@gregorio ref post # 13506
1. What I said is what is best processing - which is none. I did not state it is universally applicable to every genre and type of music.
2. I was agreeing with person whose post I have quoted -
@TheSonicTruth.
2.a Wrong. It is ALWAYS "initial recording" ( be it 2 track stereo or multitrack recording ), from which "master" is made at a later stage. Master(s), even the ones with all individual tracks of a multitrack recording already brought to 2 channel stereo (or 5.1 or whatever), can differ depending on the final delivery medium; each has its own set of limits and limitations. Master for analog record has to take into account limits and limitations regarding thickness of the lacquer ( which determines the maximum excursion of the cutting stylus in vertical direction which must never be exceeded - the first most important, governing how much out of phase or stereo bass can be put on record, followed by quite a few others, which are more trade-off between maximum signal to noise ratio vs playing time that can still be fitted on one side of the record . There are good descriptions how a master for disc cutting has to be prepared available online - and they tell a great deal about the capabilities and willingness to risk of a particular cutting provider) . Since MP3s are, like it or not, the way much if not most music is sold and distributed today, mastering engineers DID have to start to master for MP3s a bit differently than say for a RBCD version. Compensating best they can for the defficiences of the final "container" - if you will. The most "unbridled passion" master would be that for the HiRez release - whether in PCM or DSD. And yet another different set of priorities is/was for the compact cassette release. All of these masters can have but do not need to have exactly the same music contained.
3. I should have put it more directly. I have been to enough studios to see and hear WHAT I ABSOLUTELY DO NOT WANT IN A RECORDING. Not even in those I buy, but most definitely not in those I am about to make.
Besides binaural, there are other 2 microphone ( or stereo microphone, if preffered it this way ) miking techniques that do not require any processing.
They require much more careful placement of both mics and musicians in order to be successful, since you can not "fix everything in mix" as is standard practice with multimiking multitrack recordings. As time is money, such recordings are more expensive than multitrack; musicians' fees are the same if they play to find the correct placement or for real - and finding that sweet spot can be VERY time consuming.
4. The reason why there is not more native DSD recording lies mostly in the inability of the musicians to play without mistakes - and although technical difficulties are not trivial, they most definitely are not the prime reason. If say a young talented and aspiring musician wants to record a piece of music his/her teacher recorded say 2 decades ago, using all the editing and error correcting techniques available in PCM, he/she has got to have pretty mighty cojones to allow publishing a recording that does not allow anything but splicing various parts of various takes of the same piece of music. Ever since digital audio is about, musicians are panically avoiding ANY mistakes to be put on record - period. To the point some very big names are recording from bar 1 trough 5, from bar 3 trough 8, from 5 to 10, etc - overlapping a few bars, until the end of composition is finally reached. Voila - note by note perfection can be edited from such a recording. What can not be edited IN is the spirit lost in such grueling process; something only (preferably live) performance in one go can, under lucky circumstances, provide.
There is only a handful of musicians today who CAN play well enough live not to be bothered by gross mistakes. And who are not intimidated to record Direct to Disk . One example I am personally familiar with :
http://www.speakerscornerrecords.co...astor-piazzolla-tangos-del-angel-y-del-diablo
For somebody claiming to be an old studio cat, understanding Direct to Disc workflow is obviously something they did not teach in whatever school you have been attending. And , obviously, you did not find it required to investigate further on your own.
For if you did, you would have known that most usually, direct to disk session is run with a SINGLE lathe. Nobody in the biz interested in quality enough to bother with the stringent requirements of D2D back in mid 70s could afford more than a single lathe; therefore, there was only one master cut onto the lacquer disk, from which trough standard galvanic procedure only one stamper, from which the actual records were stamped, could be produced. That is WHY all D2D releases are LIMITED EDITION; each stamper is good only for so and so much copies, then it has to be discarded. Most D2D releases have individual serial number either stamped or hand written in for this purpose allocated area on the outer jacket. And, for obvious reasons, actual pressed record customer can buy # 0035 is preferable to # 1789 ( nearing its useful life as far as QUALITY pressing is concerned ).
With normal recordings, where master is on analog tape or some digital file, you can cut another lacquer disk>blabla>stamper , big companies could run more lathes in parallel at the same time, if the projected sales figure for that record has been large, etc - all of which was/is with D2D simply - impo$$ible.
D2D sessions, regardles who has been doing them, have always been backed by either analog or digital parallel recording - whether they did mention/admit it or not. For understandable reason - some of the music on originally D2D records had more customer demand than any single stamper could ever hope to supply. That's why, for example, Sheffield has after the original D2D stamper wore out, issued the same music, but this time lacquer disc>blabla>stamper was made from analogue tape master, recorded in parallel during the D2D session.
Homework: who was Keeper Of The Groove ?
I agree most of the recorded music from the last 6 decades could not have been produced in above described puristic manner. And for precisely this reason "older than 60" and "native HiRez of today" are so treasured by discerning listeners.
I am not going to say that invention by Les Paul ( Sound On Sound, as he called it - and later more popularly known as overdubbing ) and everything that followed ( including plugin for plugin for.....plugin nowadays ) was by default bad, evil, music destroying, etc. No. Genres as envisioned by the likes of Vangelis, would simply be impossible without those inventions and people who could put them to the use of music - yourself included. And I appreciate that and am thankful for those new capabilities with which to express the art in new way. None of the music by my beloved Frank Zappa ( with the possible exceptions of his recordings with LSO ) , mastered with such passion and precision by Mark Pinske, would have been possible - that would really be a terrible loss. As well as countless other musicians' good music.
All I am saying that these new capabilities paid their very existence with reduced ultimately achievable sound quality. And where artistic musical capabilities they offer are not absolutely required, they are best simply left out. That is realistically possible only with acoustic music ( classical, jazz, ethno, etc ) - and for precisely this reason, there are very few recordings outside acoustic realm today in any form of HiRez.
