Article: Realism vs Accuracy For Audiophiles | Part 2: The Real Sounds Of Live Music

[Ben-M]

That was a great article and reminded me a lot of Barry Diament's Soundkeeper Recordings. Trying to capture the realism of the performance and maintain as much of the dynamics as possible. Barry is just a damn nice guy and a super talented professional 🙂, I'm happy he's in this fight. 

 

There are a handful of other boutique recording studios and engineers that push that envelope as well, but for me, I also appreciate a lot of modern and mainstream music that unfortunately doesn't tend to be produced by those boutique studios. There's not really any way around fixing those completed recordings, so I'm looking forward to the next installment about system tuning options. 

 

Thanks for the great stuff. 

[Ben-M]

9 hours ago, Spanna said:

“If the phase relationships of the fundamental and harmonics are altered, everything from perceived pitch to timbre can change.”
 

“Along with their phase relationships, variations in the strength and frequency of harmonics can affect the perceived fundamental pitch.”

 

Would you agree that we could use the converse of this and listen to the perceived pitch to give us an indication of how accurately the fundamental and its harmonics relate to one another, with the most pitch accurate components also being the most musically accurate components?

Based on my interpretation of the quotes you picked, the recording engineer is adjusting the phase, volume, reverb, etc. aspects of the music/tracks they're working on, and all of that leads to the listener perceiving different things about the instruments, musicians, signers, localizations, venue, equipment, etc., and all of which would being going through your streamer, DAC, amp, and speakers, and be affected by your room, placement, or headphones. 

 

Which means, there may be things you could listen for in a recording which might be like fingerprints/ingredients to show what the recording engineer did to that track, but there isn't 1 recipe for post production and that means there isn't 1 solution like the one you referenced to try to judge the performance of the equipment with. And that's great ven that the players, music, or recording are following some standard that's consistent enough. 

 

I think the best example was already given, for what you're talking about, and that's to listen to both the music and the artist in real life, get as familiar as possible, then to listen to a recording of those on your equipment to figure out what happened in post production and to start trying to figure out how closely your gear is rendering that same stuff.

 

Anyway, that's my take?