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#1
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Home-reccers, your gear is good enough
If you're a home recordist, I have a suggestion -- stop stressing out
about your gear. It's probably fine. The signal path is more than likely capable of getting fairly close to megastudio quality even if all your equipment is just prosumer-level stuff. If your recordings sound crap, the reason is probably your technique, not the shortcomings of the gear. Yes, this is meant to be provocative. No, it's not meant as a troll. It seems to me that the gear obsession that drives much of the discussion in rec.audio.pro is misplaced. Many overenthusiastic amateurs like me are being stampeded by "pro" advice into buying stuff that they don't need and won't do them any good. Even the best gear in the world won't make up for the acoustic shortcomings of typical home studios. And even low-end gear won't usually make them audibly worse. Two theoretical exceptions may seem to be microphones and monitors, which are highly coloured compared with solid-state electronics. But you can get decent enough mics cheaply -- look no further than the SM57 or condensers like the Oktavas, Rodes and MXLs. And cheap-and-nasty monitors can do a good enough job. You've just got to learn them. Look at the ubiquitous NS10. Hell, some hi-fi speakers will do just fine. (Oh yes they will.) No one pair of monitors will tell you everything, anyway. Cheap modern solid-state audio gear, even some of the worst of it, is actually not bad. Signal-to-noise and distortion figures are fantastic by the standards of a few decades ago. Never before has it been possible to buy so much transparency for so little money. On top of that, most home studio work these days is done in the digital domain. How much seriously audible damage can be done to a signal that is subjected to no more than preamplification, mild compression and A/D conversion before it enters -- and stays in -- the digital domain? Before you flame me, take note that I'm saying "good enough", not "stellar". So how good is good enough? I reckon the judgment lies with the lay listener. If my girlfriend can't tell the difference, then there is no difference -- for all practical purposes. And if my hi-fi crazed friend (whose listening gear costs a lot more than the entire contents of my home studio) reckons that some of my output compares sonically with less exacting commercial releases, then I consider my hobby well worth carrying on with. I think you should do the same. Of course, both my friend and my girlfriend are wrong, in the sense that I can tell the difference and the little flaws leap out at me. Pro engineers might spot the difference on a boom box. But that's not the point. We make music for ourselves and for the listener, not the anal perfectionists in the industry. I've been doing this home-reccing thing for nearly 20 years, mostly as an aid to songwriting and arrangement for various bands. My sound sucked for the first 15 years, when I was using four-track cassette, but I learnt a lot of techniques and workarounds. Then I got a DAW, and my sound still sucked because I didn't understand the special problems of digital. The past five years have been a period of learning and slow improvement and I'm now confident of being able to make recordings -- musical content aside -- that the average listener cannot tell from a commercial release on an average playback system. And I use equipment that would be panned in this forum. Having said all this, I have to add that gear quality is not *entirely* irrelevant. Some stuff will do obvious harm to your recordings -- those starved-plate preamps spring to mind. Horrible microphones are not a good idea. And decent sources -- good-sounding instruments and amplifiers, and guitars with newish strings -- make a big difference. Certainly a home-reccer should avoid the very worst gear, but there is hardly any point in aspiring to the best. You're just wasting your money. Raglan PS. What inspired this posting was a bout of gear-insecurity that I recently suffered, specifically about my audio card, a Delta 44. How much fidelity did the converters lose, I worried. Well, I took a fine recording with lots of detail (track 2 on Bela Bela La Habana by Chucho Valdes) and ran it through the sound card six times. After that amount of generation loss, flaws should be strikingly apparent. And they are. But guess what? Not so bad, actually..... and my girlfriend mistakes the seventh-generation copy for the original if I trick her with an extra couple of dB on the copy. |
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#2
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Raglan,
Bravo, excellent post! I've been making those exact points for many years now - especially the notion that all the stellar gear in the world is useless if you're mixing in an untreated room. Yes, aside from mikes and speakers, which do vary, most "prosumer" gear is extremely good. Your girlfriend is indeed the final arbiter. As Craig Anderton once wrote, "No listener gives a damn what microphone preamp you used." --Ethan |
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#3
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"Ethan Winer" ethanw at ethanwiner dot com wrote in message ... Bravo, excellent post! I've been making those exact points for many years now - especially the notion that all the stellar gear in the world is useless if you're mixing in an untreated room. Yes, aside from mikes and speakers, which do vary, most "prosumer" gear is extremely good. I wonder if anyone has done & published blind comparisons of recordings made on consumer/prosumer level gear -vs- high-end gear both recorded and listened to in the same environment by people who know what they're doing to see how many times out of x number of tracks that pro's a/or Joe Listener can tell the difference. Then again, I'm guessing that neither gear manufacturers nor well-known pro's would be in a big hurry to participate or for such a test to be done and publicized, for obvious reasons. Once read an online review (can't recall the specifics - I suppose it could be found again) where the reviewer compared an MXL 1006 to a U-87. His observation was that it took several listens to discern any difference and that even at that, it wasn't much of a difference. I'm not making any claims as to his competence or the validity of his assertions, etc., just presenting it as an observation. |
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#4
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Different is not necessarily better or worse, just different. I bought low
