The language of Reproduction and the language of Music.

[the sound of Tao]

Live recordings can be amazing specially in mono if they leave the recording more or less intact during production. Years ago I remember reading in one of the audio magazines how studio recordings are superior to live ones because they can clean up everything as needed and people bought into that.

There's no rationale for heavy vinyl! If I recall either Hobson or Kasem took credit for it and hailed it as some kind of breakthrough when reality is that they didn't know how to formulate vinyl and came up with a patch. Sadly since characters like HP & Holt came onto the scene high end became a game of gullibility and consumer ignorance so made up BS like 180g vinyl becomes a standard the same as black backgrounds and pinpoint imaging with very few questioning them because these people are looked upon as some kind of mavens.

Quality manufacturing is as much art as it is science and technology and IMO the artists and their art went away when they shut down all the pressing plants in the 80's. I don't know if any of the major labels operate a plant today or is it all farmed out to any 3rd party as long as they can press something and ship it out whatever the quality, and if the consumer continues to buy... Still some of the major labels still seem to produce acceptable product now and then so there's hope. To be clear I'm not down on the industry as a whole only on the so called "audiophile" version of it.

david

David +1 since early I’ve also tended to have been very much a fan of live recordings… many of my favourite performances where captured live and or those not heavily edited.

If I see a performance was recorded live it factors in on if I’m also attracted to preview it and seem to enjoy the better live recorded performances especially for their potential sense of moments of realism, coherence and connection in performance and aliveness and responsive immediacy.

This is possibly even more rewarding when your speakers and electronics have great coherency in themselves and also when they have less complex but well designed crossovers. I’ve found that in a good two way passive first order crossover coherency can seem to be potentially a great strength and that the coherency of the recording can then come through and be even more influential.

I suppose part of this is the added frisson of players in making music together in the moment but there can often be less processing overall and editing and less challenges in potential latencies which are for me some of the keys towards coherency. On a tangent there is a phenomenon of the fleeting moment in more direct music connection that makes it quite fundamentally a different experience of art to the experience of paintings and sculptures.

If we consider also that experiencing purely live music brings with it an additional set of values and a different inherent framework to do with being fleetingly temporal and in the moment and more immediately connected in that composer-performer-listener relationship at the core. Recording music does change our relationship to it. We can hold onto it and that can then make the purely live experience of music (both acoustic and or amplified) a different kind of priceless.

Graham

 

[ddk]

I like your word "ambience" to describe the sound envelope of the listening experience. I am not sure, however, how ambience applies to direct sound which is also a part of the sound envelope, recorded or live.

Every space including open air has it's own vibe (for the lack of a better word) that we can hear and feel both consciously and subconsciously and all recordings are done in a space, that ambience becomes part of the direct sound even when the instruments are close mic'd. I'm constantly blown away with the amount of information hidden in those grooves when using a. properly setup real high end record player. The ambience is palpable in good recordings.

david

 

[ddk]

David +1 since early I’ve also tended to have been very much a fan of live recordings… many of my favourite recordings where captured live and or those not heavily edited.

If I see a performance was recorded live it factors in on if I’m also attracted to preview it and seem to enjoy the better live recorded performances especially for their potential sense of moments of realism, coherence and connection in performance and aliveness and responsive immediacy.

This is possibly even more rewarding when your speakers and electronics have great coherency in themselves and also when they have less complex but well designed crossovers. I’ve found that in a good two way passive first order crossover coherency can seem to be potentially a great strength and that the coherency of the recording can then come through and be even more influential.

I suppose part of this is the added frisson of players in making music together in the moment but there can often be less processing overall and editing and less challenges in potential latencies which are for me some of the keys towards coherency. On a tangent there is a phenomenon of the fleeting moment in music that makes it quite fundamentally a different experience of art to the experience of paintings and sculptures.

