Behind every sound of the tune is a story.
I find engineering interesting but it's only as good as practicality. Audio is many times built from engineering, I believe this to be backwards. Engineering should not be at the mercy of a piece of test equipment that has been made to measure a word developed by a techy. Think about it the terms we use and the test we make are based on us trying to figure out how to measure something that happens in nature. After time in audio we have turned it around so that we are designing to a measurement instead of the other way around.
Who's to say that any of the measurements made for us to use is accurate? Is a herz really an accurate measurement in all situations and if not why do we still use it and the other terms as representing what we call an absolute? I for years have found that audio has failed to produce absolutes when describing sound and the measurements of sound. Why is this a problem? The answer is simple. If our foundation is based on an inaccurate statements,terms and figures and we end up basing our findings on this non-truth than we are not using the absolute truth as a starting point. Fact is sound has a variable factor to it that changes under conditions and should be tested as a result finder and not a source giver.
Early on in my career I saw music making, recording and listening as a variable event. One that changed as conditions changed. Tempo, speed, pitch and all the other musical terms are what makes a musical note real. Reproducing music is a real time event as well and is controlled by the varying process of energy. How this plays out in our world means everything.
One of my earliest visits to the studio was done at the famous Criteria Studios in Miami where I cut many of my audio teeth. I had the oppertunity to not only do in studio work from start to finish but also toured giving me both the aspect of what was going on in the "big room" as well as the process of the audio chain. Seeing the note conceived at different locations and watching it become captured, stored, mastered and replayed gave me an insight and perspective that has always stayed with me. The first of which is one based on the personalities of the biz. Very few of the professionals in the music business do music start to finish. Everyone depends on everyone else from the building of speakers and amplifiers to acoustics to playing to engineering. And everyone has their own ideas of what sound is. To not tattle on anyone I'm going to use a few of these stories with anonymous names to show examples, but first let me explain something.
Do you know what a microphone is and how it is used? If you did you would stop assuming that microphones can give you an accurate view of what the music note is. A microphone is not a perfect representative and when we say "sounds live" we are using a wide brush that has been invented by the audiophile world that does not exist. I know for fact if you are using a stock mic out of it's box to do your testing and the element protector is still on it you are not using a mic fully exposed to the sound wave. A microphone is a tool used to pick up energy produced by soundwaves, but because the soundwaves are far bigger than the microphones element/diaphragm the mic (any mic) only picks up a small picture of the whole. And every mic is influenced by it's housing and anything it is touching. In reality the microphone itself has it's own effect on the soundwave being gathered. Each piece of your audio chain is a part just like a microphone, and each part has particular jobs to do. Understanding those jobs will help you get a better picture of what audio reproduction is and isn't. It will also help you get away from using tools to replace your ears.
What sounds good is all that matters. Measuring tools in audio do not represent what you are hearing! let me put this into practicality for you.
There was a review done on me a while back where I was tuning up a system at the same time a well known testing engineer was doing the same system. A very nice guy and we will leave names out. The system was tune using the state of the art tools by the engineer. Everything on the computer said the system was playing accurate however the sound was noticeably off according to the folks listening after the tuning. The highs were hard and there was a lack of musicality and depth to the sound. There were parts of the music missing it seemed according to their comments. Even though this was the case the system was labeled as tuned. But was it? I was asked to tune the same system using the method of the tune with no help from computers or mics. The first thing I did was free the highs up to sound relaxed and natural. The second was to add depth and music pace. In the end the system tuned by ear mechanically sounded far better to them than the system using tests with mics and computers.
WHY? GIGO
The mic/computer system only knew what it was being told from one, a very limited source and two, that source turned into a program. The computer was only a tool and this tool only dealt with the information supplied. I't didn't deal with the whole picture so only EQed the info it had gathered making the music unlistenable to the discerning ear.
I've done this test all over the world with every type of test equipment posible and the results are the same. Listening is far different than testing. listening is far different than sampling a piece than putting only that piece into a program for correcting. What you end up with is a very unbalanced sound where the music sounds sterile or exaggerated and still out of tune. The big problem though is audiophiles have been told that this is accurate and are being told to listen to it even though it sounds non-musical to them. This is completely backward from what our industry set out to do. We have taken the art out of being artist, and the high end audio industry should have always been based on truth and art.
Even in the earliest days of my professional music experiences I spent my time making sound and when the tools didn't do the sound to my studio engineers liking I gave them the sound they wanted without caring for the test results. If a kick drum doesn't sound tight it doesn't sound tight because of the job at the drum itself and the mic picking up the drum. We then would trace the signal through the chain if needed till we got the sound we wanted on the tape. this meant tuning up the signal path acoustically mechanically and electrically. If we would have cropped the signal we got you never would have heard the kick with all of it's impact. In todays world we trim up the computerized EQ (removing music) till we get the frequencies left that give the appearance of tightness. We do this with our amps, speakers, DACs, cable and the rest of the chain. What we should be doing is fixing the source itself preserving the signal.
In the late seventies I was working on a recording days after the original take was made. The engineers were staying up late playing with the EQ and effects trying to get the drums to sound right. The studio drummer was sitting there bored to death and he and I started to talk about the session. His problem was the engineers were trying to fix something that happened in the signal. After the engineers left we hung out in the studio a while. Martin started to play the drums and I recorded. The first thing we noticed was the sound in the studio sounded completely different from the mixing room. During the recording that day they were using a mic on the drums that had their cases on that are used to protect them from impact incase of being dropped. These were the first to go cleaning up the signal dramatically. From that point we wired the mics without their regular connectors (a trick I learned in my own studio). before the night was over we completely redid the signal path getting rid of most of the fat between the drum and the tape machine. We also got rid of the God awful sounding foam around the drum kit and made our own barricade sound box that housed the mic and kick drum. Did it look stock? No. Did I get in huge trouble the next morning? Yes. But, the drums were so clean they almost threw the JBLs out of their cabinets when they hit.