[spruce music]

   
My central point is that, given a musical style in which the musician needs to be sensitive to a set of patterns S in order to create good music, the recording engineer needs to be a good judge of S. 
 
Much of what you describe affects primarily sound field and tonal balance. Objectivists greatly exaggerate the importance of these things. 
 
Close miking and associated mixing techniques affect sound field and tonal balance primarily. That's only only one part of S. 
 
Let's say that you are a native English speaker, and you work on learning French. You work hard to get the closest thing to a natural sounding French speaking voice and accent. Then you speak in front of a group of people. An objectivist comes along and says that the primary factor in whether you are perceived as authentic is not all your work perfecting your accent, but the hall ambiance and the distance from you to the audience.
 
Or let's say that you manage to deliver a good impression, but then an objectivist comes along and declares that you managed to do this while having no idea what you sound like. You might as well have been wearing earplugs the whole time and you could have done just as well.
 
Pretty ridiculous, right?

You are building a straw man there.  And twisting the point of what is being said.  On the one hand you wish to know how to compare live and recorded sound to choose components.  Yet you invent these twisted ideas to resist what others are telling you.  Arguing both that musicians will have an innate idea of how they should sound and that you don't need to know how they sound to do that either.   Other than trying not to agree I am not sure what you are on about.
 
As already talked about in this thread, to get to the musical issues musicians usually don't care about and don't need extremely high fidelity.
 
If you are talking high fidelity to real sound, musicians for the reasons cited are not the best judge of that.  They can be a judge of whether a recording gets across the musical nuances they wanted to convey.  They can judge if they prefer this vs that sound.  They simply don't have the reference to best judge simple sound quality.
 
For years I read about musicians involved in remastering and mastering and how much difference it made.  The first time I recorded some folks who had not been recorded and let them hear it, it was face slap obvious that whole idea for accuracy was a farce.  A myth told and retold that didn't hold true.  You seem reluctant to accept that. I have seen musicians use recordings to improve or alter their technique.  Or a group of them slightly change what they do to improve their sound to the audience.  That is because they don't know how they sound with any precision in the sound quality sense.  Not talking in a musical sense here.  During my limited experience recording, often has been the discussion about mixing this or that instrument "hey is this how we sound when you listen to us?   Well okay lets try this or that I would like to hear some different aspect stand out more and this one less".

 

[johncarm]

   
Well, the 95% isn't all me-in-my-cave-with-my-violin. I can't imagine a teacher like a Galamian or (in Hahn's case) Brodsky just sits idly by without giving even the finest students points on handling the concert hall sound. I used masterclasses just as an example of something that people could actually look up on YouTube. I'm sure Dame Glennie had plenty of instruction to help her learn to bang the drum in just the right way, and I at least have no idea how heavily she might lean on her recording engineers for the final say in the recorded sound.
 
 
I think any engineer who specializes in a genre would do well to learn as much about it as possible, if only for the spaces if not also for the instruments themselves. To just pick an example, I'm sure John Eargle's experience on piano and organ helped him in his quest to capture large spaces well. It probably *didn't* help him understand the relative merits of the Blumlein array, I wager. As far as Hahn, she probably wasn't that great a judge when she was 14, despite already being a hotshot violinist, but that's just a guess. I'm sure a decade of recording in the finest venues with the pro engineers has helped her just a tad in that regard.

 
Teachers, recording engineers, masterclassess... it's all verbal feedback. And musicians get verbal feedback in a small fraction of their practice time. Doesn't matter whether it's Hahn or Glennie.
 
The earlier assertion was, "Musicians have no idea what they sound like." Call this assertion A.
 
My challenge is to explain how Hilary Hahn could achieve her superb musical technique if she "has no idea what she sounds like."
 
I claim that if assertion A is true, then Hiliary might have well been wearing 100% sound-blocking ear plugs while practicing, and she could have done just as well.
 
The difference with Glennie is, she really couldn't hear herself. So you're saying with all your knowledge of psychoacoustics you don't have the faintest idea how that might affect her final sound?

 

[johncarm]

 As already talked about in this thread, to get to the musical issues musicians usually don't care about and don't need extremely high fidelity.

 
Define "musical issue" and give evidence that "it doesn't need high fidelity." I challenge you to produce a sensible definition and give a good explanation.
 
