How can you evaluate a system with highly processed music?


Each to their own.

But can you really evaluate a system by listening to highly processed, electric/electronic music? How do you know what that sounds like?

I like to listen to voices and acoustic music that is little processed. 

Instruments like piano, violin, etc. 

And the human voice. And the joy of hearing back up singers clearly, etc.

Even if full instrumentation backing a natural sounding voice.

(eg.: singer/songwriters like Lyle Lovett or Leonard Cohen)

There is a standard and a point of reference that can be gauged.

 

mglik

Showing 4 responses by bdp24

@onhwy61: What you say is true of contemporary Classical recordings, but not of recordings made in the 1950’s and 60’s; all of those were recorded on a 2-track or 3-track machine (that’s all there was back then). Lots of recordings made in England and Europe were done so with minimal miking, including those made with the famous Decca tree, using only a pair of mics.

In the 70's, 80’s, and 90’s there were a number of small audiophile labels (including Wilson) making Classical recordings using only two or three mics, recorded onto a 2-track machine. I have a bunch of them, and they’re not that rare, hard to find, or expensive.

@quattro: I have a bunch of Peter’s recordings, made for Levinson, Audiofon, and Harmonia Mundi. Excellent sound and music.

John Atkinson made the point to Gordon Holt that the sound made by an electric guitar plugged into an amplifier was just as much an acoustic signal as is an acoustic instrument, and he was correct. But recorded sounds produced purely electronically is a different matter: that sound never traveled though air, from an instrument (whether acoustic or amplified) to the recording microphone. There are plenty of recordings in which the electric bass, electric guitar, and/or keyboard instrument/s was/were plugged into the recording console, not into an amplifier and then recorded with a mic.

I’ve watched and listened as a recording engineer played with the dial on a studio’s parametric equalizer (far different from a graphic equalizer), drastically changing the sound of the recording. For evaluating the timbral neutrality of loudspeakers, make and use your own recordings! Listening purely for pleasure is a different activity. "Turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream" as someone once sang. ;-)

J.Gordon Holt insisted you couldn’t. Spending a day in a recording studio can be an illuminating learning experience. ;-)

Consumer suggestion: record some live music (or even people speaking) yourself with a pair of high quality mics plugged into a good reel-to-reel recorder, and use that recording as demo material.