[Scott Dorsey]

Frank Stearns wrote:

But this comes around to a part of my original thesis that I perhaps did not state
as clearly as I should: do we now have a generation of people so unaware of what
real instruments sound like, or what is possible to experience with really good
reproduced sound, that "mediocre" is accepted as the norm?

That's part of it, but I don't think that's necessarily the problem here.
I think a lot of the problem is that we have a generation of engineers who
came up outside the studio system and did not have the benefit of learning
from other engineers, who learned things pretty much on their own by trial
and error.

This isn't entirely bad, but it HAS resulted in a world where any bozo off
the street can hang up a shingle and call himself a mastering engineer
without any previous experience at all.

On the other hand, some of those people have the chance to become very good
and to bring a different perspective in. But it will also take them some
time to get that way and I don't want to be paying for their time to do so.

But, it's true that in order to track, record, or master, you need to have
in your mind a vision of what the final product is supposed to sound like.
And, in the case of acoustic music, that is a very specific thing with a
common reference and it hard to argue that you want a cello to sound
different than a cello sounds.
--scott

--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."