 

  If you are talking high fidelity to real sound, musicians for the reasons cited are not the best judge of that.  They can be a judge of whether a recording gets across the musical nuances they wanted to convey.  They can judge if they prefer this vs that sound.  They simply don't have the reference to best judge simple sound quality.
 

 
Define the terms "sound quality" and "musical nuance" and explain why they are so separate.
 
 
 

 I have seen musicians use recordings to improve or alter their technique.

 
 
Absolutely 100% true. A recording is a kind of feedback, just as verbal feedback is. Musicians need feedback. But the claim was that "they have no idea what they sound like." So my challenge to you is to explain how a professional musician achieves a wonderful, beautiful, and detailed technique while being completely unable to hear anything meaningful about their own sound.

 

[spruce music]

   
Teachers, recording engineers, masterclassess... it's all verbal feedback. And musicians get verbal feedback in a small fraction of their practice time. Doesn't matter whether it's Hahn or Glennie.
 
The earlier assertion was, "Musicians have no idea what they sound like." Call this assertion A.
 
My challenge is to explain how Hilary Hahn could achieve her superb musical technique if she "has no idea what she sounds like."
 
I claim that if assertion A is true, then Hiliary might have well been wearing 100% sound-blocking ear plugs while practicing, and she could have done just as well.
 
The difference with Glennie is, she really couldn't hear herself. So you're saying with all your knowledge of psychoacoustics you don't have the faintest idea how that might affect her final sound?

Ridiculous.  She hears herself.  She probably knows from hearing other violinists play that it sounds different as an audience.  Is she the person with the best perspective to say a recording is of high fidelity?  No, the sound as she plays is a perspective the audience doesn't have.  The sound is not the same.  No more than you can tell me just how you sound speaking from 15 feet away from your current position vs a recording of you speaking. Doesn't your voice surprise you how it sounds if recorded a few feet away?  It does everyone I have ever known.  You still could hear what you said, and even recognize it was you from other cues, but the basic sound is usually a surprise.

 

[RRod]

   
Teachers, recording engineers, masterclassess... it's all verbal feedback. And musicians get verbal feedback in a small fraction of their practice time. Doesn't matter whether it's Hahn or Glennie.
 
The earlier assertion was, "Musicians have no idea what they sound like." Call this assertion A.
 
My challenge is to explain how Hilary Hahn could achieve her superb musical technique if she "has no idea what she sounds like."
 
I claim that if assertion A is true, then Hiliary might have well been wearing 100% sound-blocking ear plugs while practicing, and she could have done just as well.
 
The difference with Glennie is, she really couldn't hear herself. So you're saying with all your knowledge of psychoacoustics you don't have the faintest idea how that might affect her final sound?

 
And they practice in some of the most god-awful sounding rooms imaginable for much of the time. How does that prepare them for their sound from the audience in a concert venue? People are saying "the musician might not be the best judge of their sound in the audience", and you want to turn that into "the musician has no sensory feedback about their sound," which is on its face false, even in the case of Glennie, who plays percussion which is slightly different than playing the violin, no?

 

[johncarm]

 
Ridiculous.  She hears herself.  She probably knows from hearing other violinists play that it sounds different as an audience.  Is she the person with the best perspective to say a recording is of high fidelity?  No, the sound as she plays is a perspective the audience doesn't have.  The sound is not the same.  No more than you can tell me just how you sound speaking from 15 feet away from your current position vs a recording of you speaking. Doesn't your voice surprise you how it sounds if recorded a few feet away?  It does everyone I have ever known.  You still could hear what you said, and even recognize it was you from other cues, but the basic sound is usually a surprise.

 
Right, she hears herself. So are you admitting you are wrong when you say "she has no idea what she sounds like?"
 
Yes, tonal balance and sound field changes when you hear a recording of yourself. If you are such an expert on the difference between a musician's sound to themselves and to the audience, then I challenge you to do this. Give me an example of something specific a musician might notice in a recording and how they would adjust for that.

 

[spruce music]

   
Define "musical issue" and give evidence that "it doesn't need high fidelity." I challenge you to produce a sensible definition and give a good explanation.
 
 
 
Define the terms "sound quality" and "musical nuance" and explain why they are so separate.
 
