Real Live Experience, Classics unplugged (Off Topic)

by Eddie , Monday, January 29, 2007, 22:01 (6295 days ago) @ MirkoW

Hello Mirko, Klaus and others,

Hi Klaus,

I have the same impression, which leads me to a question.

Why do you listen to stereo, if you? Have you tried listen to mono even if
it is a "stereo recording"? Does it let you enjoy THE music better?

I would be interested to learn about your conclusion.

Cheers, Mirko

I was at a very good concert too on sunday afternoon. The famous Dutch cello player Pieter Wispelweij played three cello suites written by J.S. Bach. It was in a fully occupied concert hall of about 500 seats. We were sitting almost in the back. I was amazed of the sound level obtained by the cello, the distance must have been more than 20 meters but it was by all means loud enough. But to comment on the story of Klaus: "... at sufficient distance you do not hear fingers scratching the strings, bow s****ing, musicians breathing, paper turning ...". This is definitely true, but .... at such a distance also a lot of the fine nuances of the acoustical instruments are gone!:shame:

If you sit for example at the piano yourself, you press the right pedal and softly hit one key, then you hear a lot of other strings vibrating along, you hear resonances from the metal frame, the wooden enclosure. You can hear how the tones change tune while the sound level decreases. When you play regularly you hear that the instrument changes day by day etc. For other instruments similar remarks can be made, what about different reeds on a clarinet, different strings on a guitar, all the resonances you get from all parts of a large drum kit. This makes playing acoustical instruments such an exiting experience. My brother plays already almost 40 years in a large, high quality brass band. He is not impressed by my high-end equipment, it does not come close to what he hears while he is playing. Or, try to imagine a famous piano player giving a concert on a digital piano .....

The explanation is straightforward. Frequencies above 5 kHz damp quite fast when propagating through air. Just put your ear very close to a tweeter and you will notice how much the sound changes. But, now the big question is, can we and/or do we want to have all these fine details when we listen late at night to a CD. Maybe not, it could be an overkill. Besides that I do not know what the state-of-the-art of the recording technology can bring.

Another point you mentioned is the bass weakness you experienced during a live concert. There are two factors that might influence this. First, we are used to listen in releatively small living rooms where standing waves can easily increase the bass level considerably. Second, the bass level in a concert hall often strongly depends on the position of the seat. At the front, with a lot of room behind you, it can be expected that the bass level is relatively low. This is a drawback of all concerts, you caNot tweak the conditions.

Now I would like to give my comment on Mirko's question about mono playback. I have a very good recording from Billy Holiday with a 6-man band of outstanding jazz musicians made in 1957. After playing it many times, and liking it very much because her voice sounds so extremely natural, I slowly got the feeling that there was something strange with this recording. So I looked in the booklet and found that it was mono!

The reason why I did not hear it before was because my attention was caught by the singing which was clearly heard in the centre with the orchestra in the background. Later when I listened to an individual instrument I heard that it was also placed exactly in the centre of the sound stage. Once you realize this the effect is rather strange especially when you change your attention from one instrument to the other.

A test that I made later was to lisen to this CD with only one loudspeaker. This was a big disappointment, the voice and all instrument were there, but the soundstage was not much more than a point. If you are used to the sound stage of a good stereo system than one-channel mono is an enormous step back in the sense of reproducing the live concert. Two-way mono is just acceptabel for incidental listening, but the sound of real stereo is much more enjoyable and can even be very close to the acoustic performance in a music hall.

Kind regards,
Eddie

PS Surround souns system are no good for music reproduction.

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