end recording gear, MXL 991 microphones a couple art preamps and a fostex MR-8. The only reason I have high end monitors is because I bought them 30 years ago for my stereo. The sound card in my PC was just too noisey. I am sure if I do a lot of signal modification in the digital domain the 16 bits will not be enough, but since I am only adjusting the level and making a stereo recording it is probably good enough for the moment. I cant tell the difference. Bob "Doc" wrote in message ink.net... "Ethan Winer" ethanw at ethanwiner dot com wrote in message ... Bravo, excellent post! I've been making those exact points for many years now - especially the notion that all the stellar gear in the world is useless if you're mixing in an untreated room. Yes, aside from mikes and speakers, which do vary, most "prosumer" gear is extremely good. I wonder if anyone has done & published blind comparisons of recordings made on consumer/prosumer level gear -vs- high-end gear both recorded and listened to in the same environment by people who know what they're doing to see how many times out of x number of tracks that pro's a/or Joe Listener can tell the difference. Then again, I'm guessing that neither gear manufacturers nor well-known pro's would be in a big hurry to participate or for such a test to be done and publicized, for obvious reasons. Once read an online review (can't recall the specifics - I suppose it could be found again) where the reviewer compared an MXL 1006 to a U-87. His observation was that it took several listens to discern any difference and that even at that, it wasn't much of a difference. I'm not making any claims as to his competence or the validity of his assertions, etc., just presenting it as an observation. |
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#5
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If you're a home recordist, I have a suggestion -- stop stressing out
about your gear. It's probably fine. The signal path is more than likely capable of getting fairly close to megastudio quality even if all your equipment is just prosumer-level stuff. "Fairly close" is so wide open to interpretation as to be largely meaningless. I know where you're going with this, but it is a mistake to think that a "megastudio" excels due to superior equipment specs alone. It has to do with integration & optimization of an entire system, which includes design & acoustics, electrical, HVAC, maintenance, human resources & service accomodations, in addition to sound equipment that home hobbyists can't or won't afford. If your recordings sound crap, the reason is probably your technique, not the shortcomings of the gear. It's both. Gear without shortcomings will improve your technique. It seems to me that the gear obsession that drives much of the discussion in rec.audio.pro is misplaced. Quite possibly. Many overenthusiastic amateurs like me are being stampeded by "pro" advice into buying stuff that they don't need and won't do them any good. It's true you don't need high end gear, especially if your intent is not to provide a professional service for others. It is not particularly true that the better gear won't do you any good, if the intent is to attain master quality results. Even the best gear in the world won't make up for the acoustic shortcomings of typical home studios. True, although the quality bump can optimize certain less than stellar acoustic spaces. And even low-end gear won't usually make them audibly worse. I disagree with this. Cheap modern solid-state audio gear, even some of the worst of it, is actually not bad. Signal-to-noise and distortion figures are fantastic by the standards of a few decades ago. Never before has it been possible to buy so much transparency for so little money. I disagree that most low cost audio gear provides transparency, at least to the level that I'm comfortable with. Before you flame me, take note that I'm saying "good enough", not "stellar". So how good is good enough? Noted. The one commodity you have not mentioned, though, is time. Yes, I, & many others here, can get respectable results from less than wonderful gear with a lot of work. But, put up a U47, into Neve 1081, to an LA2A & you will be recording master quality vocal tracks ten seconds later. Home recordists have resources of time that pros do not, given the economic realities of the music business. We have to get it right, right now, because highly paid people are waiting for us to give them results. That's why the "Pro advice" here tends to say to get good gear & stop dicking around. If you have the luxury of time, you can spend hours messing around with mostly OK equipment to get reasonable results. I think that IS good enough. Good enough in the pro world, however, just isn't good enough. Scott Fraser |
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#6
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Raglan has a good point, in fact a lot of them. One thing, though: a lot of
the errors in cheap microphones, preamp/mixers and A/Ds are in the same direction -- bright and harsh -- and reinforce one another. If you choose your cheap gear carefully to minimize this, you can get surprisingly excellent results, but if you just put stuff together because it sounded spiffy at the store, you're likely to get hideous recordings. (Bright often sounds spiffy on first listen.) The old budget hi-fi idea of making sure the gear's imperfections cancel each other out instead of reinforcing is equally applicable to recording gear. Peace, Paul |
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#7
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"Raglan" wrote in message
m... ... So how good is good enough? Good enough that it doesn't slow down or stand in the way of obtaining a great performance. I agree that it isn't about what gear is capable of sounding like but there's more to this than potential sound quality. The biggest difference between truly great pro gear and consumer gear is the size of the sweet spot. It's about feeling like you're going to end up with a distorted, brittle-sounding keeper if you can't set a little hair-trigger pot quickly enough while missing the fact that the mike is unexpectedly in the wrong place. About never having to tell an artist you'll fix what it sounds like "later." Sometimes simply not having any excuses makes a high end studio with a stellar track record well worth any extra expense. There's just as big of an ego trip available from using the cheapest, "good enough" gear as copping an attitude that only expensive gear is "good enough" for you. BOTH are dead ends in my experience. -- Bob Olhsson Audio Mastery, Nashville TN Mastering, Audio for Picture, Mix Evaluation and Quality Control Over 40 years making people sound better than they ever imagined! 615.385.8051 http://www.hyperback.com |
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#8
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This thread is horse ****.
