Valve superiority over solid state - read this (Lynn Olsen)
 

In article ,
MiNE 109 wrote:
Can you explain "artifical aural space" please ? I think you're
talking ******** with that remark, to be frank about it.

It's what you get when you don't use microphones.

Last time I checked, microphones were man-made (artificial).

They operate on actual sound.

If you'd ever solo'd a mic in front of, say, a guitar cabinet, kick drum
or trumpet, in a typical studio multi-mic balance, you'd know just how
little 'aural space' it's picking up.

FFS, that's the whole point of a multi-mic setup...

--
*I'm not your type. I'm not inflatable.

Dave Plowman London SW 12
RIP Acorn

Valve superiority over solid state - read this (Lynn Olsen)
 

A certain MiNE 109, of uk.rec.audio "fame", writes :

Your assumption is unduly cynical. I know of no other sources on LP
mastering to quote, whether they agree with me or not. I'll certainly
read and digest any others you can find.

An interview with a Motown recording engineer:

Thanks.


http://www.prosoundweb.com/recording.../olmo/olmo.php

Bob Ludwig:

http://mixonline.com/ar/audio_bob_ludwig/

MoFi (publicity piece?):

http://www.vxm.com/21R.46.html

--

"Jokes mentioning ducks were considered particularly funny." - cnn.com

Valve superiority over solid state - read this (Lynn Olsen)
 

A certain MiNE 109, of uk.rec.audio "fame", writes :

Yes. She revisited the *repertoire*. Sorry if the juxtaposition of my
two sentences led you to the incorrect conclusion that I thought SOB 2K
was a remastering of SOB.

I hardly see what relevance this has to our discussion. Bach is probably
the most revisited "repertoire" of all time, with the possible exception
of certain rather irritating songs by Abba and the Bee Gees.

Why is it necessary to make a distinction
over whether or not a sound has passed through air before it gets
recorded?

Because you asked.

I didn't ask for your opinion about your views on a sounds
"artificiality".

Why is this musically relevant ? When it gets played back from
the recording it's not "actual sound" is it ?

It's a matter of reference. Few knew what a synthesizer sounded like
when SOB was released, so there was little basis for determining if the
recording was accurate or not.

But this is true of any situation where people do not have the
opportunity to hear the master recording. That is the only possible way
for there to be "reference", and for any other derived source you have
to take the artist/engineer's word for it. Anyway any other instrument,
like an electric guitar (regardless of how it is recorded), sounds very
different from one musician to the next.

Though in that case, the artificial and real sounds are blended to the
point where in some cases you can't tell the difference, although other
sounds are obviously synthesized. The rest of what you're saying is just
waffle, like the sort of thing you'd read in a university thesis, where
bored academics go around trying to manufacture their own relevance by
attempting to classify the unclassifiable and restricting every little
detail into little boxes for the purposes of snobbery.

This is unexpected. The advent of electronic music was a profound change
in how music is created. It's not snobbery to understand the fundamental
difference between acoustic and electronic sounds.

That's a switch in your argument. You used the word "artificial" which
implies that further than merely describing the fundamental difference
(no argument there) you were making a judgement about sounds produced in
certain ways. There is no difference in "artificiality" between a
vibrating string or a vibrating oscillator, except that one technique
happens to be newer than the other. People made this sort of argument
about pianos whenever they came out.

--

"Jokes mentioning ducks were considered particularly funny." - cnn.com

Valve superiority over solid state - read this (Lynn Olsen)
 

"Chesney Christ" wrote in message

A certain MiNE 109, of uk.rec.audio "fame", writes :

Your assumption is unduly cynical. I know of no other sources on LP
mastering to quote, whether they agree with me or not. I'll
certainly read and digest any others you can find.

An interview with a Motown recording engineer:

Thanks.


http://www.prosoundweb.com/recording.../olmo/olmo.php


Bob Olhsson. All through the article he talks about all the home-made gear
that Motown used. He doesn't say who made it, I don't think. The two
"homies" were Mike McClain (sp?) and David Clark. That would be David Clark
of AES/ABX fame. They were the Motown equipment development and maintenance
department in those days. I first met them when I was 14 and worked in a
Lafayette Radio store in downtown Detroit.

Valve superiority over solid state - read this (Lynn Olsen)
 

A certain MiNE 109, of uk.rec.audio "fame", writes :

Your assumption is unduly cynical. I know of no other sources on LP
mastering to quote, whether they agree with me or not. I'll certainly
read and digest any others you can find.

