Which speakers are the Classical Music Pros using?

[Galliardist]

Close-mic’ing has three characteristics which I find damaging to the recording of classical music:
- it changes the timbre of instruments, something which can be partly addressed but not completely solved with EQ
- consequently it requires more EQ
- it requires multiple tracks and mixing of those tracks
- it picks up unmusical mechanical and mouth noises which are distracting and not audible in live conditions from the audience

Some labels like BIS or can use spot mics in an orchestral music recording in a balanced way, others like Reference Recordings overdo it and the result is to me somewhat hyper-realistic though undeniably exciting to listen to, and there’s the extreme approach e.g. Harmonia Mundi which I just avoid buying or listening to.

i don't see that the post from @Newman actually mandated close miking... he's asking for an appropriate recording technique for each particular recording. That may be close miking, but it can as easily be microphones placed at a distance, crossed pair for stereo, a 5.1 in room array or whatever.

It also depends on what you mean by classical music and the ensemble or soloist concerned. I listen to a lot of classical guitar, lute, and small groups, in smaller halls and rooms where those "unmusical noises" are still audible and part of the performance. Hearing a wind soloist's breath in an orchestral performance, though, I'm in agreement with you.

 

[Galliardist]

A recording engineer with a lot of acoustical music experience, Mark Waldrep, has unequivocally stated that close-mic multi-mic recording enables much more enjoyable recordings when played back. The absence of close mics simply cripples the potential final result.

To be honest, that's what matters.

Also, trying to simulate the experience of sitting in the audience is a classic -- pardon the pun-- case of wrong goal.

Firstly, it's impossible to do, for human psycho-perceptual reasons. The mere act, of being in the same room as the performers and witnessing live and being in an audience, is said by perception experts to engage different channels of communication and neuro responses, and that sitting at home alone or with a few friends and experiencing music playback will never open the same neural channels. So, even if audio technically became perfect and managed to exactly, perfectly recreate the same sound waves and sound field at home as at the live venue, we as humans will absolutely not experience it as the same sound. We can abandon that notion right now.

Secondly, once we treat the in-home experience as a thing in itself, instead of false notions of replication, the door is open to maximizing that experience as a thing with its own unique qualities of perception, engagement and pleasure. This is the way forward. This is what the music playback industry can do for us. I know in my home country the national broadcaster's classical music recording efforts involve collaboration between the orchestras (represented by conductors and key musicians), the sound engineering, and the production teams. These three groups don't do their independent processes and pass it on to the next: instead, they are all engaged from conception to final product, aiming to deliver something into our homes that is most enjoyable, most artistic, and most musically communicative. Multi-mic and close-mic techniques are, I gather, essential core ingredients that enable the best results. (And, at the playback end, surround sound.)

cheers

Ah, but you did say it here.
I disagree about the requirement for close miking, but absolutely agree that the in home experience is necessarily different. On the other hand, we are dealing with musicians and musical performance, and we may well want a recording of a performance in a live space with an audience and an appropriate approach to the sound in such an environment, as opposed to a hall or studio that is being treated as such.

I don't expect a recording of a live performance in a hall with an audience to metaphorically seat me in the audience. Rather, I might refer to TV/home theatre as an analogy.
So, we may define a purist approach to a studio TV programme for a particular type of playback (we are of course in the same boat as with audio setups, that you may have a full on home theatre while in my unit I have a smaller screen in our living room). We can define camera distances and seating positions so that I get "life size" faces and upper bodies at desks and it all works really well. But that purity isn't going to work for a wildlife documentary about sharks.

At the same time, I would expect good video, and an accurate portrayal of the shark's colour and movement - it should look like a shark. I'm going to be disappointed if I expect my living room to fill with the ocean and the shark to try and bite my arm off. It's exactly the same with a live orchestral performance recording - I should get a good sense of the orchestra playing in the acoustic of the recording, but I shouldn't expect to be sat in row K seat 7 or looking over the conductor's shoulder.

My objection to the use of multiple and close miking in some locations is that the sense of the acoustic can be lost. A good classical musician or group responds to the hall acoustic in their choice of tempo and musical balance, If that is lost (worse when the mastering engineer then decides to drench the results in artificial reverb) aspects of the performance may no longer make musical sense.

