Hi Jon
You had me worried for a minute. You’d be surprised how many folks don’t understand what a soundstage is. I always think it’s maybe because they haven’t been start to finish on a recording project. If you do a few it becomes pretty easy to detect how a soundstage works. The word "distortion" did throw me a little because sound stages are really pretty simple things to replay.
Like for example, when recording, if you get use to doing halos in the live room and go listen to it you can see the tri-miking setup (pretty easily). If I do a setup, I will do 3 rooms. One is the live room, one the control room and I also setup a playback room. I don’t like using a lot of the control rooms out there for judgement calls. In recordings what I typically do is the first set of mics are close up, then I back off for the second layer, and then I pickup the whole room. That lets you blend say your piano. So when I playback a piano on a system I can usually tell if the halos are squeezed cause it makes a certain sound within the playback stage. It’s kind of like when the guitarist knows the different guitars playing in any recording you also get use to how patterns sound. If a playback pattern isn’t working right you know right away. It’s very specific. Also, I don’t know if you know this or not, but anytime you start any recording there’s a pressure that you feel behind your head. If you don’t feel that pressure that means your not getting enough of the content.
Anyway there’s just little things you learn from doing it that I’ve notice a lot of folks don’t know, or if the teachers are teaching.
Michael Green
www.michaelgreenaudio.net