Its only a comfy blanket for all the times you got ripped off at guitar center. Thier is no way u can compare the detail of a beringer/m-audio AD to a lavry or something real.. The review compareing a MXL gibson mic to a u87.. Nuff said.. Maybe you need to re-cone those 20 year old speakers. Serioulsy guys Post like this only keep you down in the dirt and keep you buying more cheap gear to try and fix it. Dont fall for it. Regards Leon |
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#9
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And reglan are u one of the employes for Presouns that keep posting here on
how great the new junkpod is? Im tierd of this crap. This is RECORDING AUDIO PRO. not recording audio cheap **** that the local music store salesman tricked you into buying. Regards Leon |
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#10
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Raglan wrote
If you're a home recordist, I have a suggestion -- stop stressing out about your gear. It's probably fine. The signal path is more than likely capable of getting fairly close to megastudio quality even if all your equipment is just prosumer-level stuff. If your a home (not looking to be a professional) recordist you should not even read this group. Try over at the 4-track group, they will give you all the praise your looking for. If your happy with cheap, low quality equipment and poorly constructed rooms then fine, but this is "Record Audio Pro". Not "Record Audio Hi-End" or "Record Audio Consumer", I came up in the mid 80's on a Fostex X15 to, but I have moved up to bigger and better. |
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#11
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Excellent post, and one question:
What are the special problems of digital you are referring to? "Raglan" wrote in message m... If you're a home recordist, I have a suggestion -- stop stressing out about your gear. It's probably fine. The signal path is more than likely capable of getting fairly close to megastudio quality even if all your equipment is just prosumer-level stuff. If your recordings sound crap, the reason is probably your technique, not the shortcomings of the gear. Yes, this is meant to be provocative. No, it's not meant as a troll. It seems to me that the gear obsession that drives much of the discussion in rec.audio.pro is misplaced. Many overenthusiastic amateurs like me are being stampeded by "pro" advice into buying stuff that they don't need and won't do them any good. Even the best gear in the world won't make up for the acoustic shortcomings of typical home studios. And even low-end gear won't usually make them audibly worse. Two theoretical exceptions may seem to be microphones and monitors, which are highly coloured compared with solid-state electronics. But you can get decent enough mics cheaply -- look no further than the SM57 or condensers like the Oktavas, Rodes and MXLs. And cheap-and-nasty monitors can do a good enough job. You've just got to learn them. Look at the ubiquitous NS10. Hell, some hi-fi speakers will do just fine. (Oh yes they will.) No one pair of monitors will tell you everything, anyway. Cheap modern solid-state audio gear, even some of the worst of it, is actually not bad. Signal-to-noise and distortion figures are fantastic by the standards of a few decades ago. Never before has it been possible to buy so much transparency for so little money. On top of that, most home studio work these days is done in the digital domain. How much seriously audible damage can be done to a signal that is subjected to no more than preamplification, mild compression and A/D conversion before it enters -- and stays in -- the digital domain? Before you flame me, take note that I'm saying "good enough", not "stellar". So how good is good enough? I reckon the judgment lies with the lay listener. If my girlfriend can't tell the difference, then there is no difference -- for all practical purposes. And if my hi-fi crazed friend (whose listening gear costs a lot more than the entire contents of my home studio) reckons that some of my output compares sonically with less exacting commercial releases, then I consider my hobby well worth carrying on with. I think you should do the same. Of course, both my friend and my girlfriend are wrong, in the sense that I can tell the difference and the little flaws leap out at me. Pro engineers might spot the difference on a boom box. But that's not the point. We make music for ourselves and for the listener, not the anal perfectionists in the industry. I've been doing this home-reccing thing for nearly 20 years, mostly as an aid to songwriting and arrangement for various bands. My sound sucked for the first 15 years, when I was using four-track cassette, but I learnt a lot of techniques and workarounds. Then I got a DAW, and my sound still sucked because I didn't understand the special problems of digital. The past five years have been a period of learning and slow improvement and I'm now confident of being able to make recordings -- musical content aside -- that the average listener cannot tell from a commercial release on an average playback system. And I use equipment that would be panned in this