 

[Newman]

i don't see that the post from @Newman actually mandated close miking... he's asking for an appropriate recording technique for each particular recording.

Indeed that is my intent, whether or not well expressed.

I mentioned Mark Waldrep: here is a link to an essay he wrote: https://www.realhd-audio.com/?p=1638

I think he expresses well that a distant single mic array only achieves one thing, and many other techniques are fully legitimate and achieve other things better.

No matter what you think can go wrong with close mic recording, and have probably experienced, that doesn't mean they must go wrong or can't be eliminated with good technique on the way to delivering sound that far-mic techniques cannot.

My objection to the use of multiple and close miking in some locations is that the sense of the acoustic can be lost.

It is routine for close-and-multi mic technique to include several ambience mics. Ambience need not be lost at all: in fact it can be emphasised.

 

[tuga]

I think both interpretations are valid interpretations of the provided data. From mono to stereo, the Rega went from 1st to 2nd, KEF from 2nd to 1st, and Quad from distant 3rd to very close 3rd. We would need more data(presumably Harman has it) to say which interpretation is more valid than the other. While I personally tend to lean more towards your interpretation(given the data we have), I have to assume that Dr. Toole's interpretation is based on far more data than what is shown to us. If I had to bet on one being correct, I'd have to bet against my own intuition here.

I think that we need new data, gathered with a more adequate/effective metodology.

 

[tuga]

Indeed that is my intent, whether or not well expressed.

I mentioned Mark Waldrep: here is a link to an essay he wrote: https://www.realhd-audio.com/?p=1638

I think he expresses well that a distant single mic array only achieves one thing, and many other techniques are fully legitimate and achieve other things better.

No matter what you think can go wrong with close mic recording, and have probably experienced, that doesn't mean they must go wrong or can't be eliminated with good technique on the way to delivering sound that far-mic techniques cannot.



It is routine for close-and-multi mic technique to include several ambience mics. Ambience need not be lost at all: in fact it can be emphasised.

In my experience as a listener, 2-main + 2-ambience can convey or recreate an illusion of a credible soundscape (what I call a documetal approach), whilst close-and-multi mic + ambience mix cannot.
To me it sounds like a collage, as if the listener was simultaneously sitting in the audience but also near the winds and near the brass, and near the percussion, and near the violins, and near the violas and near...

Below is a realistic-looking documental photo of a fair (minimalist real stereo), and a prety, tidy and exciting collage or composite image (multi-mic'ed stereo mix):

 

[tuga]

Does the derivation of a difference signal for the surround channels effectively keep the front soundstage sound out of them?

Another question arises from my upmixing ignorance: Are the settings on your processor "set and forget", or do the ideal settings vary from one recording to the next? (The "ideal setting" variation from one recording to the next is what ultimately let me to give up on the "Hafler hook-up" many decades ago. Sometimes I wouldn't find a seemingly "correct" level setting for the difference signal until the song was practically over, and sometimes I never did.)



I absolutely agree that the sort of in-room reflection arrival times we get in a two-channel home audio setting are inadequate for generating envelopment. But there is arguably another potential source of envelopment cues, namely the ambience cues on the recording, which (given a good recording) would include reverberation tails arriving after a realistic time delay. So theoretically we have two competing sets of spatial cues: The "small room signature" cues inherent to the playback room; and the venue cues on the recording, whether said venue cues be real or engineered or both. Is this "two competing sets of venue cues" paradigm a realistic and reasonable one?



I share your sentiments.



Youngho, your replies consistently pack an enormous amount of information into a minimal number of words. Thank you for those links. I had forgotten about that interview, wherein Kevin clearly explains that the tweeter waveguide on the Salon 2 not only fixed the power response, but corrected the spectral balance of the first sidewall reflections. Brilliant.

Upmixing is a surrogate solution, and in my view a crippled one. I know many classical music listener audiophiles which, like myself, are perfectly happy with two channel and do not require extra envelopment. Actually, in my more than 15 years of participating in audio forums from several countries I have not met more than a handful of people which use upmixers or even multi-channel.
I could be wrong but it looks to me like many who use multi-channel come from a more home-cinema oriented approach and are manily located in North America, probably because of the larger listening spaces and higher incomes.

