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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
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.
eldartford
4,262 posts
 
Go buy a TACET or MDG DVDA or SACD. Bring about $30 a pop. Will do more for your system than ten grand in electronics. As in just about everything else Europe is ahead of us in audio. Just my opinion of course.
viridian's avatar
viridian
4,184 posts
 
This obsession with recording quality is surely an audiophile disease and tends to ever diminish the circle of music played by many of my audio geek friends. It's time to unlearn this emphasis on recorded quality and put the focus back were it belongs, on the music. I love my mono records of jazz from the early 50s. Much of it is poorly recorded, and some of my original pressings have been loved by previous owners that were less than sympathetic to the delicate nature of their surfaces. Honest, I don't even notice. To spend an hour with Miles or Chet, to have the ghosts of long-dead sorcerers haunt my listening room; it's really all I want. Even the rock records that I grew up with, and those screechy Columbia classical recordings don't phase me a bit. I pity all of you that are held back from becoming one with the music because of imperfections in the technology. Perhaps evolving hi-rez formats will be the panacea that you seek.
cinematic_systems
282 posts
 
Nrchy,

Although the components in your systems are all excellent, they are a very poor match.

The combination of equipment you own will on a few occasions be spectacular but most of the time on most average recordings be grating and harsh. LP's are probably good but that's the easy part. CD quality is outstanding here of late, I have just bought 50 cd's from megadeth to Keb Mo to Gergiev SACD and they were all excellent. Your system is the problem not the recordings.

Please don't think this is a personal attack or a cheap shot because if you came to see me and you described your system, I would tell some stuff has gotta change.

If you want specifics i'll give them to you, let me state you don't need better equipment you need different equipment.
mprime
92 posts
 
Slappy nailed it. My A&R friends are saying as much.
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