[Gary Eickmeier]

"Sebastian Kaliszewski" wrote in message
...
Audio Empire wrote:

Of course it would be all wrong. Again, microphones are not ears. They
don't "hear" anything - they pick-up sound and they do it in a certain
way. Since they can't focus on what they "want" to heat, like a listener
in the 4th row, the recording engineer has to focus the mikes for the
listener. To get the illusion of the 4th row, center, the mikes have to
be, physically, much closer than that.

Well, physical human ears are less focused that typical cardioid mike.
Then those ears are present in a sound chain whenever they're listening a
performance directly or its reproduction.


So something is causing the perceived perspective to move
friom 10ft above 5ft behind conductor into that 4th row seat. Reasons
are rather complex. Part of it could be that listeners are used to
listen from a seat not hanging above conductor -- so listener brain
moves the image to what it knows. But part of that could be simply the
effect of listener surroundings. Both ion concert vanue and in ones
listening room there are close surrounding which affect sound coming to
our ears.

It;s merely the difference between the ear's ability to focus on the
sounds it wants to hear (and to a certain extent, ignore those it
doesn't) and a microphone which merely picks up any sound that is is
present whether its wanted or not. Simply put, the closer to the
performers, the more source and less ambience and vice-versa.

But that same human ear listens to the reproduction. You don't (yet) play
recording directly inyto someones brain, you play it via speakers for that
listener's ears to listen.

Hello again Sebastian -

Why you going into this thread again so late? The "Unique Minds" thread?

As I may have mentioned a few times before, the process is not one of taking
a "picture" of the sound from a particular perspective and then just
relaying that picture to your ears via the direct sound of a pair of
speakers. It is more like a scan, or sculptural mold, of the orchestra and
its instruments from up closer to them, then reconstructing, or rebuilding,
that sound structure in another space at a distance in front of you. You
then listen to that new soundfield with your natural hearing and the realism
depends on how well you modeled your reconstruction after the (typical) live
event.

In the process, the spatial qualities of the original are changed into the
spatial qualities of the playback speakers and room, which is why you should
look at it from the standpoint of attempting to model the playback after the
"typical" original as much as possible in your smaller space. The whole
process is more of an art than an "accuracy" process, going a lot by ear to
steer the engineer in the right direction. Perhaps some instruments are too
much louder than others, and the balance needs to be adjusted by raising the
mikes higher up to equal out the distances to all instruments. Perhaps an
important instrument or singer is not heard as well as you would like, so
you spot mike them and "help" them in the mix.

You then play this whole concoction in your listening room and make a few
judgements for next time, or change whatever can be changed in the mix and
EQ this time. In any case, it is simply not a process of relaying what the
microphones "heard" from any particular spot anywhere, but rather a
reconstruction of an event that once occured live, but now exists anew as a
recording played in a room on speakers of some spatial qualities and heard
with your good ol' natural ears and judged for the realism of that
rebuilding.

The major error that most audiophiles make is in thinking that the
microphones are "hearing" a perfect picture of the performance from a great
listening perspective at the event, and the speakers are then "shooting" the
sound back to your ears in a perfect replica of what the microphones
"heard." This error is what I have called operating on the wrong stereo
theory, yada yada yada.

Gary Eickmeier