Ultimately it is a matter of taste, which aspects of sound reproduction one favours, whether it's timbre, reconstruction of the original ambience cues (when they're in the recording), focused imaging, wide soundstage and spaciousness, envelopment, etc.
This will determine our preference for wide or narrow directivity, monopole, dipole or omni, room treatment, 2- vs multi-channel, etc.

 

[Newman]

I do think, like you suggest, you are wrong about the nationalistic card you tried to play.

The DBT experiments that back up the clear, unequivocal preference for multi channel were not AFAIK grounded in an audience with a home-cinema background. They usually draw on a disparate audience, with care and deliberation.

I just think you keep making assumptions about why your pre-conclusions are sound. Be a bit more open.

And we all know upmixing is a crippled surrogate for discrete multichannel, but I would like to see your evidence that it is necessarily crippled compared to stereo, unless you mean bad practice, which would be unfair given the amount of bad stereo practice that one could also point to.

And you can't say "it's a matter of taste" if it is a topic that has been tested and a different conclusion drawn.

 

[Duke]

Upmixing is a surrogate solution, and in my view a crippled one. I know many classical music listener audiophiles which, like myself, are perfectly happy with two channel and do not require extra envelopment.

Not that I have listened to all that many upmixing multichannel music systems, but I don't recall hearing one that I would choose over a really good same-price-ballpark two-channel system, with the exception of a Lexicon-based system decades ago. Conceptually good multichannel makes sense to me. Imo it makes sense to deliver the ambience information from the best possible directions, and after the best possible time delays.

 

[tuga]

I do think, like you suggest, you are wrong about the nationalistic card you tried to play.

The DBT experiments that back up the clear, unequivocal preference for multi channel were not AFAIK grounded in an audience with a home-cinema background. They usually draw on a disparate audience, with care and deliberation.

I just think you keep making assumptions about why your pre-conclusions are sound. Be a bit more open.

And we all know upmixing is a crippled surrogate for discrete multichannel, but I would like to see your evidence that it is necessarily crippled compared to stereo, unless you mean bad practice, which would be unfair given the amount of bad stereo practice that one could also point to.

And you can't say "it's a matter of taste" if it is a topic that has been tested and a different conclusion drawn.

My "nationalistic card" as you call it has nothing to do with preference but with distribution.

As for your last point I find the testing methodology flawed and drawn a drifferent conclusion from the data gathered.

 

[tuga]

For stereo-only? The previously mentioned award-winning 2L classical/jazz recordings aren't close-mic'd and they're some of the best multi-channel ones I've heard. There are also close-mic'd multi-channel albums I like a lot but they're definitely not on the same level of immersiveness.

2L has a, in my view, rather weird approach in some of their recordings, one where they place the musicians in a circle around the mics. I am sure it'll produce a very immersive listening experience over multy-channel but it is far from the documental approach which I enjoy (in 2-channel).

 

[tuga]

Unamas Label (Mick Sawaguchi)

https://unamas-label.net

 

[Newman]

I still find the assumption, that the seated audience's experience of a classical performance is some kind of ultimate goal, is right on one level and wrong on several levels.

It's right if classical composers/conductors universally felt that the ultimate experience of their work was from one of the seats in a specific type of venue, and that they carefully crafted every aspect of their composition to maximise perfectly in that seat.

That's not realistic.

The great classics were not, generically, playing in the big venues that we overemphasise today. The big halls were for the unaristocratic masses to hear 'pop' versions, while all the most demanding stuff was played for the aristocrats in their own homes. A few of these would have been virtually castles, but generally not, and in no sense were the venues acoustically sophisticated. The emphasis would have been on getting the musicians right up close to the audience, and the audience would have had very little regard for the ambience, and a strong focus on the direct sound. It would be no surprise to learn that soloists would walk right up to audience members, in order to communicate their music most effectively.