 
 
 
 
Absolutely 100% true. A recording is a kind of feedback, just as verbal feedback is. Musicians need feedback. But the claim was that "they have no idea what they sound like." So my challenge to you is to explain how a professional musician achieves a wonderful, beautiful, and detailed technique while being completely unable to hear anything meaningful about their own sound.

Musical nuance vs sound quality.   If a pianist listens to another and wishes to emulate them they might be interested in the way they handle the pedals on a given bit of music.  Do they need extreme fidelity to do that?  Or extreme sound quality?  No.  You need some level of sound quality as you can't listen to noise and learn anything.  But very high fidelity isn't needed. Cassette tape seems more than is needed from what I have seen of musicians.  Same for the musical nuance of stringed instruments like how much vibrato a violinist uses. You need to hear enough, and more doesn't really help.  I too would think at some level better fidelity would help, but I have yet to see it come into play with musicians.
 
Musical issues was a made up term of course.  It can include musicianship as in how to play your instrument like those in the above paragraph or it can be how to phrase, how to control rhythm, how to juxtaposition elements for a pleasing musical result.  All of which require some fidelity, but apparently nothing at all extreme.  Don't you think if you musicians could gain a quantum  leap in insight about each other they all would move toward super hifi?  Yet the reverse seems true.  They don't need much and when hearing super hifi, they may like it, but it is no enlightenment experience. Most just don't care even after experiencing it.

 

[spruce music]

   
Right, she hears herself. So are you admitting you are wrong when you say "she has no idea what she sounds like?"
 
Yes, tonal balance and sound field changes when you hear a recording of yourself. If you are such an expert on the difference between a musician's sound to themselves and to the audience, then I challenge you to do this. Give me an example of something specific a musician might notice in a recording and how they would adjust for that.

I have seen musicians who play as a small group choose one key over another for a particular song.  Practice etc.  Then upon hearing it recorded, decide a different key gives the sound they want to give.  Let you record them in the new key and sometimes yes or sometimes no, but they choose which is the sound they want from that.  Something they can't do as well on their own listening only to themselves.

 

[johncarm]

   
And they practice in some of the most god-awful sounding rooms imaginable for much of the time. How does that prepare them for their sound from the audience in a concert venue? People are saying "the musician might not be the best judge of their sound in the audience", and you want to turn that into "the musician has no sensory feedback about their sound," which is on its face false, even in the case of Glennie, who plays percussion which is slightly different than playing the violin, no?

No, the assertion was "musicians have no idea what they sound like."
 
If you want to make instead the assertion "the musician might not be the best judge of their sound in the audience," then let me address that.
 
It's a vague assertion. It really says nothing about the specific actions that a musician and recording engineer take.
 
I am not saying that musicians never adjust when they get feedback. You made a good point earlier that they get feedback in master classes and from lessons. And they get feedback from hearing recordings.
 
For example, maybe they intended to create a legato effect, but the notes are too separated as perceived from a distance. They discover this in the recording or verbal feedback. So they adjust. Do you think they can carry out that adjustment without hearing themselves? Why or why not? If you are really interested in specific knowledge, then I challenge you to describe anything that a musician hears while they are practicing and why that thing might or might not be important.

 

[johncarm]

 
I have seen musicians who play as a small group choose one key over another for a particular song.  Practice etc.  Then upon hearing it recorded, decide a different key gives the sound they want to give.  Let you record them in the new key and sometimes yes or sometimes no, but they choose which is the sound they want from that.  Something they can't do as well on their own listening only to themselves.

 
A "key" is an abstract concept. What specifically are they hearing when they evaluate which key is best? And why would their impression change when tonal balance and sound field (but nothing else) changes? Do you understand anything about this?
 
You claim that a musician is not the best judge of recorded fidelity. Therefore you are asserting there is something important that is different between "playing an instrument" and "evaluating a recording". So give some evidence for this. What is different and why is it important?

 

[RRod]

 
No, the assertion was "musicians have no idea what they sound like."
 
If you want to make instead the assertion "the musician might not be the best judge of their sound in the audience," then let me address that.
 
It's a vague assertion. It really says nothing about the specific actions that a musician and recording engineer take.
 
I am not saying that musicians never adjust when they get feedback. You made a good point earlier that they get feedback in master classes and from lessons. And they get feedback from hearing recordings.
 
