What is "Sound Stage?"
- Thread starter Phelonious Ponk
- Start date
Agreed. So if we all want to sit around and listen to Chesky demo discs instead of music, we're good. If someone is hearing a vertical field of differentiated images from a normal music recording, the trickery is between their ears.
Tim
In a prior post of mine in this thread of yours I gave a pretty detailed explanation of what I did when mixing. It was not my invention. I was taught how to do it on the board. I was also taught how to do it in minimalist fashion with mics for location sound recording. For you to assume that these are not done on normal music recordings albeit in a much less exaggerated fashion is, I'm sorry my friend, naive. To say that people that hear the result of the work that's been done are just imagining things is ___________. Supply the adjective.
Jack,
Take a Living Stereo recording of Grofe's Grand Canyon Suite. I think the micing was minimal and the sound stage is very open and expansive. Is what part of that recording a natural part of the event and what part of that is due to the RE's input and method? 80/20 pct or ?
I seriously don't know Roger. I'd have to have been there to even get an idea. I certainly was or am NOT anywhere remotely near their caliber.
Here's what I do know. The event happened so that would be the 100%. The question to ask is how much of that 100% can actually be captured on the 35mm film. You did say Mercury Living Stereo right? Grand Canyon Suite might have been on tape but I don't know. I don't have that recording. The RE's input would be how he maxed out what could be captured and laid out the tonal balance and the perspective using the microphone arrays. That would translate the RE's input to almost all of whatever the capture capability of the recording chain could muster. Then there's was probably Wilma riding the faders while reading the sheet music to make up the balance of Bill's work.
Now you made me wish I had a time machine!
Here's what I do know. The event happened so that would be the 100%. The question to ask is how much of that 100% can actually be captured on the 35mm film. You did say Mercury Living Stereo right? Grand Canyon Suite might have been on tape but I don't know. I don't have that recording. The RE's input would be how he maxed out what could be captured and laid out the tonal balance and the perspective using the microphone arrays. That would translate the RE's input to almost all of whatever the capture capability of the recording chain could muster. Then there's was probably Wilma riding the faders while reading the sheet music to make up the balance of Bill's work.
Now you made me wish I had a time machine!
Excellent Jack.....You give insight into the process. Btw that Grofe recording was on tape,but the RCA Re's were some of the best that ever have lived. The Fine's, Robert and Wilma are legends. Charles Gerhardt learned from these pioneers and his recordings are very good and of the same ilk. Sadly everybody is getting older, but there is always hope of a reniassance.
Nope, sorry Tim; it is the responsability of each member (and guest) here to read anything they want in order to further their knowledge.
And if I only quote the parts that refer to Height (vertical calibration), it would be missing the entire context, which is of prime importance to fully understand life's sciences at their very Best.
Each one of us we apply our time where we believe it is Best, and only each one of us can decide of this.
We learn from the true Masters, and we get lost when we learn no more ...
Lee-I think you hit the nail on the head. There are some people who just have to be ‘right’ in every discussion. From some of the ‘know it all’ responses I have read here, our soundstage consists of nothing more than a thin horizontal line that extends the width of whatever soundstage you have in your room and it has no particular height. But whatever height it has, it is the same height across the soundstage because, well, there is no height information recorded regardless of the height of the microphones and the angle they are pointed at (either up or down). And if it’s not a thin line that has the exact same thickness across the soundstage, that would infer there are height differences in our recordings.
And if this is true, a true point-source speaker would clearly show that all instruments and people on the soundstage all share the exact same height in every single recording because that would do away with the woofer-midrange-tweeter spacing argument. Anybody believe that?
Now let’s pick a recording that probably many people on this forum own and can relate to-the Sheffield Drum Record. Let’s pick the Jim Keltner side of either the D2D or digital copy. Has anyone who has heard this recording want to tell me that the sound of the kick drum is coming from the same vertical height as the tom-toms? Or that that tom-toms occupy the same vertical space as the cymbals? Or that when Jim goes “Ah Hem” at the very end of the cut (and if you have the digital version, that is cut off) that the sound of his voice is coming from the same vertical height as his kick drum or his tom-tom or his snare or his cowbell?
If you listen to Jim Keltner playing his drums and you can’t imagine almost being able to reach out and touch his drum kit or get up and walk around it, something is dead-wrong with your system. And if you tell me that there is no height information encoded in that recording that somehow tipped your ears/brain off on where things should be located in vertical space, then I guess we really can chalk it up to our imaginations. But I’m not buying that argument because somehow there was enough information encoded in this disc (regardless of the genesis) that allows your ear/brain to position sounds vertically and horizontally as they would be heard live.