Back to today: my point is that the real 'crippled solution' is to make everything referenced to the big hall seated audience experience, when that is really just a compromise to get hundreds or even thousands of people to pay to hear the one performance. Instead, today, we can bring the music in an optimised way to one or a few listeners, in their home -- rather more like what the aristocrats used to have, in terms of access, immediacy and insight. Where the soloists, for instance, can play when required with the delicacy that only proximity allows.

The door is open for much greater creativity in the classical sphere for creating musically communicative experiences through playback that are simply impossible when constrained by the distant-audience-distant-mic preconception/paradigm. Of course any individual, such as yourself, is completely welcome to turn their back on these opportunities for greater musical experiences, but I don't think it's right to pontificate as if there is some ultimate realism to your chosen limitation.

cheers

 

[tuga]

I still find the assumption, that the seated audience's experience of a classical performance is some kind of ultimate goal, is right on one level and wrong on several levels.

It's right if classical composers/conductors universally felt that the ultimate experience of their work was from one of the seats in a specific type of venue, and that they carefully crafted every aspect of their composition to maximise perfectly in that seat.

That's not realistic.

The great classics were not, generically, playing in the big venues that we overemphasise today. The big halls were for the unaristocratic masses to hear 'pop' versions, while all the most demanding stuff was played for the aristocrats in their own homes. A few of these would have been virtually castles, but generally not, and in no sense were the venues acoustically sophisticated. The emphasis would have been on getting the musicians right up close to the audience, and the audience would have had very little regard for the ambience, and a strong focus on the direct sound. It would be no surprise to learn that soloists would walk right up to audience members, in order to communicate their music most effectively.

Back to today: my point is that the real 'crippled solution' is to make everything referenced to the big hall seated audience experience, when that is really just a compromise to get hundreds or even thousands of people to pay to hear the one performance. Instead, today, we can bring the music in an optimised way to one or a few listeners, in their home -- rather more like what the aristocrats used to have, in terms of access, immediacy and insight. Where the soloists, for instance, can play when required with the delicacy that only proximity allows.

The door is open for much greater creativity in the classical sphere for creating musically communicative experiences through playback that are simply impossible when constrained by the distant-audience-distant-mic preconception/paradigm. Of course any individual, such as yourself, is completely welcome to turn their back on these opportunities for greater musical experiences, but I don't think it's right to pontificate as if there is some ultimate realism to your chosen limitation.

cheers

The "seated audience's experience of a classical performance as a goal" is not an assumption but a matter of preference. I have said so a few times already.
Some people enjoy listening with headphones, many will not sit on the apex of a 2-channel stereo system, few have multi-channel, probably many more have bluetooth mono tabletop speakers.

In regard to referencing "everything to the big hall seated audience experience" you are mistaken.
I am fortunate enough to be able to attend the Monday lunchtime recital at one of the local churches almost on a weekly basis. They will host soloists, small ensembles and choirs. I have sat closer or further from the altar/stage and there's a couple of row which I find have the right balance between direct and reflected sound, and also an acceptable level of reverberance. With choir music I prefer to sit further from the sound source, and because some (concert hall) soloists get overly excited with the dynamics if it's one I've listened to before I will also take a more distanced seat.
So I have a pretty good idea of how an instrument will sound close to the listener (also I've sang in a classical amateur choir, my youngest is learning classical guitar and my eldest has unfortunately given up classical piano this year). Once I got late to a music festival and had to sit on the floor some 3 metres from Wispelwey's cello. I can assure you that it sounded nothing like what I hear in many close-mic'ed recordings (anc clasical close-mic'ing is quite conservative in how close the mics sit from the sound source).
The same is true for orchestral music, as mentioned earlier in the thread.

I am not against using recording as a way to create music, in fact that's what pop and rock studio music is all about; in many cases it exists only in the mix.
But in terms of classical music recodings I enjoy the sound of acoustic instruments and how they interact with the room. And I like to hear them as I usually do, from the listener's not the player's perspective.
The domestic listening experience has one fundamental difference from the live experience which is its lack of visual cues. Mic'ing can, perhaps should, be used creatively to compensate for this.


I can't remember if I've mentioned this discussion before, which you may find interesting:

The State of the Art: Are We Recording the Score or the Hall?

http://classicalmusicrecording.blogspot.com/2018/05/the-state-of-art-are-we-recording-score.html

 

[TimVG]

Nice tuba!