For example, maybe they intended to create a legato effect, but the notes are too separated as perceived from a distance. They discover this in the recording or verbal feedback. So they adjust. Do you think they can carry out that adjustment without hearing themselves? Why or why not? If you are really interested in specific knowledge, then I challenge you to describe anything that a musician hears while they are practicing and why that thing might or might not be important.

 
I don't get any sense that anyone meant that literally, so I'm not going to bother addressing something that's literally untrue.
 
Re adjustments and feedback: there was plenty of feedback I got when I played viola back in school that was helpful during preparation for concerts, contests, etc. that let me make adjustments I would have never made on my own. One doesn't understand, say, the difference between "forte" and "solo forte" until one learns it, and you don't learn it by just sitting at home practicing. But I was never at a level where such adjustments were rarified to affecting the recorded sound. 

 

[spruce music]

   
A "key" is an abstract concept. What specifically are they hearing when they evaluate which key is best? And why would their impression change when tonal balance and sound field (but nothing else) changes? Do you understand anything about this?
 
You claim that a musician is not the best judge of recorded fidelity. Therefore you are asserting there is something important that is different between "playing an instrument" and "evaluating a recording". So give some evidence for this. What is different and why is it important?

A key is an abstract concept that results in different notes being played which is not abstract at all.  Different keys alter the emotional perception among other things.  Some are somber, some are light hearted, and other more subtle aspects many of which a musician feels more than analyzes I suspect.  So some qualitative difference is perceived by them and they change it sometimes.  Apparently a good recording of the group changes their mind vs hearing themselves only.
 
What I am not claiming is there is a difference between playing an instrument and evaluating a recording. I am saying evaluating the fidelity of a recording is not best done by the musicians as they are in a different sound environment that by necessity is very different than what an audience or a distant microphone hears.  The example of your own recorded voice should make that clear. It is a matter that should be super simple no matter how much you struggle to ignore it.  They have a crooked yardstick as a reference.  The sound when they play  as heard by them is demonstrably, measurably and should be supremely simple for you to comprehend by necessity very different than listeners of the group will perceive.

 

[Joe Bloggs]

 
In most cases they are not. The musician has no idea what it sound like out in the hall. You would not want to listen to a recording from the musician's perspective. It would likely end up in a brawl in the control room. As each claimed that is exactly what they sound, and the other members that are normally a few feet away telling them that is not what you sound like at all. I'm not sure how violin players stand the sound of their instrument inches from their ear. 

The idea that musicians have no idea what they sound like is a myth.

Think about it this way.

Let's assume you go a concert hall, and this particular hall has no acoustic problems: the sound is balanced and direct/reverb ratio is not problematic anywhere. 

Sat you sat in the left part of the front row while Michael Tilson Thomas conducts Mahler's Fifth, and you think it's a great performance. Then, the next night you sit in the back right, MTT conducts a pretty much similar performance and you think it's terrible.

Do you think that could happen? Or is that unlikely? Why or why not?

I think it's extremely unlikely. The reason why gets at this myth.

In a live performance, the actual performance of the musicians is the greatest variable and hence what the audience focus on.

In a recording, the performance is fixed and the listener has usually heard the performance many times, and hence the attention shifts to how well the performance was recorded and how well the hifi system is reproducing the recording. Your supposedly unlikely scenario is exactly what happens, if the same performance is recorded from two locations and played back.

Indeed, usually even the recording is fixed and one is only left to speculate on the qualities of the playback system. You may be attributing flaws you're hearing, wrongly, to the recording instead of your playback system.

 

[johncarm]

 
A key is an abstract concept that results in different notes being played which is not abstract at all.  Different keys alter the emotional perception among other things.  Some are somber, some are light hearted, and other more subtle aspects many of which a musician feels more than analyzes I suspect.  So some qualitative difference is perceived by them and they change it sometimes.  Apparently a good recording of the group changes their mind vs hearing themselves only.
 
What I am not claiming is there is a difference between playing an instrument and evaluating a recording. I am saying evaluating the fidelity of a recording is not best done by the musicians as they are in a different sound environment that by necessity is very different than what an audience or a distant microphone hears.  The example of your own recorded voice should make that clear. It is a matter that should be super simple no matter how much you struggle to ignore it.  They have a crooked yardstick as a reference.  The sound when they play  as heard by them is demonstrably, measurably and should be supremely simple for you to comprehend by necessity very different than listeners of the group will perceive.