forum. Having said all this, I have to add that gear quality is not *entirely* irrelevant. Some stuff will do obvious harm to your recordings -- those starved-plate preamps spring to mind. Horrible microphones are not a good idea. And decent sources -- good-sounding instruments and amplifiers, and guitars with newish strings -- make a big difference. Certainly a home-reccer should avoid the very worst gear, but there is hardly any point in aspiring to the best. You're just wasting your money. Raglan PS. What inspired this posting was a bout of gear-insecurity that I recently suffered, specifically about my audio card, a Delta 44. How much fidelity did the converters lose, I worried. Well, I took a fine recording with lots of detail (track 2 on Bela Bela La Habana by Chucho Valdes) and ran it through the sound card six times. After that amount of generation loss, flaws should be strikingly apparent. And they are. But guess what? Not so bad, actually..... and my girlfriend mistakes the seventh-generation copy for the original if I trick her with an extra couple of dB on the copy. |
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#12
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"J&L" wrote in message
news:0Cm_c.144652$Lj.74165@fed1read03 This thread is horse ****. Its only a comfy blanket for all the times you got ripped off at guitar center. Thier is no way u can compare the detail of a beringer/m-audio AD to a lavry or something real.. Got any unbiased tests to back that claim up with? I'll bet that with the label showing, you find that designer blue jeans always fit better, too. |
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#13
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"J&L" wrote in message
news:0Cm_c.144652$Lj.74165@fed1read03 This thread is horse ****. Its only a comfy blanket for all the times you got ripped off at guitar center. Thier is no way u can compare the detail of a beringer/m-audio AD to a lavry or something real.. Got any unbiased tests to back that claim up with? I'll bet that with the label showing, you find that designer blue jeans always fit better, too. |
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#14
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"Raymond" wrote in message ... If your happy with cheap, low quality equipment and poorly constructed rooms then fine, but this is "Record Audio Pro". Not "Record Audio Hi-End" or "Record Audio Consumer", I came up in the mid 80's on a Fostex X15 to, but I have moved up to bigger and better. This is rec.audio.pro as in "recreational.audio.production" ... You don't have to be payed to be here.. Does what you do sound bigger and better now ... or does your gear just take up more space? /Preben Friis |
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#15
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"Raymond" wrote in message ... If your happy with cheap, low quality equipment and poorly constructed rooms then fine, but this is "Record Audio Pro". Not "Record Audio Hi-End" or "Record Audio Consumer", I came up in the mid 80's on a Fostex X15 to, but I have moved up to bigger and better. This is rec.audio.pro as in "recreational.audio.production" ... You don't have to be payed to be here.. Does what you do sound bigger and better now ... or does your gear just take up more space? /Preben Friis |
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#16
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#17
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#18
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While some
of the High End Engineers or Producers use an M-box on their laptop at home or on an airplane to edit and do some rough mixes, that's not the final product, ever, unless it's one of those "the music is just so good we had to release it for the publicity" stunts. I mixed a track for a greatest hits package on my Mbox. I didn't start out thinking I was going to mix it - I was just checking out the parts and what was there and ended up having a pretty good mix. Mp3'd a copy to the A&R guy, he loved it and it went on the CD. Nobody ever asked me where or how I mixed it. But this is not the norm. --------------------------------------- "I know enough to know I don't know enough" |
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#19
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While some
of the High End Engineers or Producers use an M-box on their laptop at home or on an airplane to edit and do some rough mixes, that's not the final product, ever, unless it's one of those "the music is just so good we had to release it for the publicity" stunts. I mixed a track for a greatest hits package on my Mbox. I didn't start out thinking I was going to mix it - I was just checking out the parts and what was there and ended up having a pretty good mix. Mp3'd a copy to the A&R guy, he loved it and it went on the CD. Nobody ever asked me where or how I mixed it. But this is not the norm. --------------------------------------- "I know enough to know I don't know enough" |
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#20
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"Ethan Winer" ethanw at ethanwiner dot com wrote in message ...