Here's my horn:

More horns

 

[Galliardist]

I still find the assumption, that the seated audience's experience of a classical performance is some kind of ultimate goal, is right on one level and wrong on several levels.

It's right if classical composers/conductors universally felt that the ultimate experience of their work was from one of the seats in a specific type of venue, and that they carefully crafted every aspect of their composition to maximise perfectly in that seat.

That's not realistic.

The great classics were not, generically, playing in the big venues that we overemphasise today. The big halls were for the unaristocratic masses to hear 'pop' versions, while all the most demanding stuff was played for the aristocrats in their own homes. A few of these would have been virtually castles, but generally not, and in no sense were the venues acoustically sophisticated. The emphasis would have been on getting the musicians right up close to the audience, and the audience would have had very little regard for the ambience, and a strong focus on the direct sound. It would be no surprise to learn that soloists would walk right up to audience members, in order to communicate their music most effectively.

Back to today: my point is that the real 'crippled solution' is to make everything referenced to the big hall seated audience experience, when that is really just a compromise to get hundreds or even thousands of people to pay to hear the one performance. Instead, today, we can bring the music in an optimised way to one or a few listeners, in their home -- rather more like what the aristocrats used to have, in terms of access, immediacy and insight. Where the soloists, for instance, can play when required with the delicacy that only proximity allows.

The door is open for much greater creativity in the classical sphere for creating musically communicative experiences through playback that are simply impossible when constrained by the distant-audience-distant-mic preconception/paradigm. Of course any individual, such as yourself, is completely welcome to turn their back on these opportunities for greater musical experiences, but I don't think it's right to pontificate as if there is some ultimate realism to your chosen limitation.

cheers

Excellent post. I'd add a caveat, which is that that whole western art music tradition that we refer to as "classical" includes much more than playing for aristocrats in their great houses. I don't want to exclude, say, Paganini - "my art is to be heard at a distance" (said about his violin playing), seemingly demanding a hall sound, let alone music written for modern instruments that also require a hall to sound their best.

I don't see why, given the depth of the classical music tradition, we can't reflect the whole gamut of what the composers have to say to us - what different musical approaches to performance and interpretation, from pure modern playing through to historically informed performance can tell us - and indeed different recording techniques - well, "classical music" can give us so much more than it often does. There's already a lot going on in terms of musicians both generally renowned and specialists who are now prepared to take more risks, and that's what we need today. Recording needs to come along on that journey, rather than dig into any one form of "purity".

The first decades of "hi fi" recording of classical music were damaging in many ways. Entire schools of performance practice were killed off by "music critics" who had scores in hand but didn't understand the unwritten conventions of the music, criticising conventions and interpretative techniques as "wrong notes", "unmarked crescendos", "poor playing" and such like. And the sound of early LPs conditioned audiences to expect a particular sound from live performance - an irony perhaps lost on those of us who now argue that the only correct form of recording or domestic playback is to approach the sound of a mainstream orchestra in a large hall. It's time to support the people who are moving on from that.

 

[tuga]

Excellent post. I'd add a caveat, which is that that whole western art music tradition that we refer to as "classical" includes much more than playing for aristocrats in their great houses. I don't want to exclude, say, Paganini - "my art is to be heard at a distance" (said about his violin playing), seemingly demanding a hall sound, let alone music written for modern instruments that also require a hall to sound their best.

I don't see why, given the depth of the classical music tradition, we can't reflect the whole gamut of what the composers have to say to us - what different musical approaches to performance and interpretation, from pure modern playing through to historically informed performance can tell us - and indeed different recording techniques - well, "classical music" can give us so much more than it often does. There's already a lot going on in terms of musicians both generally renowned and specialists who are now prepared to take more risks, and that's what we need today. Recording needs to come along on that journey, rather than dig into any one form of "purity".

The first decades of "hi fi" recording of classical music were damaging in many ways. Entire schools of performance practice were killed off by "music critics" who had scores in hand but didn't understand the unwritten conventions of the music, criticising conventions and interpretative techniques as "wrong notes", "unmarked crescendos", "poor playing" and such like. And the sound of early LPs conditioned audiences to expect a particular sound from live performance - an irony perhaps lost on those of us who now argue that the only correct form of recording or domestic playback is to approach the sound of a mainstream orchestra in a large hall. It's time to support the people who are moving on from that.

