greg@olivej.UUCP (Greg Paley) (02/07/84)
In the great digital/analog controversy, a point that I haven't seen raised is the type of sound equipment toward which producers are targeting their products. There have been claims made in "Absolute Sound" and other publications that recording producers tend more and more to shoot for a sound that will reproduce well on cheaper equipment and thereby achieve greater marketability. This has been tied in with digital recording, and I'm not at all sure the two are really linked. I'd be interested in comments. I do know that my own list of "best sounding recordings" has modified considerably as my equipment has upgraded. Currently I'm using Hafler electronics (110 pre-amp/220 power amp) with Vandersteen 2C speakers. I favor recordings which not only have an overall agreeable sound, but which preserve realistic perspectives and that much abused entity, "ambience". By realistic perspectives I mean a sense of orchestral and vocal layout similar to that which I would experience in a concert hall or opera house. By ambience I mean a sense of acoustic "space" which (very important) uniquely identifies a particular hall. A recording can have spectacular "sound" (i.e., remarkable reproduction of frequency and dynamic extremes) but be totally unnatural in these regards. The recordings which I now find best in this regard are, however, the same ones that sounded unpleasantly recessed and muted when listening with my old Pioneer 1050 receiver and AR12 speakers. Furthermore, there seem to be certain factors, which I'm nowhere near to having nailed down, which make certain recordings "difficult" to reproduce whereas other perfectly good ones are not. The Telarc recordings I've heard seem to bring the best out of any system, from cheap to expensive, mass-produced to esoteric. The older recordings on RCA, though, including the famous Reiner/Chicago series, seem to show their most spectacular qualities of perspective and naturalness (is this an inherent contradiction?) only on extremely high quality equipment. I hesitate to make judgements in any case. Should all recordings really be made with only the elite few in mind who can afford top-notch equipment? Perhaps not. I do, however, find it saddening when people are disillusioned the first time they go to an opera because they have grown accustomed to the sound of a singer miked so closely that you can hear their hair growing. This brings up another philosophical point. That is the question of whether recordings as a media should be limited to the constraints involved in the reproduction of live music or be viewed totally independently. Obviously, I prefer recordings which are "limited" in this regard, but I can imagine powerful arguments to the contrary. Just so I don't get flamed for the wrong thing, I want to emphasize that I'm talking about recording practices in general, i.e., totally independent of whether they are applied to analog or digital technology. Greg Paley