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In article writes:
I dug out an old Betamax tape I made in 1986 of a 5-piece jazz ensemble
performing at a night club, just to refresh my memory of what I had in my
collection of old tapes. I found the experience downright disturbing. Why?
Because it sounds so darned GOOD.
Isn't that a ****er! I have lots of recordings made in the '80's and
earlier that sound very good even by today's standards. But do they
really? Can you hear the pick noise on the guitar? Can you hear that
little breath that conveys so much emotion on the lead vocal? Do you
hear the smooth, clear decay of the cymbal? No, you just hear some
good musicians all playing together, having a good time, playing
material that's so comfortable that they can loosen up and not worry
about whether they'll make it through the take.
The think that irks me, is that, with today's digital technology, why are we
still getting CDs with very audible hiss on them, when a pair of electrets
driving an old RS mixer can produce a recording that is much quieter to the
point where any hiss is masked by the ambient noise?
We tend to get obsessed with noise. We eliminate as much ambient noise
as we can, so we can hear the system noise, then we eliminate this,
and then we can hear the ambient noise. Recording in a night club can
hide a lot of system sins. So can recording on analog tape where
things can decay smoothly into tape hiss (kind of like acoustic
dither).
What kind of signal
routing and planning can cause state of the art recording facilities to turn
out such a noisy recording?
The original studio recording is probably dead quiet. It's pushing up
the ambient noise 20 dB in the process of squashing the dynamic range
(by 20 dB or more) in mastering that some of that stuff starts to
emerge from the tar pits. We're told that's what the listeners want.
The mastering engineers are told that's what the labels want. And the
labels tell us that they're only giving us what we want. Go figure.
Go make some good recordings that you and your friends can enjoy.
--
I'm really Mike Rivers )
However, until the spam goes away or Hell freezes over,
lots of IP addresses are blocked from this system. If
you e-mail me and it bounces, use your secret decoder ring
and reach me he double-m-eleven-double-zero at yahoo
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