As I've mentioned here before, I think that one of the two main obstacles to achieving a reasonable facsimile of concert hall sound at home is how commercial recordings are made. A case in point is recordings of classical or other acoustic (unamplified) music played by solo piano.
The percentage of available commercial recordings of solo piano which capture a reasonable facsimile of what a concert grand piano actually sounds like from any audience location in a good concert hall is truly miniscule. Here is an example of where the usual stereo recording technique truly gets in the way of realistic home reproduction.
An audience perspective yields no appreciable left/right spatial separation among the piano keys. Even from five or ten feet away from a piano's open lid, I can hear neither left/right nor front/back separation of notes. And, believe me, I've tried to perceive such many times from that close up in rooms ranging from a living room to a large hall from the first row.
From the perspective of the pianist, or from a few feet directly behind the pianist, there would be modest left/right separation, especially if the lid has been taken off the piano for recording, but not nearly so much separation as on most piano recordings. The bass strings actually run diagonally across the piano case, so the left hand will not really be coming from the left. Besides, I have yet to be at any concert where such a perspective is offered to any audience seat. Some halls may have stage-surrounding balcony seats, but from that far away even if your balcony seat were directly behind the pianist there would not be much, if any, left/right audible.
Okay, it is POSSIBLE to arrange the audience so that some could be directly behind and close enough to the pianist to hear some left/right separation, as this picture shows. But this is a very uncommon arrangement, one I've never seen or experienced in a concert I've attended. And grand pianos are not intended to be heard from behind the performer. The lid is intended to direct sound out toward the audience. Notice where the coincident stereo microphone array has been placed in that picture; the microphone array, and the picture, are taken from the typical audience perspective.
In contrast to the typical audience perspective, the vast majority of commercially available solo piano recordings have considerable left/right spatial separation among the keys in terms of where the sound of each note seems to originate. In addition, many such recordings also capture a considerable front-to-back spatial difference among the keys. The degree of spatial separation among piano notes routinely demonstrable from stereo recordings played back at home cannot be experienced in concert, even by the pianist, much less someone sitting directly behind and close to the artist.
However, you would expect that a company and engineer as recording-quality conscious as Reference Recording’s Keith O. Johnson would choose realism when recording solo piano. You would thus expect this company to capture a true audience perspective on their solo piano recordings.
You would be wrong.
Take Reference Recordings RR-25, Nojima Plays Liszt, for example. Many who know recorded piano music find this recording to be among the most artistically satisfying available. Nojima has not made many recordings, but the ones he has done are usually artistically riveting and revelatory. This recording is no exception and, sonically, is in many ways as fine a piano recording as any. But Like most other piano recordings, the fact that the RR Liszt has a distinct left/right separation among the various notes makes it totally unrealistic for mimicking what one hears from any audience perspective in any concert. While RR did mix in an audience-location coincident stereo pair as part of the sonic pickup, the main microphones were located at pianist perspective and the lid of the piano was removed for the recording.
Many recordings have even more extreme spatial "note spread" on solo piano than the Reference Recordings example. Many, if not most, modern recordings of piano are made by putting the microphones under the lid of the piano, inside the case, and aiming one mike at the bass strings and the other at the treble strings. A video discussing the typical techniques can be viewed here.
There are very few audience-perspective recordings of solo piano which have ever been commercially released. One was a Sheffield Lab Direct-to-Disk recording of Lincoln Mayorga playing Brahms. It was made with a coincident stereo microphone (probably an AKG C-24 as with a number of other Sheffield Lab recordings) which yielded an audience-like perspective. Actually, I thought it was a rather strange recording, at once bangy (perhaps the piano itself?) and overly distant sounding in two-channel stereo. Others I’m aware of are all the James Boyk recordings on Performance Recordings. These use an actual Blumlein stereo array to record the piano from what sounds like an audience perspective.
I’m sure there are others, but those are the only commercial recordings of solo piano I’m aware of that offer a truly audience-like perspective on a grand piano, one which lacks the obvious left/right and/or front/back spacing among notes which is almost universal on such recordings but which, I repeat, one does not hear in concert from the audience during a solo piano recital. I’m aware of a few more recordings of groups of instruments made from a true audience perspective with a coincident stereo pair of mikes where the piano does not have the typical recorded spatial spread, but no others of solo piano.
Why should this be so? Well, purist though I am, I have to confess that even I find stereo solo piano recordings which lack "note spread" a bit boring or uninvolving. I suspect that the reason I do not find live solo piano recitals boring is that the visual image of the pianist playing adds sufficient additional sensory interest to keep me fully engaged.
I suspect that most others must agree with me on this, even most other audiophiles. Thus, while the RR Liszt recording is surreal or idealized rather than realistic in terms of spatiality, I find it both artistically AND sonically enthralling to listen to.
Stricter purists than I may well disagree. I agree that the RR Liszt piano recording probably would sound more concert-hall realistic if only the audience-location coincident stereo microphone had been used. But for solo piano recordings, surreal spatiality is just fine for me, thank you.
