I was fortunate enough to hear Doug Sax working at the Mastering Lab in the early 90's. At that time, it was the best reproduced audio I had heard.
Talking of pro-audio, whilst in Moscow last week I was doing a technical talk on Dave and Mojo, and afterwards a young recording engineer talked to me. Naturally, I chatted about Davina, and he said that he would like a vari-speed option on it, as a lot of ADC/DAC's don't allow it. So I thought about it, and reckoned it was possible, so we will add it as a feature on the pro version of Davina. Now he needs it so that he can match pitch from different tracks. So I said why didn't he use digital effects to change the pitch? He said they were awful, and completely changed the character of the voice, making it sound unnatural.
We then talked about removing DC offsets - and he said that using low pass filters sounded worse than taking a file, calculating the DC and subtracting to offset. I explained why it would make a difference - but the point I am making is that there are very good mastering and recording engineers who really do have good ears and are prepared to make great efforts to get more musical sound.
But they need the tools to do the job properly - and that's why I am so keen on creating the tools for them.
Rob
Regarding Doug Sax his direct cut Sheffield Labs classical LPs like Prokofiev´s Romeo and Juliet and excerpts from Wagner operas are still after all these years,they were done around 1977,THE refererences for me of string sound, natural timbre and how an orchestra sounds in an admittedly dryish hall.A very coherent simple mic take.
Soundstage doesn´t get more realistic than this imho.Absolutely pinpoint location of instrument layout both front to back and the sides way beyond both of my electrostatic speakers.
And no synthetic digital no man´s land blackness.
Well recorded acoustic music does NOT arise from digital blackness!
What you should hear before the music starts, apart from a slight surface noise as with LPs is the ambient sound of the venue itself and whatever extramusical noise players make now and then.
The purity of tone and superb string tone and lightning fast and accurate not low res digital squashed, transients with harmonics intact,from percussion is still the most realistic I have ever heard from any recording medium.
If all LPs had been this good I would never have bought into digital for any other reasons than portability needs for my travels.
RBCD a few years later came as a pain and an offence on sensitive ears!
Mind you I still have roughly ten shelf metres of LPs in my listening room.
I think the reasons for their superiority over a lot of modern digital boils down to the following: all analogue, no digital approximations and filtering, no bits involved, no sampling and no limiting with the best direct cuts.
And the dynamic range from direct cuts, is as good as it gets from LP,and quiet vinyl,around 70 dB. No signal processing,no compression. Simply stunning.
Regarding pitch /speed variation I am of the opinion that if a singer can´t sing in tune, get someone who can, to do the job for her or him instead.
There are too many in the popular music genre that can´t really sing in tune imo.
I rarely listen to that genre but what worries me most is the decline in standards in the classical world where time and cost saving, multimic overkill and signal processsing and post-processing too often ruin the final result and renders it less realistic than even a decent recording made in the late fifties done with a simple blumlein stereo mic set.
Blumlein or Sheffields labs spaced omnis ,simple miking, no limiting ,a goood venue and orchestra and highest possible resolving Davina, now that would sound promising.
Linn have one in their Dac and I can imagine this go some way towards settling the analog vs digital debate.