I was planning originally to set this thread up as an intellectual trap. Instead, I will begin at the end of the story.
My personal starting point is that I am ideologically opposed to tone controls. I do not want to mess with the “absolute sound“ recorded to the tape. But I realize there is no principled basis for this view. Why do I write this?
I write this because when an engineer records a live performance he/she is baking into the recording his/her personal, subjective preferences about frequency response and tonal balance. When ideological purests like me play back the recording we say we want to say that we play it back “flat”; we don’t want to adulterate it artificially with tone controls.
But there is no “flat.” The recording is the idiosyncratic tonal balance subjectively determined by the recording engineer. When we play something back flat –– with no tone controls –– all we are doing is hearing and implicitly blessing the subjective recording decisions of the engineer. There is no “true neutral” to be reproduced.
My personal starting point is that I am ideologically opposed to tone controls. I do not want to mess with the “absolute sound“ recorded to the tape. But I realize there is no principled basis for this view. Why do I write this?
I write this because when an engineer records a live performance he/she is baking into the recording his/her personal, subjective preferences about frequency response and tonal balance. When ideological purests like me play back the recording we say we want to say that we play it back “flat”; we don’t want to adulterate it artificially with tone controls.
But there is no “flat.” The recording is the idiosyncratic tonal balance subjectively determined by the recording engineer. When we play something back flat –– with no tone controls –– all we are doing is hearing and implicitly blessing the subjective recording decisions of the engineer. There is no “true neutral” to be reproduced.