Raglan, Bravo, excellent post! I've been making those exact points for many years now - especially the notion that all the stellar gear in the world is useless if you're mixing in an untreated room. Yes, aside from mikes and speakers, which do vary, most "prosumer" gear is extremely good. Your girlfriend is indeed the final arbiter. As Craig Anderton once wrote, "No listener gives a damn what microphone preamp you used." --Ethan Ethan, I'm honoured to win praise from an expert and fine writer like you. As it so happens, I've recently discovered your website and I'm about to build bass traps using your design. The way I see the state of prosumer audio at the moment is a bit like the state of desktop publishing around 1990. (My job is in publishing, so I was there.) The analogy isn't perfect, but it's instructive. Before the advent of DTP, "professional-looking" documents could only be produced on specialised equipment by skilled operators at vast expense. When DTP came along, the skilled operators pooh-poohed it. At first, they were right. But any fool could see that the potential was there. As DTP advanced, they resorted to special-case arguments, such as saying it would never be possible to produce a multi-edition broadsheet newspaper using the new technology. But of course it was, soon enough. Nowadays, any fool with a small amount of capital can set up DTP workstations and an imagesetter and produce the best possible quality of output for printing. Technically speaking, that is. The fact remains that without a solid grounding in design principles, lithographic printing techniques, colour theory and so on, all this cheap but nevertheless state-of-the-art equipment will only produce garbage. Which is why specialised repro houses are still in business. And so it is with audio. Instead of dissing the cheap gear to maintain their competitive advantage, I suggest the pros should consider embracing it, while emphasising what is their real selling point -- the skill and experience they bring to operating it. At the present time, the audio pros seem to be where the print compositors were in 1990 -- arguing endlessly about how many angels could dance on a 1200dpi imagesetter. Raglan |
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#21
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"Ethan Winer" ethanw at ethanwiner dot com wrote in message ...
Raglan, Bravo, excellent post! I've been making those exact points for many years now - especially the notion that all the stellar gear in the world is useless if you're mixing in an untreated room. Yes, aside from mikes and speakers, which do vary, most "prosumer" gear is extremely good. Your girlfriend is indeed the final arbiter. As Craig Anderton once wrote, "No listener gives a damn what microphone preamp you used." --Ethan Ethan, I'm honoured to win praise from an expert and fine writer like you. As it so happens, I've recently discovered your website and I'm about to build bass traps using your design. The way I see the state of prosumer audio at the moment is a bit like the state of desktop publishing around 1990. (My job is in publishing, so I was there.) The analogy isn't perfect, but it's instructive. Before the advent of DTP, "professional-looking" documents could only be produced on specialised equipment by skilled operators at vast expense. When DTP came along, the skilled operators pooh-poohed it. At first, they were right. But any fool could see that the potential was there. As DTP advanced, they resorted to special-case arguments, such as saying it would never be possible to produce a multi-edition broadsheet newspaper using the new technology. But of course it was, soon enough. Nowadays, any fool with a small amount of capital can set up DTP workstations and an imagesetter and produce the best possible quality of output for printing. Technically speaking, that is. The fact remains that without a solid grounding in design principles, lithographic printing techniques, colour theory and so on, all this cheap but nevertheless state-of-the-art equipment will only produce garbage. Which is why specialised repro houses are still in business. And so it is with audio. Instead of dissing the cheap gear to maintain their competitive advantage, I suggest the pros should consider embracing it, while emphasising what is their real selling point -- the skill and experience they bring to operating it. At the present time, the audio pros seem to be where the print compositors were in 1990 -- arguing endlessly about how many angels could dance on a 1200dpi imagesetter. Raglan |
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#22
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High end gear is used for high end projects involving high
end musicians, high end engineers, and high end producers. Mike... I guess you haven't flipped on top 40 radion in the last 10 years! ^_^ "I'm beginning to suspect that your problem is the gap between what you say and what you think you have said." -george (paraphrased) |
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#23
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High end gear is used for high end projects involving high
end musicians, high end engineers, and high end producers. Mike... I guess you haven't flipped on top 40 radion in the last 10 years! ^_^ "I'm beginning to suspect that your problem is the gap between what you say and what you think you have said." -george (paraphrased) |
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#24
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"Raglan" wrote in message
m... If you're a home recordist, I have a suggestion -- stop stressing out about your gear. It's probably fine. The signal path is more than likely capable of getting fairly close to megastudio quality even if all your equipment is just prosumer-level stuff. If your recordings sound crap, the reason is probably your technique, not the shortcomings of the gear. The vast majority of my listeners are downloading MP3s. I could be tracking on a pocket dictation recorder and the difference would be barely audible. If audio quality was the first consideration for consumers, $30 blasters wouldn't have their own shelf at KMart. dtk |
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#25
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"Raglan" wrote in message
m... If you're a home recordist, I have a suggestion -- stop stressing out about your gear. It's probably fine. The signal path is more than likely capable of getting fairly close to megastudio quality even if all your equipment is just prosumer-level stuff. If your recordings sound crap, the reason is probably your technique, not the shortcomings of the gear. The vast majority of my listeners are downloading MP3s. I could be tracking on a pocket dictation recorder and the difference would be barely audible. If audio quality was the first consideration for consumers, $30 blasters wouldn't have their own shelf at KMart. dtk |
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#26
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Hear, hear ...