 
Speaking of abstract concepts, "emotional perception" is a VERY abstract concept. Good one though, I think it's enjoyable to perceive that aspect of keys.
 
More concretely a key affects the timbre and sense of register of each note. In many instruments it changes articulation and intonation.
 
A key change may make the highest note of a phrase sound either more or less intense, meaning it alters the relationship of that note to the rest of the phrase, altering the sense of dramatic shape, pacing, etc. It may change the intonation causing some harmonies to be more dissonant and others less, again changing phrases on the small or large scale.
 
I may have given the impression that it's the same musicians who are playing that should check the control room sound. What I actually mean is that someone who is sensitive to the musical expression as perceived in the hall--that means someone who is trained to hear this---is the one who can best determine fidelity. Sometimes that is the musicians performing, sometimes better to use someone else.
 
When a musician changes their mind after hearing the recording, this is not a question of fidelity. Fidelity is choosing the miking etc. to match the musical expression as it first exists in the concert hall. But when musicians change their minds on performance details, there are most often two reasons.
 

1. Being involved in playing can change how you sense the music. For example, you can think that a climax works because it felt physically good to play it, but discover on the recording that it was too intense.
2. With very professional musicians, it's actually the conductor adjusting the performance because of fidelity problems in the recording. I.e. if the lines aren't legato because the recording isn't capturing enough of the sounds that occur between notes, the conductor will overlap notes more. That's not a fidelity issue either.

 

[johncarm]

Let me go back to my central point: the right way to evaluate the mics and mic positions is to listen in the concert hall, then go into the control room and check for points of similarity.
 
In disagreeing with me a number of topics came up.
 

1. The idea that musicians aren't good judges of recorded sound or "fidelity." And that "musical nuance" is something separate from "fidelity."
2. Musicians "have no idea how they sound."
3. A person is always surprised to hear their own voice in a recording.

 
Let me give some musical specifics.
 
I'm listening to a recording of the Julliard String Quartet playing an arrangement of the Art of Fugue. There are several obvious factors.
 
(1) The music begins at a slow tempo. Each note is shaped, with a gentle attack, a little swell and ebb. The notes are separated slightly. The attack, swell and ebb involve involve both spectral content and amplitude envelope. The musicians have obviously performed these notes carefully so that the line feels connected despite the slight separation.
 
(2) Dynamic shaping. These slow phrases get slightly louder and then softer. This is critical to the music working. If the shape isn't there, then these slow separated lines lose momentum and become monotonous.
 
(3) Tempos. Each fugue in the collection has a slightly different tempo. The relationship of tempos is not independent from the timbre and articulation of the lines.
 
These are all things that make the music "work." The playback will introduce distortions. Whether they are in transient responses, frequency response, compression, lack of dynamic resolution.
 
These distortions can disrupt how well the music works.
 
(1) If the gentle attack is made to sound a little more aggressive, if the swell and ebb are less clear, if the spectral changes over time are altered, then the articulation will no longer be right for the tempo and note separation. If the noise floor is high and the tail of the ebbing disappears, then the notes will seem too separated.
 
(2) If there is a loss of dynamic resolution, then the phrases will not have a clear shape and the music will become static.
 
(3) If the timbre, articulation, dynamics etc. are altered as above, then the relationship of tempos may no longer be right.
 
If all these things are right in the concert hall, then a high-fidelity recording is one that gets them right in the control room. I don't mean that it has to be the performing musicians themselves evaluating the sound in the concert hall. It has to be someone who is trained to perceive these patterns.
 
If a recording engineer knows about tonal balance and sound fields but little else, they will not be able to evaluate the fidelity of a recording.
 
I hope my examples make clear that musical nuance is truly disrupted by fidelity problems.
 
For the Julliard Quintet to perform with all this nuance is impossible without having a very good idea of your own sound; and I don't mean just from past feedback, but from listening as you practice.
 
Regarding the idea that you don't know your own voice: the surprise you are talking about, hearing a different tonal balance and balance among consonants and vowels, is not the best analogy. A better analogy is the idea of learning to speak a foreign language with minimal accent, mostly practicing without hearing a recording of yourself. Does that make it impossible to learn a foreign language? If not, then what are you doing when you practice?