[spruce music]

Okay so why didn't you answer your own question to start?

Further your description of musicians and sound quality is at variance with my experience with dozens of them. Also what many others report.

Finally what the great majority of recording guys do is not what you describe.

Oh well good luck in fantasy.

Oh and btw musicians despite the myth are not in a good position to determine what sounds right. They have no idea what they sound like to someone a few feet away. They have never heard themselves that way.

 

[Joe Bloggs]

You could modify the preference test by making the listeners score according to similarity to the original instead of preference.


As a matter of practicality, your goals can be better served by grabbing a hold of your sound engineer to learn miking and mixing techniques from him on the recording side and loudspeaker placement and room treatment techniques on the playback side, than coming up here trying to get us together to rewrite all of (psycho)acoustics theory. I suspect you haven't scratched the surface of what is possible with current technology.

It sounds like you are referring to the myth that "sound is the engineer's job" and "music is the musician's job."

Both disciplines require what we call "an ear." That is, an ability to perceive patterns in sound. There is no reason that the patterns an engineers uses and the patterns a musician uses should be distinct. (The TECHNIQUES are distinct but not the EAR.)

I think they probably USUALLY ARE distinct and that's an unfortunate thing.

I also think that some musical styles lend themselves to distinct roles.

But acoustic classical music? The engineer and musician should be listening for very similar things.

I tell you, a musician, to go learn the sound engineer's job and you tell me I'm telling you to keep the jobs separate?

 

[castleofargh]

I agree with Joe Bloggs opinion that albums are in majority just too different from lives(mostly on purpose), so what gear we use won't solve anything.
 
if I was to look for live sound, I guess I would focus on acoustic stuff mostly, where the band is often recorded playing together and there is no perfectly clean and isolated track straight from a guitar or a keyboard to fool around with. that will limit the mastering possibilities.
on headphones, maybe go for binaural records like chesky and co. or why not go for the smyth realiser, that would possibly be a way to get closer to a real feeling and get the sound of some studios.
on speakers, getting some nice software+room treatment could probably help getting at least closer to the studio. the rest will depend on what was done at the mastering.

 

[dprimary]

 
In your original post: What is the right way to compare live and recorded music in order to select good audio components?
 
I have read at least two papers where they recorded acoustic music with different techniques.  Had trained listeners or music school students on hand.  Then played back over high quality gear in the same space these recordings to judge which most accurately conveyed the live performance, the placement of virtual imaging of the musicians vs their actual place during the recording, and a judgement of overall fidelity.   In one case a Blumlein recording was judged most accurate.   In another Blumlein and I think it was NOS (could have been mid/side) were judged equally accurate with slightly different strengths and better than the other methods.
 
 
https://www.academia.edu/693259/An_Investigation_into_Stereo_Microphone_Techniques_and_their_Applications
 
Here is another paper I just turned up.  Also saying Blumlein is very good.  Paper is a thesis and about 100 pages.  You can skim the highlights though.

 
There is large flaw in playing back a recording in the room that it was recorded. That would double the amount of room reverberation and echoes in the playback. There has been attempts to close mic instruments in a space and then play it back over speakers in the same location. What is the correct mic'ing technique depends on many variables which is why there is not a standard way to do it. In a place like the BBC where they have many similar studios you expect the same technique to yield similar results. All those techniques had been tried many times so there is a base knowledge with the staff that knows what works well. When you are recording in an existing space such as large church, you end up having to try a few to many combinations of techniques and microphones depending on your experience. Often you are working to minimize an acoustic problem, and then if there will be an audience  you have adjust for that as well.
 
The paper is good but it seems to be more of an academic exercise in documenting a typical stereo recording session. I do have to note they seemed to do far more processing in mastering then I would normally expect. Most of what they did I would had done in placement and microphone selection. It seems the rooms might have been too small. Possibly they did this all in rehearsal studios.

 

[dprimary]

   
 
 
But acoustic classical music? The engineer and musician should be listening for very similar things.

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. 

 

[jcx]

Orchestras definitely have to provide ear protection per OSHA, EU workplace safety sandards

 

[johncarm]

I tell you, a musician, to go learn the sound engineer's job and you tell me I'm telling you to keep the jobs separate?

 
Oops, you are right. I was a bit stuck in my own perspective on this, which is to focus on the ear skills. I don't know if you agree with me that the ear skills are very similar, but the techniques are certainly different. 

 

[johncarm]

  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.

 

[johncarm]

Another challenge I have for objectivists here is to give an answer to the following question that makes even the tiniest bit of sense:
 
If Hiliary Hahn has no idea what she sounds like, then how did she learn to produce a heavenly timbre?

 

[RRod]

  Another challenge I have for objectivists here is to give an answer to the following question that makes even the tiniest bit of sense:
 
If Hiliary Hahn has no idea what she sounds like, then how did she learn to produce a heavenly timbre?

 
If you watch masterclasses, you'll quite often hear discussions about the disparity between what you hear as the player versus how it sounds out in the hall, especially issues of dynamics and timbre. "Crack out those bass notes or they won't hear them", "play that rougher than you want too, it sounds too smooth out there". A player of Hahn's level has integrated all these kinds of corrections into her sound for each piece, and has probably learned additional tricks for making the recording process smoother. A friend of mine is a budding flutist and has said that hearing a recording of one's self is quite harrowing, since you suddenly here all kinds of new things you don't hear/notice when performing. So who would be the better judge of a *recorded* flute sound: her, or a sound engineer who's been recording all kinds of wind instruments for professionals his whole career?