TM Raglan wrote: The way I see the state of prosumer audio at the moment is a bit like the state of desktop publishing around 1990. (My job is in publishing, so I was there.) The analogy isn't perfect, but it's instructive. snip of a well-put analogy At the present time, the audio pros seem to be where the print compositors were in 1990 -- arguing endlessly about how many angels could dance on a 1200dpi imagesetter. |
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#27
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Hear, hear ...
TM Raglan wrote: The way I see the state of prosumer audio at the moment is a bit like the state of desktop publishing around 1990. (My job is in publishing, so I was there.) The analogy isn't perfect, but it's instructive. snip of a well-put analogy At the present time, the audio pros seem to be where the print compositors were in 1990 -- arguing endlessly about how many angels could dance on a 1200dpi imagesetter. |
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#28
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#29
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#31
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#32
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A parametric equalizer on each mic before conversion would probably be a
good idea. Bob "Paul Stamler" wrote in message ... Raglan has a good point, in fact a lot of them. One thing, though: a lot of the errors in cheap microphones, preamp/mixers and A/Ds are in the same direction -- bright and harsh -- and reinforce one another. If you choose your cheap gear carefully to minimize this, you can get surprisingly excellent results, but if you just put stuff together because it sounded spiffy at the store, you're likely to get hideous recordings. (Bright often sounds spiffy on first listen.) The old budget hi-fi idea of making sure the gear's imperfections cancel each other out instead of reinforcing is equally applicable to recording gear. Peace, Paul |
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#33
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A parametric equalizer on each mic before conversion would probably be a
good idea. Bob "Paul Stamler" wrote in message ... Raglan has a good point, in fact a lot of them. One thing, though: a lot of the errors in cheap microphones, preamp/mixers and A/Ds are in the same direction -- bright and harsh -- and reinforce one another. If you choose your cheap gear carefully to minimize this, you can get surprisingly excellent results, but if you just put stuff together because it sounded spiffy at the store, you're likely to get hideous recordings. (Bright often sounds spiffy on first listen.) The old budget hi-fi idea of making sure the gear's imperfections cancel each other out instead of reinforcing is equally applicable to recording gear. Peace, Paul |
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#34
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Its....
40% the song 40% the performance 10% the room 10% everything else Mark |
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#36
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I play guitar and desired to record myself. I started out using the sound
card in my computer. Way too bad. I decided to get something a little better. And my budget was ony 1000 dollars for the whole banana. The setup is almost good enough for that purpose. Now I need to convert my spare room to a little studio suitable for a very small group of musicians. For the actual recording of a CD you rent a studio and hire a recording engineer. That is a lot cheaper than doing it yourself. If you have a contract with a record company. all you need is your instrument. Bob "Raglan" wrote in message m... If you're a home recordist, I have a suggestion -- stop stressing out about your gear. It's probably fine. The signal path is more than likely capable of getting fairly close to megastudio quality even if all your equipment is just prosumer-level stuff. If your recordings sound crap, the reason is probably your technique, not the shortcomings of the gear. Yes, this is meant to be provocative. No, it's not meant as a troll. It seems to me that the gear obsession that drives much of the discussion in rec.audio.pro is misplaced. Many overenthusiastic amateurs like me are being stampeded by "pro" advice into buying stuff that they don't need and won't do them any good. Even the best gear in the world won't make up for the acoustic shortcomings of typical home studios. And even low-end gear won't usually make them audibly worse. Two theoretical exceptions may seem to be microphones and monitors, which are highly coloured compared with solid-state electronics. But you can get decent enough mics cheaply -- look no further than the SM57 or condensers like the Oktavas, Rodes and MXLs. And cheap-and-nasty monitors can do a good enough job. You've just got to learn them. Look at the ubiquitous NS10. Hell, some hi-fi speakers will do just fine. (Oh yes they will.) No one pair of monitors will tell you everything, anyway. Cheap modern solid-state audio gear, even some of the worst of it, is actually not bad. Signal-to-noise and distortion figures are fantastic by the standards of a few decades ago. Never before has it been possible to buy so much transparency for so little money. On top of that, most home studio work these days is done in the digital domain. How much seriously audible damage can be done to a signal that is subjected to no more than preamplification, mild compression and A/D conversion before it enters -- and stays in -- the digital domain? Before you flame me, take note that I'm saying "good enough", not "stellar". So how good is good enough? I reckon the judgment lies with the lay listener. If my girlfriend can't tell the difference, then there is no difference -- for all practical purposes. And if my hi-fi