Real Live Experience, Classics unplugged (Off Topic)

by soundcheck , Germany, Sunday, January 28, 2007, 12:31 (6298 days ago)

Hi there.

Last night I was lucky to visit a real nice small classical concert.
It took place at a small church closeby my place.
Around 100 people showed up.

A chamber formation (3 violins, 1 viola, 1 cello 1 contrabass, 1 cembalo)
of the Young Philarmonic Orchestra Cologne, was presenting 4 seasons, a
Mozart piece and a Tchaikovsky piece for clarinet.

A russion guy called Dima Feinschmidt had the violin solo part.
He is one of these numerous very talented players.

I had the luck to get the very center seat in the first row. Strange though but the first row was the last unoccupied row when we entered the church. Nobody was sitting in front of me and my wife. Great.

Distance to the musicians were about 5-6m.

(Just to mention it: I think the average age of the audience was about 65.
Me and my wife felt like youngsters again! )

The overall performance was quite good and enjoyable.

Now: Why do I post this story! ( I could also bore you to death with Linux stories! )

I never really had a chance before, to compare Hifi at Home with live classical music in such a very realistic similar to "Home-Audio" setup.
( Don't take me wrong here! It was not my first classical concert I visited!)

I spent a couple of minutes to do analytic listening. ( I conducted even a blindtest!)

My impression. We are extremely close to real live reproduction. (Despite the sweet spot fact!)
Probably we're even overdoing it, with our strive for brutal dynamics and 3 dimensional pinpointing and endless deep and wide staging.
When it comes to the instruments, especially the contrabass is much less audible in a real live situation.

I had to conclude again, that it is just the poor way of recording today, which messes around with the sound. ( That's not acually new to us - right?)

The most obvious and enjoyable (audio) fact at the concert:
I did not hear any fingers scratching the strings, bow scraping, musicians breathing, paper turning and mainly all other nasty noises are gone when you listen to unplugged live-music even at a distance of 6m. The only sound which came to my attention were the moving valves of the clarinet around 4 m away from me! ( And an ambulance driving by the church.)

The performance in general just provides a silky, fluent and very emotional sense of music! (not too silky though! :wink: )

When it comes to the way of recording: I don't see any other way of realistic recording than using just one microphone.
nnearfield microphones just record sounds which nobody wants to listen to.
It just disturbes the overall performance!

Good to have quite some ONE-Mic recordings at home!

So far so good! I gotta get back to my Linux project.

Cheers
Klaus

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