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The problem with the music

There are lots of people who frequent this site that have spent significant amounts of money to buy the gear that they use to reproduce their music. I would never suggest that you should not have done that, but I wonder if the music industry is not working against you, or at least, not with you.

For the most part studios are using expensive gear to record with, but is it really all that good? Do the people doing the recording have good systems that can reproduce soundstage, detail and all the other things that audiophiles desire, or do they even care about playback?

I know there are labels that are sympathetic to our obsessions, but does Sony/Columbia, Mercury, or RCA etc. give a rats #$%&@ about what we want?

Recordings (digital) have gotten a lot better since the garbage released in the mid 80's. Some of them are even listenable! BUT lots of people are spending lots of money to get great music when the studios don't seem that interested in doing good recordings. Mike Large, director of operations for Real Worl Studios said "The aim of the music is to connect with you on an emotional level; and I'd be prepared to bet that the system you have at home does that better than any of the systems we make records on."

Do recording engineers even care about relating the emotion of the music, or are they just concerned about the mechanics?

What do you think, and can/ should anything be done about it?
128x128nrchy
beavis
272 posts
 
I think it goes a bit farther than the technology used. Part of it is the recording engineers know-how. If it was just the technology, all LPs from the 60s-80s would consistently sound like s**t.
jeffreybehr's avatar
jeffreybehr
805 posts
 
I agree that some or maybe MOST engineers, producers, and music companies don't care much for recording quality. Seems the small labels like Chesky, Reference, Mapleshade, etc. that are owned by ONE caring person do the best jobs. Telarc seems to be doing a great job at creating natural-sounding orchestral recordings, and they use audiofile-grade equipment.

I'm VERY pleased with most classical multichannel recordings I've bought on DVD-A and SACD; I've certainly kept more than I've sold.

I think each of us should e-mail the companies that produced that BAD recording we just listened to and tell them why we won't be buying any more like it. MAYBE someone will listen. I know that Columbia/CBS/Sony finally figured out they were making excrable recordings in the '60s and '70s. Their stuff from the '90s and '00s sounds MUCH better.
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pabelson
344 posts
 
You might also consider the remote possibility that they, as professionals, actually know more about this than you do.
nrchy's avatar
nrchy OP
2,111 posts
 
Pabelson, which ones, since none or few of them seem to agree on how things should sound. There are some companies that continually put out quality recordings, others that consistantly put out poor quality recordings.

What am I not hearing that I should be hearing?

Which of these are doing it right. Or don't you really have anything to contribute to this discussion? How about the quote from a gentleman involved in the business? Doesn't he know anything either?
markphd
667 posts
 
To suggest that because you work for a big corporation, you don't care about the quality of your craft is, I think, a bit harsh. Many honourable people are cogs in the big machine and perform their job within the limitations imposed upon them by the corporation. This is probably why some people move on to form small audiophile labels where they have greater control over the process.

I also don't think that the equipment they use is poor. Our playback systems and the limitations of the media which are used are far greater constraints on quality than the gear used to produce the original master, or an alleged bad attitude on the part of recording engineers.

I would be more concerned with the point made by Slappy. After all, if mass market consumers only want mp3's, then maybe the studios will decide only to record masters in mp3. And it's the mass market that pays the bills that drive the industry, not a few audiophiles like us. What a horror that would be,although we wouldn't have to spend near so much money on our systems if the upper limit of the recording was lowered.

However, I remain optimistic. As we continue to develop media with greater storage capacity, there will be less of a need to save space with data compression. We will soon have the advantages of digital with a storage medium that contains as much information as analog.
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