An interview with a Motown recording engineer:

http://www.prosoundweb.com/recording.../olmo/olmo.php

There is only really one relevant paragraph here :

"Berry Gordy had the experience of getting burned by trying to do that.
He had learned early on the hard way that if you didn’t get it right
you really couldn’t do anything about it. And of course with vinyl
that was a lot more the case than with compact discs.

They were very, very concerned that things not be particularly modified
in the transfer. They’d rather do a new mix than try and fix anything
in mastering. So I started out pretty much doing really hot flat
transfers, although if we heard something that seemed obvious to change,
we could throw on some EQ and send an alternative version labeled with
what we did."

I don't see any contradiction here with what I've been saying, although
I would hardly call it the kind of detailed appraisal of mastering
techniques that Carlos' site provides.

Bob Ludwig:

http://mixonline.com/ar/audio_bob_ludwig/

I know about this guy. Well respected and extremely talented. But in
this article he's just describing his job which is to improve the sound
on master tapes which have been poorly mixed. In other words, the work
that his sent to him is incomplete. Occasionally it's so bad that -
"under certain circumstances, I have to ask the song to be remixed." -
obviously there's only so much he can do.

It's sad that he manages to be factually incorrect, and quotes a popular
myth :

"It is customary to believe that the CD is superior to the LP in terms
of bandwidth, but this is not the case. The CD is limited to 22,000
cycles, whereas the LP is able to reproduce frequencies up to 50,000
cycles, which in the PCM world equals a sampling rate at 100 kHz. The
bottom line is that LPs mastered with DMM still sound really good."

That harms his credibility somewhat. He goes on to shill for SACD, which
damages his credibility even further (in my book).

I disagree with him on another point :

"While we are in the analog domain, I would like to add that I think
analog lends itself really well to pop music. The unlinearities added in
terms of compression and harmonic distortion are, in many cases,
desirable, unless you ask all-digital people like Bob Clearmountain, who
doesn't at all like the fact that analog machines aren't reproducing
what you are feeding them. [Laughs.]"

This is of course a matter of disagreement. If I were a recording
artist, I wouldn't want my mastering engineer to add distortion and
compression to my recording. Then again, this is more to do with the
market he is selling his work into.

MoFi (publicity piece?):

http://www.vxm.com/21R.46.html

MoFi are the masters of hype, with this silly nonsense of pressing CDs
with gold (completely unnecessary). That aside, this article is about
all the hard work and messing about you have to do in order to make a
good master. There's a lot of voodoo-style crap in there about digital
recording clocks. I have heard some MoFi CD masterings, and they
certainly sound excellent, but that's usually because they went back and
sought good quality source material. Nothing to do with these whacky
custom-built D/A convertors.

--

"Jokes mentioning ducks were considered particularly funny." - cnn.com

Valve superiority over solid state - read this (Lynn Olsen)
 

In article ,
Chesney Christ wrote:
"It is customary to believe that the CD is superior to the LP in terms
of bandwidth, but this is not the case. The CD is limited to 22,000
cycles, whereas the LP is able to reproduce frequencies up to 50,000
cycles, which in the PCM world equals a sampling rate at 100 kHz. The
bottom line is that LPs mastered with DMM still sound really good."

That harms his credibility somewhat. He goes on to shill for SACD, which
damages his credibility even further (in my book).

It certainly is possible to record frequencies well above the cut off
limit of CDs on vinyl - the old JVC quadrophonic system relied on an FM
carrier at about 30 kHz, IIRC. But you needed a special cartridge, and the
system was very susceptible to wear and damage.

It also begs the question as to why you'd want to, given that CD can
handle high amplitude HF signals with no problems, which vinyl certainly
couldn't.

--
*It was all so different before everything changed.

Dave Plowman London SW 12
RIP Acorn

Valve superiority over solid state - read this (Lynn Olsen)
 

In article ,
Chesney Christ wrote:

A certain MiNE 109, of uk.rec.audio "fame", writes :

Yes. She revisited the *repertoire*. Sorry if the juxtaposition of my
two sentences led you to the incorrect conclusion that I thought SOB 2K
was a remastering of SOB.

I hardly see what relevance this has to our discussion. Bach is probably
the most revisited "repertoire" of all time, with the possible exception
of certain rather irritating songs by Abba and the Bee Gees.