I would like to add a couple of funny quotes myself.

Wagner, the inventor of the orchestra pit, to his friend Nietzsche at the Festival Theatre in Bayreuth to "Remove your spectacles, music is only to be listened to".


And this was Jascha Heifetz in an interview to Life magazine:

Roger Kahn - “I notice you don’t have stereo in the studio.”
Jascha Heifetz - “Hystereo. I don’t need it!”
Roger Kahn -“Do you like high fidelity, Mr. Heifetz?”
Jascha Heifetz - “High phooey? Why should I have anything against hi phooey?”

 

[tuga]

Gould discusses experimentation with technology and recording techniques in this interview:

 

[rdenney]

More horns

View attachment 157859
View attachment 157860

Is the top one a triple?

Rick “seeing two switch valves, but no expert on horns” Denney

 

[TimVG]

Is the top one a triple?

Rick “seeing two switch valves, but no expert on horns” Denney

Top one's a triple.

 

[rdenney]

Excellent post. I'd add a caveat, which is that that whole western art music tradition that we refer to as "classical" includes much more than playing for aristocrats in their great houses. I don't want to exclude, say, Paganini - "my art is to be heard at a distance" (said about his violin playing), seemingly demanding a hall sound, let alone music written for modern instruments that also require a hall to sound their best.

I don't see why, given the depth of the classical music tradition, we can't reflect the whole gamut of what the composers have to say to us - what different musical approaches to performance and interpretation, from pure modern playing through to historically informed performance can tell us - and indeed different recording techniques - well, "classical music" can give us so much more than it often does. There's already a lot going on in terms of musicians both generally renowned and specialists who are now prepared to take more risks, and that's what we need today. Recording needs to come along on that journey, rather than dig into any one form of "purity".

The first decades of "hi fi" recording of classical music were damaging in many ways. Entire schools of performance practice were killed off by "music critics" who had scores in hand but didn't understand the unwritten conventions of the music, criticising conventions and interpretative techniques as "wrong notes", "unmarked crescendos", "poor playing" and such like. And the sound of early LPs conditioned audiences to expect a particular sound from live performance - an irony perhaps lost on those of us who now argue that the only correct form of recording or domestic playback is to approach the sound of a mainstream orchestra in a large hall. It's time to support the people who are moving on from that.

Fully agree. I expect a tight, dry sound for something like Philip Glass, something reverberant for a Bach cantata, and something in between for a Shostakovich Symphony. But it’s not a historical trend, either. Give me the reverberant sound for Vaughan Williams’s Tallis Fantasia, and something tighter with more focus on clarity for his Sea Symphony, the two of which were composed only three years apart.

The thing is, the orchestra knows how to do that. I heard Tallis and Dona Nobis Pacem (a large choral work like the Sea Symphony) from the same seats and in the same program a the Royal Festival Hall. The muted strings of Tallis captured the church acoustic even in that hall which I recall as being a bit dry. That was how it was composed and performed. They also staged it correctly—large string orchestra and small string orchestra separated on the stage. Close miking risks undermining all that performance care, putting the mixer in a role that the conductor and musicians thought they were in.

And recorded classical music strives too much for perfection and ultimate clarity, and this has driven orchestras to strive for perfection and ultimate clarity. And playbacks are often dramatically amplified, leading orchestras to play louder and louder. These have combined to be (physically and psychologically) unhealthy for wind players in particular. But for string players, it means forgetting any sense of the soft sounds of gut strings (and the reaction to that, which was the emergence of period-instrument performances).

And the presence of “reference” recordings homogenizes performance practice. The “house sound” of Vienna was highly distinct from London, which was recognizably different than the Concertgebouw. Likewise, there was an acknowledged difference in the sound of Nes York, Boston, Chicago, and Philadelphia orchestras of old. Those differences have faded, and I think that is unfortunate.

Rick “let alone the dramatically different interpretations of, say, Toscanini and, say, Fricsay” Denney