Matt
Are there any women on this board?
- Joined
- Jun 25, 2001
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A fact that was easy to hear when comparing HD600's/Max/Blockhead and Stax's Omega system at my local HeadRoom Tour stop was that with, say, vocals, the HD600's presented them with body and a fairly good amount of life, but from a more distanced perspective, whilst the Stax's gave a very "close to the ear," very-lifelike, detailed presentatition of vocals.
This raises an interesting question for me: when you hear a singer in an ultra-detailed, ultra-intimate setting like with the Stax's, there is no real-life, performance-based corollary to that. The singer is never going to be standing right next to your ear nor will you ever be shrunk to fit inside the microphone. Likewise, some of the perspectives on instruments (ultra-closely mic'ed and mixed instruments) sound "weird" in a headstage without that "naturalistic distance." However, with the more distant but still lifelike sound of the HD600's, there is a corollary: your typical acoustic concert or whatever it is you're listening to. It seems that the Stax/Ety "perspective," though I personally like it, is an odd one, considering.
When an engineer mixes, he/she probably figures that more than likely, the listener will be doing so through speakers in his home and so, they figure in your carpeting, your distance from your speakers, etc. and mix it in a way that will arrive across that room and into your ears "as intended." Either that or a CD is mixed to sound good on some teenybopper's cheap stereo, where the sound is expected to go through various levels of masking and trashing, restuling in the engineer exaggerating unnaturally various parts of the sound (e.g. overemphasized treble).
With this in mind, does anyone know how an engineer, say, records an artists and with what intentions with regard to the final transduction for the listener? Wouldn't it be more "true to the intended experience" to listen through the more distant, not-as-utterly-terribly-intimate HD600's?
- Sir Mister Matt
This raises an interesting question for me: when you hear a singer in an ultra-detailed, ultra-intimate setting like with the Stax's, there is no real-life, performance-based corollary to that. The singer is never going to be standing right next to your ear nor will you ever be shrunk to fit inside the microphone. Likewise, some of the perspectives on instruments (ultra-closely mic'ed and mixed instruments) sound "weird" in a headstage without that "naturalistic distance." However, with the more distant but still lifelike sound of the HD600's, there is a corollary: your typical acoustic concert or whatever it is you're listening to. It seems that the Stax/Ety "perspective," though I personally like it, is an odd one, considering.
When an engineer mixes, he/she probably figures that more than likely, the listener will be doing so through speakers in his home and so, they figure in your carpeting, your distance from your speakers, etc. and mix it in a way that will arrive across that room and into your ears "as intended." Either that or a CD is mixed to sound good on some teenybopper's cheap stereo, where the sound is expected to go through various levels of masking and trashing, restuling in the engineer exaggerating unnaturally various parts of the sound (e.g. overemphasized treble).
With this in mind, does anyone know how an engineer, say, records an artists and with what intentions with regard to the final transduction for the listener? Wouldn't it be more "true to the intended experience" to listen through the more distant, not-as-utterly-terribly-intimate HD600's?
- Sir Mister Matt