If we consider also that experiencing purely live music brings with it an additional set of values and a different inherent framework to do with being fleetingly temporal and in the moment and more immediately connected in the composer-performer- listener relationship on top. Recording music does change our relationship to it. We can hold onto it and that can then make a live experience of music (both acoustic and or amplified) a different kind of priceless.

Graham

I agree with all! Graham I continue to be amazed by the amount of information I find on analog recordings with every system improvement and how poorly audiophile labels fair in contrast.

david

 

[marty]

Dear Marty,
I'm a stickler for precise VTA adjustment! Everyone that I've worked on setup with knows the length I go to get it right. My problem with all this "audiophile" formulation is that it sounds horrible and it's really easy to prove with a properly setup tonearm and quality front end.

david

It's not about being a sticker for VTA. That's not in question. My question is whether you think 180gm vinyl is somehow bad because you are not changing VTA specifically for the change in LP thickness when making that assessment.

 

[ddk]

It's not about being a sticker for VTA. That's not in question. My question is whether you think 180gm vinyl is somehow bad because you are not changing VTA specifically for the change in LP thickness when making that assessment.

Nothing to do with the VTA adjustment in my case I have compensated for it but it's not always necessary either. I believe the poor sound is the result of a combination of formulation, mass and the sheer volume of goo that the stamper has to imprint. Then there's heating and cooling that you're dealing with this much material and other processes that they have a handle on when everything has an affect on quality.

You can see how little depth there is in a stamper and they use this to squish all that goo, it will never make it through all the way. You don't think some of the excess material distorts in the process?



Put a thin layer of Nutella on a piece of bread and push down your thumb in it for an imprint, try it with again with large blog of the brown stuff and see what happens !

david

 

[ddk]

Coming back to the OP what does the term "audiophile label" or "audiophile recording" really mean to people?

For me both terms mean hifi, fake and junk no different from dark backgrounds and pinpoint imaging stuff.

Of course there's my all time favorite term, "audiophile rated xyz" which automatically translates to buyer beware!

david

 

[Tango]

Excellent, David, excellent. I wish I could be this concise.

Living presence - the fabric of any space. <snip> One reason I love live recordings. Just listen to Vladimir Horowitz play Schumann's Fantasy in C Major on his "Historic Return" album from 1965 - live in Carnegie Hall - you feel the energy of an appreciative audience in a packed house, the electricity in the air. Fantastic!

View attachment 88716

Live recordings can be amazing specially in mono if they leave the recording more or less intact during production. Years ago I remember reading in one of the audio magazines how studio recordings are superior to live ones because they can clean up everything as needed and people bought into that.

Try Russian old MOHO recording. There are good repress from Melodiya. The sound is uniquely Russian. Listen many enough will hear their old Russian recording signature. The recordings leave a lot imperfect sound. Ambient is phenomenal. You can even sense the Russianness of the Moscow Conservatoire Grand Hall. The coughing (if you dont feel irritated) is every where. Thank god they did not have COVID back then.

 

[MarcelNL]

Every space including open air has it's own vibe (for the lack of a better word) that we can hear and feel both consciously and subconsciously and all recordings are done in a space, that ambience becomes part of the direct sound even when the instruments are close mic'd. I'm constantly blown away with the amount of information hidden in those grooves when using a. properly setup real high end record player. The ambience is palpable in good recordings.

david

basically the same applies for their digital counterparts, although it does matter how the recording was done and what process was used to create the digital file.

 

[ddk]

Try Russian old MOHO recording. There are good repress from Melodiya. The sound is uniquely Russian. Listen many enough will hear their old Russian recording signature. The recordings leave a lot imperfect sound. Ambient is phenomenal. You can even sense the Russianness of the Moscow Conservatoire Grand Hall. The coughing (if you dont feel irritated) is every where. Thank god they did not have COVID back then.

I have to contact the General! 78 rpm shellacs have the same quality flawed but natural reason why I have a 78 setting in AS2000 !

david

 

[ddk]

basically the same applies for their digital counterparts, although it does matter how the recording was done and what process was used to create the digital file.

