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Posted by Paul Serotsky on February 27, 2007, 9:20 pm, in reply to "Re: Hatto? Ha!" The second involves using the technology to modify the sound as heard "live". Really, this has gone on since the microphone was invented. "Creative" use of microphone placements, mixing, and equalisation, for example, result in sounds that you couldn't hear "live". I recall that John Culshaw's creative approach to the "last trump" sequence of Solti's LSO recording of Mahler's Second Symphony caused a bit of a rumpus when it first appeared. Culshaw argued that being unable to achieve the composer's ideal in the concert hall was no barrier to doing it in the recording studio. CBS's close-miking technique (in the 1960s) produced sound balances that cannot be found in the concert hall. Moreover, as we all know, ever since the advent of magnetic tape recording, splicing to replace "bad" bits has been standard procedure. Even though these things were done with the best possible intentions, in the strictest sense they remain mis-representative. It is a small step from doing these things for "good honest" reasons and doing them for "grubby commercial" reasons. If a pile of artificial reverb. and some judicious, not to say "juicy", enhancement of the third harmonic content of the sound will make your latest "singing angel" sound even more angelic, and therefore sell more product then, with sound-processing technology "improving" by leaps and bounds, it's going to happen - and, by golly it DOES happen. What's more, commercial pressures dictate that it will be done not only to "improve" the sound of your "singing angel" but also, albeit applied more subtly, of your Steinway Model D as well. Of course, all this merely underlines the plain fact that a recording is a totally different animal from a live performance, even when it purports to be a recording OF a live performance! Our problem is that we often tend to forget that this is the case. Therefore, quite apart from verification of the IDs of the performers involved, when we buy a recording we need to know a few pertinent facts about how, or with what intention, it was made - for instance, perhaps some sort of labelling standard, starting at "hi-fi" and graduating downwards to "any similarity between the sounds preserved on this recording and those made by real people is entirely coincidental."
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"Doctoring" of classical recordings is not a child of the digital age - it has, in fact, been ROUTINE for a very long time. It comes in two main "colours" - the pursuit of the "best" possible sound, and the "creative" use of recording technology. The first is the erstwhile "high fidelity" - if the recording/reproduction chain is regarded as a veil drawn between the performer(s) and audience, the object of the exercise was to make the veil as thin as possible. Nobody would argue with that as an objective, although it's a long time since I last saw hi-fi parameters such as THD mentioned anywhere. This now old-fashioned "hi-fi" approach is the ONLY one that even tries to "accurately . . . reflect the work of the artist."
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