[Argyris]

Pretty much what everybody else said. It definitely depends on your equipment. Classical in particular, in my experience, doesn't like too much extra color. It's one of the reasons I strongly prefer neutral-sounding equipment. A fairly decent chunk of my library is classical, and I like being able to switch genres on the fly, without thinking about calibrating a specific tonal balance for each.
 
If you're having trouble getting your classical to sound good, you might want to consider getting some more neutral gear (of course I don't know what you have right now). An EQ can only do so much (and, being a strong proponent of EQ, I can say that definitively).

 

[bigshot]

It depends on your headphones or speakers and room. That is what you need to EQ for. Everything else is already pretty much flat.

 

[mikebauer]

the recording engineer and the company present an average sound for the average system. imagine in the '50's what an average system looked like -- even one with 1/4 tape... the tube amp's coloration, the connecting wire's coloration -- the speaker's coloration. the RIAA curve, too, for LP's. What came out was a mush which had to be home-equalized to cut heavy bass and over-active midrange.
 
famous anecdote is how RCA couldn't get a decent sound from the Philadelphia Orchestra because the hall was so un-resonant, so they had to actually put speakers in a stairwell, and re-record the tape for 'living presence' or whatever. all that crap comes out in the CD's and has to be EQ'd out for your system.

 

[bigshot]

No it does't. They recorded flat. The master tapes are stone flat. The coloration to correct for the limitations of vinyl were added as the LP was cut along with the RIAA curve. The latest batch of Living Stereo SACDs and CDs are flat and clean. Some of the best sound quality you will find anywhere.
 
And the Philadelphia Orchestra had some of the best sound quality on records all the way back to the acoustic era of Victor red seal batwings. Stokowski encouraged the RCA engineers to experiment with new techniques. That's why RCA/Victor across the board had some of the best sounding records.

 

[mikebauer]

fabulous. now, go actually listen to the recordings. of course, if you can find a SACD digital original recording of Stowkowski's philadelphia please post a link so i can hear what they actually sounded like. you understand that a playback inside a stairwell sounds very reverberant?
in effect, the speaker/transducer is the instrument you're listening to, and the engineers created a plausible speaker sound for the average cabinet hi-fi system -- but, remember 'command records', how nobody could track them with a cartridge?... they were pretty clean and for the hi-fi hobbyist. but, maybe you're too young though -- my dad was building audiophile systems in the mid-fifties and i had master tape to LP comparisons available.
 
the only real comparison between systems which makes audiophile sense, is the transducer compared to the actual live instrument.

 

[bigshot]

Wasn't Enoch Light on Command? I have lots of those "percussion" records and they play great. Not untrackable at all. I only know of one record that had an untrackable passage. That was Bizet's Carmen by Slatkin on Telarc. It was an early digital recording and they put way too much energy in one particular bass drum wallop. It played fine on CD, but on LP it would buzz and distort as the needle bounced around in the groove.
 
Every studio before the days of digital reverb had a reverberation chamber. But those were used for popular music, particularly vocals, not classical. They would pipe the vocal channel into a reverberation chamber and mike it and mix that as a low bed under a vocal to give it presence. That is still done today, except with digital reverbs. I never heard of that being used in a classical recording, but perhaps in a work with a solo voice. (Chants d'Auvergne?)
 
There's extensive information on how the Philadelphia Orchestra under Stokowski was recorded in Chasins' book if you're really interested. RCA was at the forefront of recording technology in the 78 era, and pioneered stereo recording in the early 50s. One of their first stereo recordings was of Offenbach's Gaetie Parisienne by Fiedler and the Boston Pops. It was recorded in 1953 and it still is one of the best sounding stereo recordings ever made.
 
I really don't understand the point you are trying to make. Living Stereo and Command and Mercury Living Presence and all the other labels aimed at "hifi nuts" were among the first to have a truly balanced and full frequency response curve. Many of these recordings are still among the best sounding on CD.

 

[mikebauer]

i like and appreciate what you're saying, but i'm not sure that these recording were actually produced with this linear balance -- and, perhaps i'm wrong -- perhaps it's just that the mics were placed right over the timpani, for instance... that that's why the mercury's are so boomy... i know that back when i'd play the Bartok -- Menuhin violin concerto on a funky KLH portable that it seemed 'balanced', but when i play the CD re-issue the bass is quite muddy and boomy...
 
anyway, thank you. it seems like our experiences are parallel but not in sync, but not fatally so, and only really an issue because we both believe and like music so much that it's actually worth arguing about in order to find the truth of music itself.
 
mike

 

[bigshot]

I believe Mercury were generally single mike position with one continuous take, and once the tape started rolling, they didn't touch the mixing board. That makes for a very natural soundstage and dynamic, but it also meant that they couldn't control overdriving in peaks. You'll find that Mercury sometimes has points with much higher distortion than Living Stereo. That may be what you are hearing in the Bartok.
 
