingly loud and bright, even with earplugs. Mixing was a young guy, the mixer of the band, using loudness measurement which actually showed levels that were at least 20 dB lower than what I was hearing ! That guy was seriously deaf, and must have “recalibrated” his measuring rig !
In Belgium you can actually get up to 2 years effective for this If people get hurt.
This topic is about classical music recording/production.
 
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This topic is about classical music recording/production.
I know, but the percentage of classical discs that suffer from this is not that much lower than pop/rock IME.
the resulting problem is the same, and often the mastering studios or setups are the same or similar.

Some speakers just do not belong in a mastering studio.
I have some bad experiences with the old K&H series as well. I clearly remember a mastering session that sounded fine on them. In my studio the overcompression in some spots was suddenly blatantly obvious. Which means the OD300 were masking the mastering compression. Not in a slight bit. Which makes them kindof useless in a mastering context ! This was a classical, fyi.
 
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tuga

tuga

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I know, but the percentage of classical discs that suffer from this is not that much lower than pop/rock IME.
the resulting problem is the same, and often the mastering studios or setups are the same or similar.

I disagree. I have many hundreds of classical music CDs and the very large majority is objectively and subjectively fine to excellent. Since many were monitored, mixed and/or mastered in B&W 800-series speakers it seems that these speakers are more than adequate for this purpose.
 

kongwee

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Some speakers just do not belong in a mastering studio.
I have some bad experiences with the old K&H series as well. I clearly remember a mastering session that sounded fine on them. In my studio the overcompression in some spots was suddenly blatantly obvious. Which means the OD300 were masking the mastering compression. Not in a slight bit. Which makes them kindof useless in a mastering context ! This was a classical, fyi.
I dunno how your studio does. I went some studio( not huge recording room for classical) and personally done some classical recording. I don't really need to compress even it is a studio. Once you do that you raise the background noise. Studio room, air con even mic pre. All I need to do just put a limiter. Up the gain and observe not over -0.3dB. You can say that not what limiter does. Well. it is just easy for me to observe peak and gain. Usually the dynamic is huge, and awfully quiet compare to rock song. I find I need to retain the sonic cue. I can raise the volume automation but I will not put up compression. It will make everything, erm heavy. I did compare to commercial recording. In term of DRC or LUFS, I don't need to change volume control too much with commercial recording. In concert hall or open space, I don't use compression.
 

Keith_W

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I disagree. I have many hundreds of classical music CDs and the very large majority is objectively and subjectively fine to excellent. Since many were monitored, mixed and/or mastered in B&W 800-series speakers it seems that these speakers are more than adequate for this purpose.

May I ask if your preference in terms of performers meant that they were recorded at a certain era? Nearly all modern (i.e produced after 2000) have "fine to excellent" sound, so I would agree with you there. However this was not the case for some labels in some eras. Deutsche Grammofon from the early digital age (80's) up till the late 90's had a notoriously muddy sound. Prior to that they sounded mostly decent but not outstanding. Decca from the 50's up to late 90's had variable quality, some were really good, and some not so great (good example is Solti's Wagner Ring cycle, supposedly a breakthrough in sound quality with the famous John Culshaw, but modern remasterings sound awful). The same variable quality can be heard with EMI of all eras. The only consistently good recordings (as in, I haven't heard a bad sounding disc from this label) come from Hyperion, ECM, Alia Vox, and surprisingly - modern Deutsche Grammofon.

I have a few thousand CD's because that's the only music I listen to. My focus is on collecting historical, famous, or unusual performances, which usually means digging through older recordings and sometimes on smaller labels. For example, Jascha Horenstein's recordings of Mahler are particularly rare, and you have to really hunt down small labels that I have never heard of, e.g. Unicorn-Kanchana, VoxBox Legends, and so on.

My point is, if your taste leads you to some performers (which would mean recordings were made at a certain era), you might form a biased view of classical recordings. I could on balance say that nearly all classical music from the earliest recordings in the 1920's to early-mid digital era are inferior to modern recordings, which would mean that the majority of recordings were substandard.

I would also like to know how you determine a recording to be "objectively fine to excellent". The only way I know of is to listen to it.
 
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