The following was just posted to another group that I follow. I felt it might be of interest here.
Quote:
Hi Guys:
I wanted to respond to Radu's comment about "soundstage", something in which we are all interested.
I'm now speaking as a retired recording engineer who dealt mostly with classical music and some jazz.
The best analogy of a soundstage occurs with a very similar human sense, that of seeing.
You may have noticed that most of us have two eyes, and if you were really observant (sorry, couldn't resist the pun) you may also have noticed what happens when we close one eye and view the world through only the remaining one. Upon the closing of one of the pair, we discover that what was formerly a 3-dimensional image has suddenly become only two-dimensional. This two-dimensional image consists of information describing only left to right, and up and down. There no longer exists the third dimension, which is front to back, or depth.
OK, so after stating the obvious, it's time to examine how recordings and their resultant soundstage differ.
Many of my recordings, particularly for orchestras and chamber ensembles of various sizes were made with only two microphones, a "stereo pair" consisting of either two spaced omnidirectional mics, or an ORTF pair, which are cardioids spaced a distance of 117cm apart, angled at about 100 degrees, or each about 50 degrees from center. There are a few other miking methods which also produce a fairly accurate 3-dimensional soundstage. These methods give results similar to our two eyes, both open.
Quite a few years back (much longer than I care to count) multitrack recording became fashionable, with recordings being made with a microphone directly assigned to each instrument. Since there were no longer any "stereo pairs" of mics in most of these recordings, there was no longer any perceived depth to the recording, unless a few of the mics happened to interact in such a way that some depth was allowed to happen. The only localizing of instruments was achieved by the position of the pan-pot, or panning potentiometer, which assigned a particular mic channel a location between full left and full right, depending on the engineer's conception of how he thought the recording should sound, and his positioning of the control. In other words, the engineer established the positioning of instruments from left to right. There was no depth unless some reverb or artificial ambience was added to the mix.
So what's the result of all these various ways of recording? The result is a lot of recordings with wildly differing soundstages, some with true depth created from real stereo miking, and others with no depth other than that created by reverb added to the mix.
It's therefore easy to understand that sometimes we may be listening to material that has a "real" 3-dimensional soundstage, and other times we are hearing a two-dimensional recording with added ambience. The bottom line here is that our recordings are extremely variable as far as soundstage is concerned.
I realize that for many of us, I've been " preaching to the choir", but hopefully one or two of you will have gained a bit of better understanding. You can't blame the tuner for no perceived depth when none was recorded in the first place.
Jeff
End quote.
Thanks YMMV,
r2