Tympani are generally the toughest to reproduce because low frequencies require a lot of power to produce at high volumes. If a system just can't reproduce the low end, like your KLH perhaps, it isn't a problem. But better systems are going to immediately point out imbalances in subwoofer levels or lack of sufficient wattage to push the loud low frequencies. If you just have a two channel system without any subwoofer, it's doubtful whether you will be able to reproduce that accurately at all. The super low frequencies are going to run roughshod over everything else and swamp your speaker. But with a subwoofer, you can hear everything in proper balance, because the hard to reproduce stuff is ported away from the mains to the sub. I use Mercury's 1812 Overture to balance the subwoofer in my system for this reason. The huge low frequency cannon shots are very unforgiving to systems with the sub turned up a little too high, which most people do. Not all recordings contain sub bass, so people think they need it louder than they actually do. However, if you adjust your sub to the point where it is just barely able to reproduce those huge low blasts in Dorati's 1812 without rattling, the sub bass will fall into proper balance on all well balanced recordings. It's an easy way to calibrate to something that pegs 10 on a scale of 1 to 10.
 
Living Stereo often used three mikes recorded as separate channels. They would mix down the three channels to a final stereo master, and I think they were able to perform edits between multiple takes on the fly, which you can sometimes hear if you listen closely. This added a generation to the master (not a big deal) but gave them a little more control over peaks and gave them more takes to choose from. You don't find the huge dynamic swings and distorted peaks on Living Stereo that you find on Living Presence.
 
These old recordings are not noise free and Mercurys often have distortion in the peaks. But the thing you do find on these old early stereo records is very simple direct miking and a stone flat response and a wide range of frequencies. This was early on in hifi, so the engineers were very aware of their response curves. They used mikes with very flat and very broad range response and pretty much put them on tape without any equalization. Compared to a lot of modern recordings, these are the most direct and accurate you can find.

 

[mikebauer]

yah, actually, my favorite recordings are acoustics with single mic... the 78 grabs a lot of information and makes for very clear bass. naturally, i'm not using a KLH type system anymore -- i'm direct out from a SACD 777es with rheostat attenuator, or an Oppo 105, my HD800's from the back line out into Balanced XRL Black Dragon cable. the spread of the timpani was the first thing noticed in The Absolute Sound, back in the day, when hitachi linear-crystal cable first was marketed. i bought several rca interconnects from a store near MIT, and used them or cut them for rewiring my ADS 1290's. Now, i use no loudspeakers at all and no headphone amp -- the amp on my IBasso DX90 pushes the sound so that vocalists are licking my ear, but it's not very sanitary -- i really like hearing the sound of the room itself. Best is the direct out from the SACD sony player.
 
but, the problem is whether or not the actual disk manufactured is as linear as the master tape, and the capacitance of the mic wire distorting over producing certain frequencies, and not remixed for to make that smooth sound so popular with tired nobody's after a few martini's or coke or whatever substitutes for them instead of the actual sound of the sound itself?I was thinking that the people who do the CD mastering of old discs must have a lot of anecdotes about the various discs they're recovering and their difficulties in finding the right kind of sound for the CD. i sometimes think maybe the turntable and arm and the stylus or laser cartridge or whatever they're using to playback a 78 is giving up more sonic info than the original sound engineers even thought of hearing? have you ever played a 78' on a wind-up machine with a cactus needle? and, i like the new hyper-clear sound, because i just like how things are made -- listening to the squeeking wheels of the camera trolly during an outdoor shot of katheren hepburn and jimmy stewart in 'philadelphia story' puts me right in the picture -- same with hearing furtwangler's stomping on the podium during the stockholm 1943 9th.
 
mike

 

[bigshot]

I think you are over thinking it. Living Stereo CDs are stone flat and the new ones sound exactly like the SACDs. They're accurate representations of the master tape. Records are going to sound different because records are by definition not flat. They have to cheat it with the RIAA curve to get anywhere close to flat. CDs are flat out of the box. Most high fidelity classical recordings are flat.
 
The other thing is that these recordings were designed to be played on speakers, not headphones. Headphones don't give as natural a presentation, particularly of the stereo soundstage.
 
78s are an entirely different thing altogether.

 

[mikebauer]

LOL, you need to listen to a really good headphone run off a modern amp. LP's are crap, but available -- we were able to play a piece without changing discs, but the sound quality is compromised. that's why many of us bought the 1/4 in tapes the companies were still marketing. speakers are junk -- going to all the work of building a solid and tuned listening room, using 10 thousand dollar speakers -- in 1970 dollars -- all run off designer lampcord wire functioning as those tone-controls we so proudly rejected as 'un-natural'.

 

[bigshot]

I don't know what you're talking about. I have excellent headphones and a highly rated headphone amp (that doesn't make a lick of difference). My speaker system totally blows the headphones away. But even though I am using 1970s studio monitors, the technology I'm using in my speaker rig is totally up to date. DSPs and 5:1 are complete game changers over 2 channel stereo.

 

[lamode]

  Equalizers are to compensate for biases in your equipment.  Nothing to do with the style of music.

+1