Go listen to the recording and get back to me…
I would suggest a recording experiment, a variation on my earlier 3 violinists. A single performer on a straighforward, acoustic instrument, where the location of the main sound output is some good distance above the floor, face height approximately. A reasonably normal room, not especially reverberant, not acoustically dead. Then place the stereo mics at a reasonable distance from the performer, say 10 feet.
The key difference is that the mics are mounted on a boom such that their orientation pointing forward is not altered, but they can raised and lowered to within a close distance to the floor and ceiling while recording. Then do a recording, and during the recording slowly raise and lower the mic setup, up and down the full distances available, several times .
What would you hear? In particular, would you be "tricked" into hearing the instrument rise and fall in front of you?
Frank
The key difference is that the mics are mounted on a boom such that their orientation pointing forward is not altered, but they can raised and lowered to within a close distance to the floor and ceiling while recording. Then do a recording, and during the recording slowly raise and lower the mic setup, up and down the full distances available, several times .
What would you hear? In particular, would you be "tricked" into hearing the instrument rise and fall in front of you?
Frank
Music recording is an art, and we don't know all the audio attributes that are contained in a stereo recording. There are still unexplored microphone techniques to be discovered and experimented ...
Stereo is dead, according to some who are now ahead of the curve, in sound envelopment ...
* I walk into the forest and I hear the birds singing above the trees' tops.
The music then start playing in my head, and I can hear their wings flapping in the wind ...
___________________________
This thread is very interesting, to me at least.
Because I realize, that like me, many members here also have experience with microphone techniques and positioning.
And then we listen. :b
I took all my time, and read it all with careful attention.
And it is extraordinary what's happening here, plus the member's contributions ...
We are exploring further into the science of sound, of sound stage, of hi-fi, of sound envelopment (surround sound included), of sound positioning (Master and Commander - The Far Side of the World, Into the Labyrinth, Amused to Death, ...), in the horizontal and vertical auditive planes, and with all we know, and don't.
And that's what a good Forum is all about: Exploration, Communication, Learning & Sharing, new Sciences developing right in front of our own very ears, and in the Now, and in the Here.
Sound is one of the most complex and less understood of all sciences.
___________________________
When we assist to a Classical music concert in a great Hall, or that we take a stroll into the most enchanted forests of our planet, we are in full contentment, in contemplation with our surroundings, in ecstasy with the great music playing.
When we're at home, and that we listen from our loudspeakers to some great recordings, in our own rooms, with our gear, we love to relive that reality, and we achieve it to some degree.
... And even discover some new frontiers of our imagination mixed with scientific evidences ...
Stereo is dead, according to some who are now ahead of the curve, in sound envelopment ...
* I walk into the forest and I hear the birds singing above the trees' tops.
The music then start playing in my head, and I can hear their wings flapping in the wind ...
___________________________
This thread is very interesting, to me at least.
Because I realize, that like me, many members here also have experience with microphone techniques and positioning.
And then we listen. :b
I took all my time, and read it all with careful attention.
And it is extraordinary what's happening here, plus the member's contributions ...
We are exploring further into the science of sound, of sound stage, of hi-fi, of sound envelopment (surround sound included), of sound positioning (Master and Commander - The Far Side of the World, Into the Labyrinth, Amused to Death, ...), in the horizontal and vertical auditive planes, and with all we know, and don't.
And that's what a good Forum is all about: Exploration, Communication, Learning & Sharing, new Sciences developing right in front of our own very ears, and in the Now, and in the Here.
Sound is one of the most complex and less understood of all sciences.
___________________________
When we assist to a Classical music concert in a great Hall, or that we take a stroll into the most enchanted forests of our planet, we are in full contentment, in contemplation with our surroundings, in ecstasy with the great music playing.
When we're at home, and that we listen from our loudspeakers to some great recordings, in our own rooms, with our gear, we love to relive that reality, and we achieve it to some degree.
... And even discover some new frontiers of our imagination mixed with scientific evidences ...
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Tim at times you make good points. Other times your arguments are like a carnival ride rounding in a circular patter passing the same points seemingly unrecocgnized. I for one can't help but relaize I have been here before.
The fact that planar speakers or line sources do an excellent job of rendereing height images is to me also not worth arguing. If you want to discuss how well they do it, that's another matter.
As always I feel you have a point to make that is buried your current argument.
I beleive that a microphone can capture all the information needed for a credible reproduction of music.
I think you are making the mistake of seeing the micropphone as a sieve captuing a portion of the music and losing a portion of the music. I see the microphone being hit by a wave containing all the attributes of music including height. What we hear is the stereos ability to recreate it.
What continues to bother me Tim is what you seem to want seems to be readily available. Why are the rest of us constantly under attack?
