greg@olivej.UUCP (Greg Paley) (01/06/84)
I received as a Christmas gift the DGG digital recording (on analogue vinyl discs - I don't have a CD player) of Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde" (Carlos Kleiber, cond.). I use this only as a particular example of what I've experienced over the past couple of years. The performance is in many ways a great one, but the sound is in many ways inferior to the 1952 EMI Furtwaengler recording. There are the obvious things that one has heard often complained of with digital recording such as the lack of ambience, the stridency of strings and winds, etc. However, there is also a shallowness to the "soundstage" and a disembodied quality to voices, particularly female, that I haven't seen explained. The net result is that even if digital recording can produce extraordinary specifications with test signals and analogue recordings are using distortion to trick the ear, good analogue recordings present an orchestra like the Chicago Symphony, Vienna Philharmonic, or (as in this case) Dresden State Opera Orchestra with a beauty and amplitude that are absent from their digital counterparts but present at live presentations in a decent hall. I can understand to a degree musicians advocating the system since they tend to be notoriously unaware of a listener's perspective and like recordings which present them as loud, bright, front and center. It's even more understandable that conductors like Karajan endorse them, since the sound produced by a digital recording of an orchestra is very much like what you hear from the podium, or if you are seated directly behind the podium. They are, I think, forgetting that this sound is an embryonic one which needs to be modified by the auditorium before reaching the listener as a final product. I am not anti-digital. Each time I read a review of a record that praises the extraordinary digital recording I still rush to listen to it hoping I've been wrong so far. Out of several hundred, all but a handful have been bitter disappoint- ments. Of that handful, I still can't say clearly that they've been better than the best analogue, but merely that they haven't been as obviously worse as the rest. This leads me to say that, whatever the potential of the medium, there is something radically wrong with its current deployment. The tragedy is that a generation of performing musicians are having their unreproduceable performances archived in a defective manner. These observations are not limited to analogue pressings of digital master recordings. Although I don't own a CD player I've had extensive opportunities to audition them with a large selection of software. Except for the lack of problems like surface noise and inner-groove distortion, my impression has been essentially unaltered. Please convince me that I'm wrong. I want to see progress made in sound recording and I want to be happy about it. Greg Paley Olivetti ATC Cupertino, Ca. (408) 996-3867 x.353
sdyer@bbncca.ARPA (Steve Dyer) (01/08/84)
As has been discussed here before, recording techniques have a profound effect on the depth and clarity of the soundstage. I have heard excellent digital recordings of local Boston performances made by members of the Boston Audio Society, using only two or three microphones. Unfortunately, the ossified techniques of many of the major recording studios and their engineers still produce flat, lifeless and unconvincing products. I suspect your bad experiences with digitally recorded records are actually examples of this. -- /Steve Dyer decvax!bbncca!sdyer sdyer@bbncca