I have to agree with this - at least, to some extent. One of the best
recordings, in the sense of most enjoyable to me when I listened back
to it, I ever did with the York Waits was one of the ones we did at
the marvellous Bossal Church near York. It had to my ears a perfect
balance of the acoustic of the space to the sound of the
musicians...all down to the musicians, not me, I hasten to add.
But...when it went to the record company they insisted on sticking
additional, cheesy, reverb on it "'cos that's what our customers
want". Yuck :-(
Dave
On 2 April 2012 17:48, Robert Greene <gre...@math.ucla.edu> wrote:
>
> I agree completely.
> The elephant in the room of audio and the reproduction
> of music is that in fact most people do not seem
> to WANT music at home that sounds like music in concerts.
> They say they do, but in practice they have been conditioned--
> or perhaps they are just like that--to want something else.
>
> In the case of opera, the singers themselves want something
> different. They want mikes on THEMSELVES, individual mikes.
> Violinists can be like that too. I read a quote once
> from Perlman in response to an interviewer raising the question
> of whether he did not find one of his concerto recordings
> somewhat over balanced towards the violin
> He said(approx)
> "My fans do not want to hear the orchestra, they want to hear me."
>
> Singers are typically even worse on this,
> But personally I find opera to sound far better
> in a naturally done recording. If you can find one.
>
> One of the great things about Soundfield microphone
> recordings is that they are almost guaranteed
> to be more natural sounding than others because
> they are made from one point. RCAF is exactly right here.
> One listens from one spot.
>
> This is why something like the Unicorn Fenby Legacy Soundfield
> orchestral recording sounds so wonderful: it sounds as an
> orchestra sounds when you are there, and of course in one
> spot.
>
> Hardly anything is sillier than the idea that several
> locations of microphones separated by four or five meters
> can somehow be put together in a simple way to sound
> like real sound. Talk about all the King's horses and all
> the King's men putting Humpty together again...
>
> Robert
>
> On Mon, 2 Apr 2012, Ronald C.F. Antony wrote:
>
>>
>> On 2 Apr 2012, at 17:57, Eero Aro <eero....@dlc.fi> wrote:
>>
>>> Because Nimbus Records devoted themselves strictly to one point
>>> miking, they didn't record any operas, as the singers, choir and the
>>> orchestra are scattered in a large area and you cannot get a good
>>> balance with one point miking.
>>
>>
>> Sorry, that's bogus. When I go to the Opera, I sit at ONE SPOT.
>> IF there's anything as a good seat in the opera house in question, where
>> people in the audience can listen to a well balanced live performance, then
>> that means there is a spot for single-point recording.
>>
>> Recording the sound field at that spot should be equivalent of recording
>> the listening experience of a person sitting in that spot, and if the
>> resulting recording is decoded binaurally and played back over head phones,
>> the listener should hear what he would have heard sitting in that spot.
>>
>> Listeners in the opera house don't bounce back and forth between various
>> seats during the performance to adjust which singer is singing where on
>> stage. If the singer can't fill the room appropriately with his voice, then
>> either the room acoustics, or the singer suck (or both), and in either case
>> there's no need to make a recording of such an even anyway.
>>
>> So for real performances, single point micing, even though not a must,
>> should be adequate or superior for all events that are recorded in a venue
>> in which a live audience is supposed to have a good listening experience of
>> an equivalent performance.
>>
>> If that's not possible, there's something wrong with the microphone,
>> recording methodology, or both.
>>
>> The key benefit of ambisonic mixing is to synthesize events that didn't
>> exist in a real acoustic space, but that are supposed to create a virtual
>> reality.
>>
>> Ronald
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--
These are my own views and may or may not be shared by my employer
Dave Malham
Music Research Centre
Department of Music
The University of York
Heslington
York YO10 5DD
UK
Phone 01904 322448
Fax 01904 322450
'Ambisonics - Component Imaging for Audio'
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