I guess I just don't like misinformation, Greg. Microphones don't work the way you imagine they do. Most of them don't capture all of the frequency information needed for a credible reproduction of music. None of them capture height information. Some hear sound coming at them from different angles with a slightly different FR, but they have no capacity to tell from which direction that angle is coming and stereo systems have no ability to decode any information into height.
The illusion of height we experience in stereo is mostly achieved through the emphasis, deliberate or otherwise, of specific frequencies, by driver units placed at physically different heights.
Your MLs don't have those different drivers at different heights. Pretty simple.
You could still get the part of the illusion created by phase manipulation, but in spite of what Jack says, I just don't think studio engineers are manipulating phase in the mix to create the kind of parlor trick illusion of height that exists on the Chesky demo. I think what most audiophiles hear as height is discrimination between the frequencies being produced by the drivers, and it is arguably not a good thing. It reveals a lack of coherence that is not necessarily surprising in behemoth speakers that spread multiple drivers out along a vertical plane that is five, six feet hight and often only 10 feet from the listening position.
As to why you feel like we've been here before, it's because we have. There are a handful of you on this board, and armies on most audiophile boards, that keep bringing us back to the same misinformation over and over again. They look at a white piece of paper and insist that it is pink. The few realists in the hobby keep giving them the color temperature readings, explaining the theory and the reality, giving them every possible tool to be able to see the white that is right before their eyes; they insist that it is pink. They see pink, by God. Fine. Enjoy your rose-colored glasses. But if you want the realists to stop repeatedly telling you that the paper is white, stop stomping your feet and repeatedly insisting that it's really pink and pink is correct. Just enjoy your color.
Tim
Tim,
That pretty much sums up the relevant points quite succinctly.
I'll add one further point. A planar or other type of single point speaker source (such as a coaxial design) DOES have some height. It's the height of the speaker itself. So a planar could have a height of 4' but it is uniform top to bottom (for the most part) of its musical vertical projection. Any illusion of instrument specific height will be a matter of acoustics in the listening environment. A 15" coaxial speaker will have a height of 15" plus whatever influences its cabinet and placement have in the environment.
I listened carefully to several HD recordings the other night, specifically for any notion of height by instrument. And there actually was some! You see, my speakers have a 15" bass driver about 3' off the floor, and its tuned vent firing downward. So low midbass and LF will be 3' high or lower. The midrange driver is about 4.5' off the floor, and the HF driver about 5' off the floor. When seated I'm positioned ear-wise right between mid and HF drivers.
So when listening to wide FR music, bass frequencies are lowest in position. Middle range frequencies from about 800Hz to 2-3k are just about ear level, and HF, including most harmonics are clearly above all the others. But they are NOT above the tweeter. When listening to a jazz combo with piano, bass, drums, the bass (especially an upright) moves in position from very low to the ground (low notes) to almost midrange height as the played notes move up and down the scale, change harmonic structure, and intensity of plucking. The piano can shift from upper bass to lower tweeter range depending on note played, attack and chord combination. The drums are all encompassing, the bass drum close to the floor and cymbals way up at tweeter height.
So yes, there is a portrayal of height, but it has nothing to do with the venue or cues on the recording. A different type of group with bass, electric guitar, acoustic guitar, vocal and drums will have a different structure but still placed by primary frequency of interest for that instrument. One in particular I just heard, Norah Jones, had her voice right in front of me, acoustic guitar clearly above her voice, and cymbal ring out above the acoustic guitar. Electric guitar and electric piano were below her voice, bass and lower drums below all that. Very clear, but not determined by cues on the recording.
I think that one thing that is confusing to some listeners is that they don't really understand the frequencies and how they sound, relative to the instrument they're hearing. How the fundamental tone differs from the harmonics of it and their influence on the whole instrument. And how that frequency is produced by the various transducers in a speaker.
In other words, could you listen to a pitch or range of frequencies and correctly identify what frequencies they are or which transducer should be producing them? I'll bet most can't.
It's very educational to watch music on a spectrum analyzer so you can relate what you're hearing at any given time, to the actual frequencies in use, AND their relative intensity. There are a lot of surprises. This type of thing is pretty much second nature to people who have mixed audio for a number of years. There is no mystery to it.
--Bill
Bill,
As most of the time, things are not so easy. One of the best speakers I have owned in a enthusiasm that did not last for tool long, as my listening room at the time was also a family room and the best listening position was the dining table
, was the fantastic Dynaudio Consequence. And height information, when existing, was very correct ...Attachments
Bill,
As most of the time, things are not so easy. One of the best speakers I have owned in a enthusiasm that did not last for tool long, as my listening room at the time was also a family room and the best listening position was the dining table
'splain that you no-height knuckleheads.
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