crazed friend (whose listening gear costs a lot more than the entire contents of my home studio) reckons that some of my output compares sonically with less exacting commercial releases, then I consider my hobby well worth carrying on with. I think you should do the same. Of course, both my friend and my girlfriend are wrong, in the sense that I can tell the difference and the little flaws leap out at me. Pro engineers might spot the difference on a boom box. But that's not the point. We make music for ourselves and for the listener, not the anal perfectionists in the industry. I've been doing this home-reccing thing for nearly 20 years, mostly as an aid to songwriting and arrangement for various bands. My sound sucked for the first 15 years, when I was using four-track cassette, but I learnt a lot of techniques and workarounds. Then I got a DAW, and my sound still sucked because I didn't understand the special problems of digital. The past five years have been a period of learning and slow improvement and I'm now confident of being able to make recordings -- musical content aside -- that the average listener cannot tell from a commercial release on an average playback system. And I use equipment that would be panned in this forum. Having said all this, I have to add that gear quality is not *entirely* irrelevant. Some stuff will do obvious harm to your recordings -- those starved-plate preamps spring to mind. Horrible microphones are not a good idea. And decent sources -- good-sounding instruments and amplifiers, and guitars with newish strings -- make a big difference. Certainly a home-reccer should avoid the very worst gear, but there is hardly any point in aspiring to the best. You're just wasting your money. Raglan PS. What inspired this posting was a bout of gear-insecurity that I recently suffered, specifically about my audio card, a Delta 44. How much fidelity did the converters lose, I worried. Well, I took a fine recording with lots of detail (track 2 on Bela Bela La Habana by Chucho Valdes) and ran it through the sound card six times. After that amount of generation loss, flaws should be strikingly apparent. And they are. But guess what? Not so bad, actually..... and my girlfriend mistakes the seventh-generation copy for the original if I trick her with an extra couple of dB on the copy. |
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#37
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I play guitar and desired to record myself. I started out using the sound
card in my computer. Way too bad. I decided to get something a little better. And my budget was ony 1000 dollars for the whole banana. The setup is almost good enough for that purpose. Now I need to convert my spare room to a little studio suitable for a very small group of musicians. For the actual recording of a CD you rent a studio and hire a recording engineer. That is a lot cheaper than doing it yourself. If you have a contract with a record company. all you need is your instrument. Bob "Raglan" wrote in message m... If you're a home recordist, I have a suggestion -- stop stressing out about your gear. It's probably fine. The signal path is more than likely capable of getting fairly close to megastudio quality even if all your equipment is just prosumer-level stuff. If your recordings sound crap, the reason is probably your technique, not the shortcomings of the gear. Yes, this is meant to be provocative. No, it's not meant as a troll. It seems to me that the gear obsession that drives much of the discussion in rec.audio.pro is misplaced. Many overenthusiastic amateurs like me are being stampeded by "pro" advice into buying stuff that they don't need and won't do them any good. Even the best gear in the world won't make up for the acoustic shortcomings of typical home studios. And even low-end gear won't usually make them audibly worse. Two theoretical exceptions may seem to be microphones and monitors, which are highly coloured compared with solid-state electronics. But you can get decent enough mics cheaply -- look no further than the SM57 or condensers like the Oktavas, Rodes and MXLs. And cheap-and-nasty monitors can do a good enough job. You've just got to learn them. Look at the ubiquitous NS10. Hell, some hi-fi speakers will do just fine. (Oh yes they will.) No one pair of monitors will tell you everything, anyway. Cheap modern solid-state audio gear, even some of the worst of it, is actually not bad. Signal-to-noise and distortion figures are fantastic by the standards of a few decades ago. Never before has it been possible to buy so much transparency for so little money. On top of that, most home studio work these days is done in the digital domain. How much seriously audible damage can be done to a signal that is subjected to no more than preamplification, mild compression and A/D conversion before it enters -- and stays in -- the digital domain? Before you flame me, take note that I'm saying "good enough", not "stellar". So how good is good enough? I reckon the judgment lies with the lay listener. If my girlfriend can't tell the difference, then there is no difference -- for all practical purposes. And if my hi-fi crazed friend (whose listening gear costs a lot more than the entire contents of my home studio) reckons that some of my output compares sonically with less exacting commercial releases, then I consider my hobby well worth carrying on with. I think you should do the same. Of course, both my friend and my girlfriend are wrong, in the sense that I can tell the difference and the little flaws leap out at me. Pro engineers might spot the difference on a boom box. But that's not the point. We make music for ourselves and for the listener, not the anal perfectionists in the industry. I've been doing this home-reccing thing for nearly 20 years, mostly as an aid to songwriting and arrangement for various bands. My sound sucked