2. misc-audio
  3. 1375840071

Does it bother you?

I'm a recording engineer who has worked in some of the world's top facilities. Let me walk you though an example signal path that you might find in a place like, say, Henson Studio A:

1. Microphone: Old. Probably a PCB inside. Copper wiring.
2. Mic cable: Constructed in house with $1/ft Canare Star Quad, solder, and a connector that might have been in the bottom of a box in the back.
3. Wall jack: Just a regular old Neutrik XLR connector on the wall.
4. Cable snake: Bundles of mic cables going to the control room.
5. Another XLR jack.
6. Another cheap mic cable.
7. Mic preamp: Old and lovely sounding. Audio going through 50 year old pots.
8. Patchbay: Another cheap copper cable is soldered into a patchbay where hundreds of connectors practically touch.
9. TT Cable: Goes from one patch to the next in the patch bay. Copper. No brand preference.
10. DB25 connector: Yes, the same connector you used to connect a modem to your computer in 1986. This is the heart and soul of studio audio transfer.
11. DB25 cable to the console: 25 strands of razor-thin copper wire, 8 channels of audio, sharing a ride.
12. The mixing console: PCB after PCB of tiny copper paths carry the audio through countless op amp chips.
13. DB25 cable to the recording device: time to travel through two more DB25 connectors as we make our way to the AD converters or tape machine.
14. AD conversion: More op amp chips.
15. Digital cable: nothing fancy, just whatever works. USB and Firewire cables are just stock.

...and this is just getting the audio into the recorder.

Also:

None of this equipment has vibration reducing rubber feet, it's just stacked haphazardly in racks. Touching.

No fancy power cables are used, just regular ol' IEC cables.

Acoustic treatment is done using scientific measurements.

Words like "soundstage" and "pace" are never uttered.

Does it bother you? Do you find it strange that the people who record the music that you listen to aren't interested in "tweaks," and expensive cables, and alarm clocks with a sticker on them? If we're not using any of this stuff to record the albums, then what are you hearing when you do use it?
trentpancakes

Showing 5 responses by jjrenman

jjrenman
279 posts
 
Trentpancakes,

A reason for the better sounding recordings of the 50's and 60's may be that there is a lot less of all the little "problems" you mention in rant.
jjrenman
279 posts
 
I can make an argument that 10 of your 15 "issues" were not present in those early recordings where simple recording techniques were used.

Excellent recordings are like a fine restaurant. You have to go out of your way to find one created by those who truly care enough about the final product to pay attention to every possible detail.
jjrenman
279 posts
 
But it still doesn't explain how audiophile listeners only seem to find extreme positives when they listen to traditional studio recordings on expensive stereos.

How do you come to this statement. The bulk of recordings that have "extreme positives" are a small minority. I'd say that far less than 10% of my collection is audiophile quality recordings, with the bulk coming from small specialty labels that are obsessed with sound quality.

The rest of the recordings have lots of issues but I don't post about how my system lets me hear the issues.

In fact there are far to many recordings that are so bad I can only listen to them as backround music.
jjrenman
279 posts
 
Look at my system and you won't see any strange tweaks.

This is getting laughable. Your system is full of technology that was originally tweaky. The most obvious are the speaker cables. Not all that long ago the question of wire making a sonic difference was hotly debated between those who are the technically inclined non believers and those who are the proof is in the pudding so give it a try folks.
jjrenman
279 posts
 
What makes an album transcendent is emotion, power, fragility... For very little money and effort,

True enough but if it is a crappy recording quality does the emotion, power, fragility come through?
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