You've lost track of the context of this part of our discussion. You
were discussing thing Carlos could have done beyond what she did in
remastering SOB, such as re-record parts. I simply mentioned that she
made a new recording of her old repertoire.

Why is it necessary to make a distinction
over whether or not a sound has passed through air before it gets
recorded?

Because you asked.

I didn't ask for your opinion about your views on a sounds
"artificiality".

I didn't give an opinion.

Why is this musically relevant ? When it gets played back from
the recording it's not "actual sound" is it ?

It's a matter of reference. Few knew what a synthesizer sounded like
when SOB was released, so there was little basis for determining if the
recording was accurate or not.

But this is true of any situation where people do not have the
opportunity to hear the master recording. That is the only possible way
for there to be "reference", and for any other derived source you have
to take the artist/engineer's word for it. Anyway any other instrument,
like an electric guitar (regardless of how it is recorded), sounds very
different from one musician to the next.

The master as unknowable reference? I agree with that. However, with
most instruments, one can hear them played. That wasn't the case for the
Moog and SOB.

Though in that case, the artificial and real sounds are blended to the
point where in some cases you can't tell the difference, although other
sounds are obviously synthesized. The rest of what you're saying is just
waffle, like the sort of thing you'd read in a university thesis, where
bored academics go around trying to manufacture their own relevance by
attempting to classify the unclassifiable and restricting every little
detail into little boxes for the purposes of snobbery.

This is unexpected. The advent of electronic music was a profound change
in how music is created. It's not snobbery to understand the fundamental
difference between acoustic and electronic sounds.

That's a switch in your argument. You used the word "artificial" which
implies that further than merely describing the fundamental difference
(no argument there) you were making a judgement about sounds produced in
certain ways.

You can rest assured that I was not making such a judgment and no switch
occured.

There is no difference in "artificiality" between a
vibrating string or a vibrating oscillator, except that one technique
happens to be newer than the other. People made this sort of argument
about pianos whenever they came out.

Yes, there is, and, no, they didn't.

Valve superiority over solid state - read this (Lynn Olsen)
 

In article ,
MiNE 109 wrote:
It's what you get when you don't use microphones.

Last time I checked, microphones were man-made (artificial).

They operate on actual sound.

If you'd ever solo'd a mic in front of, say, a guitar cabinet, kick
drum or trumpet, in a typical studio multi-mic balance, you'd know
just how little 'aural space' it's picking up.

That's a different issue. You do grant that even a close-mic setup works
on sound waves.

Indeed, but the microphone converts this into an electrical signal. And a
synth attempts to mimic this accurately, if that's what it's setting out
to do. My point is that there will be little or no 'aural space' with
either.

FFS, that's the whole point of a multi-mic setup...

Didn't BBC have an electronic music lab? Someone there might know the
difference between synthesized and acoustic.

The Radiophonic Workshop used both 'real' and synthesised sounds - and
played around with both 'till they got the effect they wanted.

FWIW, it's pretty easy to synthesise any one note of any instrument at
any one time. The difficulty is that each time that note is played on a
real instrument by a real human it will be slightly different. It's got
nowt to do with room acoustics that synths don't sound like the real thing
- even when they set out to do so.

--
*Re-elect nobody

Dave Plowman London SW 12
RIP Acorn

Valve superiority over solid state - read this (Lynn Olsen)
 

A certain MiNE 109, of uk.rec.audio "fame", writes :

I don't see any contradiction here with what I've been saying, although
I would hardly call it the kind of detailed appraisal of mastering
techniques that Carlos' site provides.

Too bad she couldn't use Motown engineers to master her lps!

She didn't have any say in the matter.

A flat
transfer seems a good thing.

The term "flat transfer" isn't defined anywhere there.

Another question and answer was relevant. Ohlsson mentions how much he
likes cutting vinyl: "It's wonderful."

Enjoying doing something doesn't mean it's inherently good.

This is of course a matter of disagreement. If I were a recording
artist, I wouldn't want my mastering engineer to add distortion and
compression to my recording. Then again, this is more to do with the
market he is selling his work into.

You wouldn't say that as such. You'd say, how can I get a drum sound
like I heard on this other recording?

Colouring a drum sound at the mastering stage would be plain daft, I
don't care what anyone says. If you want a certain drum sound, you'll
record it properly and colour it on your multitracks, not when you're
doing any pre-pressing stuff.

--

"Jokes mentioning ducks were considered particularly funny." - cnn.com