The percentage of available commercial recordings of solo piano which capture a reasonable facsimile of what a concert grand piano actually sounds like from any audience location in a good concert hall is truly miniscule. Here is an example of where the usual stereo recording technique truly gets in the way of realistic home reproduction.
An audience perspective yields no appreciable left/right spatial separation among the piano keys. Even from five or ten feet away from a piano's open lid, I can hear neither left/right nor front/back separation of notes. And, believe me, I've tried to perceive such many times from that close up in rooms ranging from a living room to a large hall from the first row.
From the perspective of the pianist, or from a few feet directly behind the pianist, there would be modest left/right separation, especially if the lid has been taken off the piano for recording, but not nearly so much separation as on most piano recordings. The bass strings actually run diagonally across the piano case, so the left hand will not really be coming from the left. Besides, I have yet to be at any concert where such a perspective is offered to any audience seat. Some halls may have stage-surrounding balcony seats, but from that far away even if your balcony seat were directly behind the pianist there would not be much, if any, left/right audible.
Okay, it is POSSIBLE to arrange the audience so that some could be directly behind and close enough to the pianist to hear some left/right separation, as this picture shows. But this is a very uncommon arrangement, one I've never seen or experienced in a concert I've attended. And grand pianos are not intended to be heard from behind the performer. The lid is intended to direct sound out toward the audience. Notice where the coincident stereo microphone array has been placed in that picture; the microphone array, and the picture, are taken from the typical audience perspective.
In contrast to the typical audience perspective, the vast majority of commercially available solo piano recordings have considerable left/right spatial separation among the keys in terms of where the sound of each note seems to originate. In addition, many such recordings also capture a considerable front-to-back spatial difference among the keys. The degree of spatial separation among piano notes routinely demonstrable from stereo recordings played back at home cannot be experienced in concert, even by the pianist, much less someone sitting directly behind and close to the artist.
However, you would expect that a company and engineer as recording-quality conscious as Reference Recording’s Keith O. Johnson would choose realism when recording solo piano. You would thus expect this company to capture a true audience perspective on their solo piano recordings.
You would be wrong.
Take Reference Recordings RR-25, Nojima Plays Liszt, for example. Many who know recorded piano music find this recording to be among the most artistically satisfying available. Nojima has not made many recordings, but the ones he has done are usually artistically riveting and revelatory. This recording is no exception and, sonically, is in many ways as fine a piano recording as any. But Like most other piano recordings, the fact that the RR Liszt has a distinct left/right separation among the various notes makes it totally unrealistic for mimicking what one hears from any audience perspective in any concert. While RR did mix in an audience-location coincident stereo pair as part of the sonic pickup, the main microphones were located at pianist perspective and the lid of the piano was removed for the recording.
Many recordings have even more extreme spatial "note spread" on solo piano than the Reference Recordings example. Many, if not most, modern recordings of piano are made by putting the microphones under the lid of the piano, inside the case, and aiming one mike at the bass strings and the other at the treble strings. A video discussing the typical techniques can be viewed here.
There are very few audience-perspective recordings of solo piano which have ever been commercially released. One was a Sheffield Lab Direct-to-Disk recording of Lincoln Mayorga playing Brahms. It was made with a coincident stereo microphone (probably an AKG C-24 as with a number of other Sheffield Lab recordings) which yielded an audience-like perspective. Actually, I thought it was a rather strange recording, at once bangy (perhaps the piano itself?) and overly distant sounding in two-channel stereo. Others I’m aware of are all the James Boyk recordings on Performance Recordings. These use an actual Blumlein stereo array to record the piano from what sounds like an audience perspective.
I’m sure there are others, but those are the only commercial recordings of solo piano I’m aware of that offer a truly audience-like perspective on a grand piano, one which lacks the obvious left/right and/or front/back spacing among notes which is almost universal on such recordings but which, I repeat, one does not hear in concert from the audience during a solo piano recital. I’m aware of a few more recordings of groups of instruments made from a true audience perspective with a coincident stereo pair of mikes where the piano does not have the typical recorded spatial spread, but no others of solo piano.
Why should this be so? Well, purist though I am, I have to confess that even I find stereo solo piano recordings which lack "note spread" a bit boring or uninvolving. I suspect that the reason I do not find live solo piano recitals boring is that the visual image of the pianist playing adds sufficient additional sensory interest to keep me fully engaged.
I suspect that most others must agree with me on this, even most other audiophiles. Thus, while the RR Liszt recording is surreal or idealized rather than realistic in terms of spatiality, I find it both artistically AND sonically enthralling to listen to.
Stricter purists than I may well disagree. I agree that the RR Liszt piano recording probably would sound more concert-hall realistic if only the audience-location coincident stereo microphone had been used. But for solo piano recordings, surreal spatiality is just fine for me, thank you.