NewBuyer, I'm not Pat, so forgive me, but my personal experience of this is that Engineers/Producers are different. I personally will try and balance a mix to sound "good" on nearfield monitors (which have a limited but predictable bass response - and often quite a "hot" top end - with experience you can mentally compensate for this. I'd also make sure I listened on a full blown "audiophile" rig, a car stereo and a Walkman/iPod device. The resultant mix is going to be a compromise that sounds OK across the board.
Many professionals don't have time for all of that (time is money!), but then again they have an ability to mentally extrapolate the likely sound of a mix on a variety of replay setups. Sometimes, happily, this results in a sound that is really great on a good system. Unfortunately, the "compression wars" of the last decade or so have created commercial pressures to manipulate the sound to make it more "exciting" (louder!) using brick-wall limiting and other methods that are not exactly "hi-fi" as we know it... Few mixdowns/masters are created using anything we would recognise as a conventional high-end audio chain (Naim and Linn labels are exceptions to this that I know of - I'm certain there are others). To address the other part of your question, take vocals as an example... Most vocals re recorded in an acoustically "dead" (characterless) vocal booth. The aim is to get a dry, ambience free sound so that the desired ambience can be "painted on" afterwards. Remember, you can't remove ambience - it changes the fundamentals of the sound. The analogy is with a polarising filter on a digital camera - you can't exactly recreate or remove the effect on a computer because the quality of the light itself was changed before it was captured by the sensor... Anyway, the dry vocal track will sound unappealing and unnatural without some ambience added. One production trick is to occasionally remove all the ambience on a solo vocal right at the end of a song (often on the last word or phrase). This "shocks" the listeners ears as the illusion of acoustic space is dramatically collapsed - the performer will seem to step out of the (artifical) acoustic into the room. The opposite approach (adding oodles of plate reverb or echo onto the final word in a line) is also used quite often. Hotel California, for example, uses a trick that sounds like the entire mix was rapidly gated to nothing for a beat or two halfway through...it creates a dramatic "heart-stopping" effect. This is readily audible on the current remastered CD. Nobody will be happy with the sound of instruments/voices with zero ambience - they will sound "all wrong" because we bever encounter an anechoic space in the real world, and we have highly developed sense of ambience in order to survive being hunted by bears in dark caves (well that's my theory anyway!). So the choice has to be made as to using natural ambience or a digital/mechanical emulation of ambience. There are ways of applying natural ambience in post-production, but they are fiddly and time consuming and lack the nth degree of control you get with digital. As an aside, most (all?) performers need ambience adding to their monitoring chain (in a studio environment) in order to sing/play well... In the 80's there was a fashion to use gated reverb on drums - this is a dramatic but completely artificial - and ultimately highly annoying - effect. Thank goodness we got through that! Certain instruments are problematic (eg brass, woodwind) becasue they actually create vibrations in the skulls of the players that becomes part of the sound they "hear"...obviosuly the microphone isn't going to pick those up, so the sound to the player will differ from that of anyone else listening at the time ..it's like that thing where you don't recognise the sound of your own voice when it's recorded... A more subtle form of the same problem is that the non-linearities of a microphons don't match that of any particular persons ears. Therefore, even a "perfect recording" may disappoint the performer. Thankfully there is an array of tools available to manipulate the sound to make it more like what they were expecting to hear. Sometimes though - as Pat said - it's not possible to completely close the expectation gap. Regards Phil Over to you Pat! -- Phil Leigh ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Phil Leigh's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=85 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=30820 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