There’s something in digital recordings but more of spatial cues than an actual ambience. I think it has to do with the fact that digital is a mathematical creation/recreation process and not a direct record of the venue.

david

 

[Tango]

I have to contact the General! 78 rpm shellacs have the same quality flawed but natural reason why I have a 78 setting in AS2000 !

david

Obviously you understand what I am talking about quality flawed. I actually got those from discog.

 

[zerostargeneral]

The 78 is the highest possible power bandwidth currently known.

The only downfall is the slate substrate.

Kindest regards,G.

 

[bonzo75]

78 also sound phenomenal on TD124 and tannoys @montesquieu better than reissues on many higher end analog

 

[Ed.P]

Always found this interview with Joe Broussard humorous, on the superiority of 78 music:


Q: are you following any specific genre in your collection? Or maybe pressing years?

A: I got all types of music: everything from string bands and southern artists to Country blues and early jazz. Gospel and Bluegrass. In terms of pressing years, the best stuff is from 1929 to 1933, especially 1931, 1932, 1933. Nobody had any money, sales were low. So that what makes the records so scarce. And people didn’t take care of them with those old damn wind-ups. Those needles destroyed the grooves. That’s what happened to all those Charlie Patton records.

Jazz music ended in 1933, with the last recordings of worth being Clarence Williams in 1932. Also Benny Moten’s last recordings (he died in 1935). The problem was the sound changed in 1933; the tone was gone. When they came back with .25 cent records, the sound had changed for good. It wasn’t the same. Lost that beautiful tone.

In 1955, country music had its last gasp. Jimmy Murphy’s records (six titles actually) that were recorded in Trashville, oops, I mean Nashville, were the last real recordings. Songs like “Here Kitty Kitt,” “Looking for a Mustard Patch,” and “Baboon Boogie.” It all changed after that.

Q: Is there a music genre that you avoid?

A: Rock-n- roll. Period. Any of it. Hate it. Worse thing that happened to music. Hurt all types of music. They took blues and ruined it. It’s the cancer of music….ate into everything. Killed Country music, that’s for sure.

Q: A lot of people would claim the complete opposite. that Rock-n-Roll re invented and recharged music. What is it about rock-n-roll that annoys you so much?

A: Don’t like. Just my personal taste. Don’t like the sound of it, the meaning of it…doesn’t promote anything beautiful or meaningful. Idiotic noise, in my opinion.

Q: So artist like Miles Davis, John Coltrane don’t deserve your time?

A: Oh my god, you gotta be kidding me. None of that music moves me.

Dust & Grooves – Adventures in Record Collecting. A book about vinyl records collectors » Joe Bussard – Frederick, MD

dustandgrooves.com

 

[MarcelNL]

There’s something in digital recordings but more of spatial cues than an actual ambience. I think it has to do with the fact that digital is a mathematical creation/recreation process and not a direct record of the venue.

david

At the risk of kicking off, and not intending to, did you hear a good music server recently? Things have come a long way in the last few years...

 

[andromedaaudio]

I love digital music

 

[ddk]

At the risk of kicking off, and not intending to, did you hear a good music server recently? Things have come a long way in the last few years...

Sure, I get to hear and play with some of the current top end models, my comment was about all digital including redbook CDs which I think is still the superior digital media.

david

 

[microstrip]

Harman offers an application that is a (sort of) training course. It can help hone certain skills (good headphones are required)

Are you joking? The Harman course trains people to detect and focus on the classical technical artifacts, IMHO exactly the opposite people in this thread are referring.

Long ago in the early WBF days I considered taking it, but after I read testimonies of people having gone through it, I decided to avoid it.

 

[andromedaaudio]

The Harman course trains people

.... to buy their products

 

[microstrip]

Sure, I get to hear and play with some of the current top end models, my comment was about all digital including redbook CDs which I think is still the superior digital media.

david

David,

Just MHO, but I think your choice is due to existence of some players that play digital adding artifacts according to your preference.

BTW, did you listen to the Wadax Reference DAC?