March 12, 2024 / By mobanmarket
Recently, I found myself in an email conversation with two colleagues on the nature of reproduced audio. How should we think about it? The conversation was provoked by a “hybrid” (live and online) presentation of the Pacific Northwest section of the Audio Engineering Society called “What Does ‘Accurate’ Even Mean?” The presenter was James D. “JJ” Johnston, a distinguished researcher in the field of perceptual audio coding and a co-inventor of MP3.
Among many other honors, Johnston was selected to present the Richard Heyser Memorial Lecture at the 2012 AES convention—an honor shared by our own John Atkinson, who had given that lecture the previous year and was one of the participants in this email conversation. The other was Tom Fine—so, it was me and two sound engineers.
In the email that got us started, Tom (who has done a lot of archival work) noted that vintage tape machines were usually better at recording (“better” meaning close to the microphone feed) than they were at playback. Consequently, he wrote, “Playing old tapes on late-era, state-of-the-art tape machines often yields a very different sound profile than original commercial releases.” Those commercial releases, Tom wrote, “also went through the Vinyl Black Box and thus were very far from output equals input, with input being what the microphones captured.”
“I’m not even talking about fidelity to what sounds occurred in front of the microphone,” Tom continued. “That gets lost as soon as the microphone does its thing.”
Is he saying that microphones don’t accurately capture sound? It depends what you mean by “accurately.” Microphones “don’t operate or ‘hear’ like human ears,” Tom wrote, “and their placement and use is determined by aesthetic factors.” In use, then, a microphone is alien, and the thing it produces—a typically two-channel electrical signal that’s preserved as a recording—is subjective.
What about engineers who strive to stay out of the way as much as possible, with so-called minimalist recording methods? Such recordings, Tom said, “are dull and don’t hold up in the commercial world.” They are admittedly an acquired taste.
JA answered with a related point, quoting Evan Eisenberg’s book The Recording Angel: Explorations in Phonography: “In the great majority of cases,” JA quoted, “there is no original musical event that a record records or reproduces.”
Up to now, we were so focused on the relationship of a recording to what it reproduces that we overlooked the fact that most of the time, it doesn’t reproduce anything. Subjectivity aside, very few recordings correspond to an actual performance. Most are studio concoctions with pieced-together instrumental tracks and artificial ambience that document no sonic event that ever occurred. Your average studio album is a whole-cloth creation of musicians and sound engineers.
But that’s just rock and pop, right? Aren’t they the ones who make those synthetic albums? Not exactly. Even most mainstream commercial recordings of, say, an orchestra or solo piano are spliced together from many takes—perhaps one main take per movement and many short corrections. That’s partly because musicians make mistakes, and mistakes aren’t acceptable on mainstream commercial recordings. “Perfection” is expected, even if it’s fake.
Tom, who has remastered many of the Mercury Living Presence recordings, wrote in a follow-up email, “Some Mercury fans get going about how ‘pure’ the recordings sound. I tell them, ‘It’s a minimalist, purist recording technique, but you should see how many splices are in a master tape. It’s a produced and edited product, polished to stand up to hundreds of playbacks in the home. The fact that people think it sounds lifelike means the production was done as intended.'”
Finally, the crux of the issue. We audiophiles and serious music listeners are most satisfied (whether we know it or not) not when engineers intervene as little as possible but when they are most successful in pulling the wool over our eyes—when the illusion is complete. Often, that is best achieved with more intervention—more manipulation—not less.
Recording, then, is an act of artistic creation, starting with the earliest and most basic of audio-engineering tasks: positioning the microphones. Tom again: “A spaced-omni setup is probably among the most dependent on the listening aesthetic of the engineer and producer.”
Let’s return to that Eisenberg quote. Far from being representative of some past real-world event or experience, Eisenberg said, “each playing of a given record is an instance of something timeless. The original musical event never occurred; it exists, if it exists anywhere, outside history.” JA wrote about this in this very space in 2010.
It is often said and written, including in this magazine, that a recording can be a time machine, perhaps a teleportation device, moving you through space and time to experience things you couldn’t otherwise, like Thelonious Monk playing at the It Club or the Blackhawk. Yet the experience of playing a record is best thought of not as an act of recreation but as an act of original creation. Even a recording of a live event—even if there was an experience in the real world that was captured on tape—what’s on the record is so far removed from what happened then and there that it makes sense to think of it as something new.
So this synthetic, whole-cloth creation is what we audiophiles are supposed to compare to “live” sound. Sounds hopeless, doesn’t it?
On the contrary. The notion of a (re) produced recording as a performance is, to me, liberating. The irony is striking, but the argument is compelling: Once we’ve embraced the notion that a recording is a complete fabrication, we get to decide for ourselves how convincing that illusion is without worrying much about whether the connection to live music is real, whatever that might mean.
A comparison to live, though, is just one of many aesthetic choices; we are equally free to judge by other criteria, such as whether we find the soundstage compelling, the images palpable, or instrumental timbres consistently pleasing. Something, though, must constrain our judgments (and designers’ choices) if we are to continue to use the word “fidelity” in describing our sonic goals.
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