for the first 15 years, when I was using four-track cassette, but I learnt a lot of techniques and workarounds. Then I got a DAW, and my sound still sucked because I didn't understand the special problems of digital. The past five years have been a period of learning and slow improvement and I'm now confident of being able to make recordings -- musical content aside -- that the average listener cannot tell from a commercial release on an average playback system. And I use equipment that would be panned in this forum. Having said all this, I have to add that gear quality is not *entirely* irrelevant. Some stuff will do obvious harm to your recordings -- those starved-plate preamps spring to mind. Horrible microphones are not a good idea. And decent sources -- good-sounding instruments and amplifiers, and guitars with newish strings -- make a big difference. Certainly a home-reccer should avoid the very worst gear, but there is hardly any point in aspiring to the best. You're just wasting your money. Raglan PS. What inspired this posting was a bout of gear-insecurity that I recently suffered, specifically about my audio card, a Delta 44. How much fidelity did the converters lose, I worried. Well, I took a fine recording with lots of detail (track 2 on Bela Bela La Habana by Chucho Valdes) and ran it through the sound card six times. After that amount of generation loss, flaws should be strikingly apparent. And they are. But guess what? Not so bad, actually..... and my girlfriend mistakes the seventh-generation copy for the original if I trick her with an extra couple of dB on the copy. |
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#38
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"Preben Friis" wrote:
This is rec.audio.pro as in "recreational.audio.production" ... You don't have to be payed to be here.. Preben, For the millionth time, here is the start of the FAQ for this group. Please note the absence of the word "production": Q1.1 - What is this newsgroup for? What topics are appropriate here, and what topics are best saved for another newsgroup? [9/98] This newsgroup exists for the discussion of issues and topics related to professional audio engineering. We generally do not discuss issues relating to home audio reproduction, though they do occasionally come up. The rec.audio.* hierarchy of newsgroups is as follows: rec.audio.pro - Issues pertaining to professional audio rec.audio.marketplace - Buying and trading of consumer equipment rec.audio.tech - Technical discussions about consumer audio rec.audio.opinion - Everyone's $0.02 on consumer audio rec.audio.high-end - High-end consumer audio rec.audio.misc - Everything else alt.music.4-track - Deals with smaller home based recording projects rec.music.makers.marketplace - A music related for sale forum Please be sure to select the right newsgroup before posting. -- Q1.2 - Do I have to be a "professional" to post here? No. Anyone is welcome to post on rec.audio.pro so long as the messages you post are endemic to the group in some way. If you are not an audio professional, we would ask that you read this FAQ in full before posting. You may find that some of your essential questions about our field are answered right here. But if not, feel free to ask us. Harvey Gerst Indian Trail Recording Studio http://www.ITRstudio.com/ |
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#39
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"Preben Friis" wrote:
This is rec.audio.pro as in "recreational.audio.production" ... You don't have to be payed to be here.. Preben, For the millionth time, here is the start of the FAQ for this group. Please note the absence of the word "production": Q1.1 - What is this newsgroup for? What topics are appropriate here, and what topics are best saved for another newsgroup? [9/98] This newsgroup exists for the discussion of issues and topics related to professional audio engineering. We generally do not discuss issues relating to home audio reproduction, though they do occasionally come up. The rec.audio.* hierarchy of newsgroups is as follows: rec.audio.pro - Issues pertaining to professional audio rec.audio.marketplace - Buying and trading of consumer equipment rec.audio.tech - Technical discussions about consumer audio rec.audio.opinion - Everyone's $0.02 on consumer audio rec.audio.high-end - High-end consumer audio rec.audio.misc - Everything else alt.music.4-track - Deals with smaller home based recording projects rec.music.makers.marketplace - A music related for sale forum Please be sure to select the right newsgroup before posting. -- Q1.2 - Do I have to be a "professional" to post here? No. Anyone is welcome to post on rec.audio.pro so long as the messages you post are endemic to the group in some way. If you are not an audio professional, we would ask that you read this FAQ in full before posting. You may find that some of your essential questions about our field are answered right here. But if not, feel free to ask us. Harvey Gerst Indian Trail Recording Studio http://www.ITRstudio.com/ |
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#40
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"Harvey Gerst" wrote in message
... "Preben Friis" wrote: This is rec.audio.pro as in "recreational.audio.production" ... You don't have to be payed to be here.. Preben, For the millionth time, here is the start of the FAQ for this group. Please note the absence of the word "production": Ya got me curious. I looked up the Feb 1992 charter. Under reference entry, the official listing for the newsgroup is "rec.audio.pro Professional audio gear, production and studio engineering". The intended audience was... - Broadcast and studio engineers - Those with interests in production and engineering - Musicians and recording hobbyists Feels a little like quoting scripture. dt king |
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