 

[johncarm]

   
If you watch masterclasses, you'll quite often hear discussions about the disparity between what you hear as the player versus how it sounds out in the hall, especially issues of dynamics and timbre. "Crack out those bass notes or they won't hear them", "play that rougher than you want too, it sounds too smooth out there". A player of Hahn's level has integrated all these kinds of corrections into her sound for each piece, and has probably learned additional tricks for making the recording process smoother. A friend of mine is a budding flutist and has said that hearing a recording of one's self is quite harrowing, since you suddenly here all kinds of new things you don't hear/notice when performing. So who would be the better judge of a *recorded* flute sound: her, or a sound engineer who's been recording all kinds of wind instruments for professionals his whole career?

You have made some good points. Note that a musician spends maybe 5% of their time in masterclasses, and 95% practicing alone. So answer this question: could Hiliary Hahn have achieved her superb musical technique (as well as heavenly tone) if she spent 95% percent of her practice time wearing 100% sound-blocking ear plugs? If she "has no idea what she sounds like"?
 
Here's another challenge for you to think about. Once I heard a musician who really *couldn't* hear what she sounded like: Evenlyn Glennie. There were certain features to her sound that were consistent with this fact. Actually, she does have a way of sensing her sound, which is vibrations in her body. I challenge the sound scientists here to use their knowledge of psychoacoustics to produce a reasonable guess what features her sound probably had based on these facts.
 

 

[johncarm]

   
If you watch masterclasses, you'll quite often hear discussions about the disparity between what you hear as the player versus how it sounds out in the hall, especially issues of dynamics and timbre. "Crack out those bass notes or they won't hear them", "play that rougher than you want too, it sounds too smooth out there". A player of Hahn's level has integrated all these kinds of corrections into her sound for each piece, and has probably learned additional tricks for making the recording process smoother. A friend of mine is a budding flutist and has said that hearing a recording of one's self is quite harrowing, since you suddenly here all kinds of new things you don't hear/notice when performing. So who would be the better judge of a *recorded* flute sound: her, or a sound engineer who's been recording all kinds of wind instruments for professionals his whole career?

 
About the judge of sound. My assertion is that a recording engineer needs a good musical ear. In other words, a musician works with certain patterns. Good music involves producing a set of patterns S. (Of course, the style of music matters to S.) My assertion is that the recording engineer needs to be able to perceive S well. He/she needs to perceive how mic technique, for example, affects these patterns S, the same patterns the musician works with. 
 
Suppose we have a recording engineer who specializes in sound field patterns. In that case, Hiliary Hahn would be the far better judge of her recorded sound. Of course, some recording engineers do have a musical ear.

 

[jcx]

big touring Rock bands are another case - standing, playing in front of literally deafening speaker stacks everyone on stage has isolating iem with their own monitoring feeds from the mixing board - and those aren't what's being sent to the speakers, audience
 
and neither is what is used to make a "live album"
 
likewise a good fraction of studio work - isolation booths, retakes done with a performer listening to recorded and/or mixed feeds to sync to
 
 
and the final consumer product almost never makes any pretense to be accurately representative of a audience member's exact sound field even during a real performance with audience
 
close mics on performers, instruments, flying mics to capture hall ambience with less audience noise, "tasteful" dynamic compression, EQ, dynamic panning to featured soloist/sections - all to create a impressive, hyper "real", stimulating recordings

 

[johncarm]

  big touring Rock bands are another case - standing, playing in front of literally deafening speaker stacks everyone on stage has isolating iem with their own monitoring feeds from the mixing board - and those aren't what's being sent to the speakers, audience
 
and neither is what is used to make a "live album"
 
likewise a good fraction of studio work - isolation booths, retakes done with a performer listening to recorded and/or mixed feeds to sync to
 
 
and the final consumer product almost never makes any pretense to be accurately representative of a audience member's exact sound field even during a real performance with audience
 
close mics on performers, instruments, flying mics to capture hall ambience with less audience noise, "tasteful" dynamic compression, EQ, dynamic panning to featured soloist/sections - all to create a impressive, hyper "real", stimulating recordings

 
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?

 

[RRod]

  You have made some good points. Note that a musician spends maybe 5% of their time in masterclasses, and 95% practicing alone. So answer this question: could Hiliary Hahn have achieved her superb musical technique (as well as heavenly tone) if she spent 95% percent of her practice time wearing 100% sound-blocking ear plugs? If she "has no idea what she sounds like"?
 
Here's another challenge for you to think about. Once I heard a musician who really *couldn't* hear what she sounded like: Evenlyn Glennie. There were certain features to her sound that were consistent with this fact. Actually, she does have a way of sensing her sound, which is vibrations in her body. I challenge the sound scientists here to use their knowledge of psychoacoustics to produce a reasonable guess what features her sound probably had based on these facts.
 

 
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.
 

   
About the judge of sound. My assertion is that a recording engineer needs a good musical ear. In other words, a musician works with certain patterns. Good music involves producing a set of patterns S. (Of course, the style of music matters to S.) My assertion is that the recording engineer needs to be able to perceive S well. He/she needs to perceive how mic technique, for example, affects these patterns S, the same patterns the musician works with. 
 
Suppose we have a recording engineer who specializes in sound field patterns. In that case, Hiliary Hahn would be the far better judge of her recorded sound. Of course, some recording engineers do have a musical ear.

 
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.