[Stuff Jones]

In the race towards higher and higher hifi, I wonder to what extent are the gains on the consumer side limited by recording technology. Have innovations in recording equipment kept up with those in consumer listening equipment? It seems unlikely given the larger and more competitive consumer market. Are there improvements in recording equipment on the horizon that will have significant effect on SQ?

 

[dprimary]

Recording equipment has never been better then what we have now. The larger problem is there is not that many people left that know how to use it. In the past you really had to be on top of all the technical issues to even make respectable recording. You had the plan it to even the type of music would alter think like tape speed, tape brand, and recorder calibration.
 
Today you have so much headroom and resolution you can completely screw it up and someone can fix it. DSP is very powerful and can do things that was only dreamed about 20 years ago. In the past every piece of equipment was very expensive and even the large thousands of dollars a day studios had their limits. In the past you might have processing on (eq's, compressors, gates, reverbs) on a dozen channels of the 24 track recording. Often you were trying to fix sound problem ( a little harsh, sibilance and so on) and you used as little correction as possible.
 
These days you have plug-in to do all that processing that took expensive equipment to do before. So many people use dozens of plug-in on every track and never if try listening if it need anything done to it all.
 
The significant effect would be put a great player  with a great instrument in a great sounding room, know which microphones to use and where to place them, record it and if is not right don't process it with dozens of plug-ins just record it again.

 

[Stuff Jones]

Thank you. So it sounds like the constraints to SQ are with the skill/experience of the engineer and consumer equipment. 

 

[watchnerd]

Microphones.
 
Like speakers, they've gotten a lot better. But also like speakers, they're still highly flawed and colored compared to the rest of the chain.

 

[dprimary]

Agreed transducers are the weakest link in the chain. While there is tons of breakthroughs in  the recent years with signal processing in loudspeakers and microphones very little of it applies to microphones used in music recording.
 
There has been advancements in monitor speakers. The JBL M2 studio monitors can sound realistic enough the if was I blindfolded I would swear someone was playing in the room. I have had it happen to me in the past in a studio but not as consistent as on the M2. I found myself standing up to look for someone standing behind the computer monitor, that I knew could not possibly be there. It is a strange feeling when your eyes and ears are sending conflicting information to your brain. The downside of them (and is true of most large monitors) is I have yet to get them perfectly integrated in the control room acoustics, that and the price. I was very surprised being that it has been decades since JBL has had world class monitor.