Why Recorded Music Stinks
Recorded music stinks, and it stinks on many levels. When we listen to recorded music, what we want and think we are getting, is a reproduction of what the musicians sound like in person. This goal is frustrated on so many levels as to make it easier to find the hold grail.
The first hurdle is that the average home stereo also stinks. However, assuming you have a few thousand dollars to spend, you might be able to construct a stereo system that will, for the most part, reproduce the sounds on the recording. This would be great if the recording itself weren’t so flawed.
Recordings used to be flawed because of the technology. Musicians had to alter their songs, the way they played and even their instruments in order for the technology to work. Songs were cut to around 3 minutes so that they would fit on a 78 rpm record. Drummers would keep time on wooden blocks instead of drums so that the recording needle wouldn’t jump, and players were arranged with louder players further away. The result was a muted mess. Early jazz players were amused when touring Europe to find bands that were reproducing these muted tones in public performances, unaware that the recordings were deeply flawed reproductions of the real thing.
To this day, pop songs are still set around 3 minutes since people have gotten used to this contrivance. The effect is worse for an improvisational form, like Jazz, where the improvosation has to be planned to some extent to ensure that the solo ends within the time constraints.
You might point out that since the 50’s and the advent of stereo and high fidelity that we now get to hear the “real” thing, in our recordings. Nothing could be further from the truth. The more technology that was added the more freakish the recordings have become. The 50’s and 60’s are probably the high point in musical reproduction. The musicians would come in, microphones were set up and the band played. Some number of takes later and the record was complete.
It appears that sound engineers were not content with this. First they placed mic’s in strange locations to reduce the levels of certain sounds that they thought detracted from the recording, like the grunting of the piano player. Then they took it to the next level and recorded the musicians separately and put them together in the studio. This way they could work all sorts of black magic, having a freakish violin that’s louder than a trumpet, or change the tempo or pitch of the performance, or cut and paste sections so that the musucian doesn’t even have to play the whole song. I have a recording of Louis Armstrong in which Armstrong sings and is simultaneously backed up both vocally and on trumpet by himself. The sound engineers departed from reality in the pursuit of “perfection” whithout realizing that the imperfect is human and that music should be, flawed and human, not sterile and mechanic.
From there the technology runs amok. There is the fiasco with 80’s “re-mastering” of analog recordings onto CD’s. The dynamic range of analog recordings is larger than that of CD audio. CD’s have enough range to reproduce sounds accurately for the human ear, but the sound has to be centered properly within the CD’s range. Otherwise you get either the top or the bottom of the range clipped off. For some reason recording engineers were oblivious to the fact that the CD that resulted from their process sounded like crap compared to the original. Its like they never bothered to listen to the final product.
Then, just when you thought that it couldn’t get any worse, the marketing departments found that they could get more sales if their recording sounded louder on the radio. So they got the engineers to boost the signal on the CD, clipping both the highs and the lows, to make the recording stand out by virtue of being slightly louder.
So that’s where we are today, a video of some dude lip syncing during a dance number backed by a clipped digital recording of himself somehow playing half a dozen different instruments, perfectly, at the same time, like some crazy one robot band.
The solution? Go see a live band at a small venue, the sound is incredibly life like, and the fidelity unparalleled.
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