I got some experience during in live recording, a STAX static head phone switched to a Studer A80's out put and MIC pre amp, there were not too big different between those in sound quality but a noise of HISS, after I on and off the head phone to check the difference between real sound and the repro, I found main difference is not frequency respond or distortion, the real sound with body, mass, weight and thickness compare to the repro, so this should be the same way to compare two recorded source or two amps or two systems to see which has more thickness more mass and weight or sharp body,with those that will sound close to the real things is not only by measure the rate of distortion or frequency respond, I don't think people will compare two 0 % distortion 60HZ sin wave to see which HUM sound better, just joking
tony ma
I'm a professional recordist specializing in live events. I am therefore constantly faced with the problem of great audible differences between "live" and "recorded". Here I sit with dozens of great microphones, freedom to put them where I want, a 56 input mixing console, and a collection of recorders that I all know to be capable of certainly reproduce their electrical inputs far better than any comparison I hear when on the job. So, I've studied this problem for just a few decades.
I would say that most recordings are completely aware of these intractable differences, and generally redefine the problem in order to feel satisfied with their work. If you refine the problem as one of providing a recording that is a good reflection of the tone of the music and the content of the music, and a credible and pleasing but not identical rendition of the acoustic scene, then one can say that one's recordings are good.
I obtained one clue to the nature of the problem with the recordings I make with a coincident array, particularly those I make with a Rode NT4. I found that I had to put the mic far closer to the music ans than the listener, for the recording to have a perceived balance between direct and reflected sound that was similar to what the listener heard, and not just a little closer.
I later on learned from my studies of psychoacoustics that the human ear/brain does what is now called
dereverberation. As decomposition of the word suggests, dereverberation is the process by which our brain strips off the sound reflections from our environment. We are thus able to clearly hear people speak at a distance in a reverberant room, where a recorder and mic at the listener's location would record sonic mud unless the mic was highly directional. Students who attempt to record in lecture halls are intimately familiar with this problem.
We know from the study of HRTF's that our ears don't have the laser beam directionality of highly directional microphones. Therefore, the effective directionality that we perceive is also due to things that happen in our brains.
Dereverberation is our friend because it makes it possible for us to enjoy listening to recordings in rooms that are far more reverberant than optimal. We also know that there is something about how we make recordings that vastly diminishes our ear's ability to dereverberate the room that the original performance took place in.
We know for example that virtually every microphone in general use for recording today primarily captures the sound pressure at its location. The sound waves that pass over the microphone's diaphragm also have the property of coming from a certain direction and going in a certain direction. Almost all microphones and microphone techniques that we currently use throw away almost all of this information about direction.
Even if we could capture the information about direction of the sound as accurately as we presently capture the information about sound pressure, we don't have speakers that could reproduce varying directional information with even an approximation, let alone accurately.
Therefore, for the foreseeable future we will be disappointed and dismayed whenever we compare what we hear coming out of our microphones to what we hear when we listen live. For openers, our live listening needs to be done from a vastly greater distance than there is from the microphones to the source to compensate for the fact that our ears unconsciously dereverberate what we hear.
