| Author | Message | ||
| bigredbass
Senior Member Username: bigredbass Post Number: 543 Registered: 9-2002 |
Is it just me or does most stereo music just sound strange synthed out through most of the current 5.1, etc., systems? Is is just because I can't afford Krell or most things in The Absolute Sound? Have I not heard any CDs mixed for 5.1? I know there are some out there, but I'm just missing this boat so far. Any advice? I'm ready to buy a stereo rig with a subwoofer and call it a day. But then again, I AM my own subwoofer. This is a real advantage as I like my own bass parts better than the ones they cut !! For me, I'll know they've really perfected it when I hear a Live recording in surround that's sounds the way that I and all of you have heard a live band: Standing next to the drummer, wishing I could hear the keys better whilst checking out that waitress and thinking I'm about ready for one more Grand Slam breakfast at Denny's . . . J o e y | ||
| dadabass2001
Senior Member Username: dadabass2001 Post Number: 510 Registered: 6-2002 |
Naw, Joey, Make mine a meat-lovers bowl. If it sounds like a real stage mix, would that mean instruments are in the rear channels and vocals (monitors and mains) are in the front channels and squealing? (added: Does your audio system let you just use the rear channels to duplicate the front? My little AIWA surrond stereo has several presets for surround mode, including "off". This setting defaults if you plug in headphones.) Mike (Message edited by dadabass2001 on December 31, 2005) | ||
| keith_h
Advanced Member Username: keith_h Post Number: 294 Registered: 2-2005 |
Joey if it is just you then we have the same malady.;-) I leave my CD and turntable settings on good old stereo. I don't even use the sub when playing music as it sounds to boomy to me. I will also run direct (bypass the preamp) when playing my direct to disk LP's. I tried playing with the different DSP settings when I first got the receiver but they all sounded odd. Now when I play a movie that's a different story it's all surround sound driving every speaker in the system. Keith | ||
| bob
Senior Member Username: bob Post Number: 558 Registered: 11-2002 |
You're not alone, Joey :-) I'll try not to ramble too much, but there are at least two or three points I'd like to address here (just my opinions, as always). First, if the music was originally recorded in stereo, then all you can possibly do with DSP to spread it out to more channels is hurt it. Mono is a bit of an exception, in that it can be great through 2 channels, but I'll stand by the statement that more will hurt. A good stereo recording should be miked to capture the room acoustics/ambience appropriately, and a good playback system should reproduce them accurately. This gets to the second point: a critical piece of the "playback system" is your room. If it's too dead, or too live, or poorly set up, then it will not be able to reproduce the ambience of the recording. And if it can't, do you really think that some DSP algorithm is going to help? (Notable exception here: there are some very expensive digital room compensation devices available these days, but that's a different story.) Next point (I'm losing count), as far as I can tell, no one really knows how to make great use of multi-channel recordings for music purposes. It's not realistic, except maybe to the performers, to place the listening position somewhere on stage, in the middle of the musicians. This is not how most of us are used to listening to live performances, and (with perhaps a few exceptions), not how things are being recorded. Plus, as you suggest, there are still ongoing debates about the relative merits of 5.1, 6, 7, and variations on the number and placement of channels. And while people have been arguing about this stuff for quite a few years now, the vast majority of music recordings available today are still only two channel. Most important point: do the math. Assume a simple system, with a single source component (turntable, CD, universal multi-channel disc player, whatever). Subtract out the cost of the source, and then take the remaining budget you have for your system. Do you want to divide this - for speakers, amplifier channels, and cables and stands - by 2, or by 5 or more? I don't think it matters much what price point you're considering. At almost any level, you will end up with better sound by spending twice as much on two good channels, instead of diluting it among five or so. Alternatively, take the money you save and spend it on treating your room acoustics, and you'll still come out ahead. As it happens, I'm fortunate enough to own at least one component that was reviewed in TAS - the Ayre D-1 CD/DVD player (they may have reviewed one or two other things I have, I've not been keeping score). I mention this because the guy behind Ayre, by the name of Charlie Hansen, makes exactly the same point about cost/benefit. While they do offer a lower cost disc player with more channels, you can't buy (or maybe can't sell...) a D-1 with more than two. As for watching movies, I would suggest that aside from some novelty effects, a high quality stereo system - with good imaging, dynamic range, and articulation, will make for a more satisfying experience in the long run. The notable exception here is when you need to seat more than about two people, in which case the center channel speaker in particular will help a lot in keeping the sound coherent with the image. Last thing for now: subwoofers. Yes, these can be quite tricky to set up, and properly integrate with the main speakers. Placement, level and crossover settings, and phase, can be very sensitive. Personally, if I had space constraints, a satellite/sub system might make sense, but I'd generally be happier to just buy a pair of (reasonably) full range speakers and not have to deal with the sub. Again, there are some cost/benefit tradeoffs here, and it depends on your situation - though as a bass player, you Must have something more than a pair of mini-monitors (you can't "sub" all the time). As you can probably tell, I could go on about this for hours, but I think I'll go off and do something else while waiting for the New Year to roll in on this side of the planet. Hope yours is a good one. -Bob | ||
| bigredbass
Senior Member Username: bigredbass Post Number: 544 Registered: 9-2002 |
Bob: You confirmed my ears' suspicions. Actually, I WANT a subwoofer that's gonna wind up TOO bass-heavy when required for when I want to be able to pick out the parts I'm learning. Now my next question: A few of the manufacturers still make stereo recievers (I'm just not willing to buy preamps/amps, etc.). Would I be better off hunting EBay, etc., for some of the last of the great stereo recievers before they all went headlong into surround? I seem to remember a Yamaha R9 as an object of lust in the 90s . . . the rest of the components and speakers are all currently available. Do you like NAD? J o e y | ||
| bob
Senior Member Username: bob Post Number: 559 Registered: 11-2002 |
Joey - let's do this by phone. Too many possible questions/directions, and I can talk faster than I can write. (Though yes, in the price range, I like NAD.) -Bob | ||
| adriaan
Senior Member Username: adriaan Post Number: 697 Registered: 6-2002 |
Funny thing: audio purists will tell you different things - one man's "purity" is by definition another man's "horrible colouration". One thing most purists should agree on is that any processing beyond pure level matching (like tone shaping, but also multi-channel recording and mixing) deteriorates the truthfulness of the resulting audio signal, as you're basically messing with time (phase coherency). Like Bob pointed out, anything beyond good old stereo can yield nice results, if in the hands of people who know what they're doing. But then I would be surprised if even 5% of all the audio material you can buy - in any format - is in palateable quality. Of course depending on your personal preferences ... | ||
| kmh364
Senior Member Username: kmh364 Post Number: 1583 Registered: 9-2003 |
Like the early days of stereo (remember "ping-pong" effects or extreme L-R panning of instruments and vocals without regard to image/sounstage?), no one on the engineering/production end has gotten multi-channel right just yet. Multichannel is supposed to be able to re-create the image and soundstage better than stereo, but you could fool me. I'll take hi-quality two-channel any day for music reproduction. Alan Parsons at Abbey Road Studio's has done some interesting work with surround sound mixes/re-mixes...but it's most effective for film scores, sound effects and other surreal soundscaping, not for capturing a live, acoustic performance IMHO. | ||
| edwin
Intermediate Member Username: edwin Post Number: 115 Registered: 5-2002 |
I have my first surround mix coming up. It's a live recording of a band to 24 tracks to go with a 5 camera shoot. I think that the band is going to pretty much leave it to me as far as how to approach it, so I thought I would ask some of the most discerning folks around how they would want to hear it. Just crowd in the back? Instruments spread around? Vox in the center channel? I see a fair amount of critique of the format here, so, if you were given what you want, what would you want? Edwin | ||
| davehouck
Moderator Username: davehouck Post Number: 2954 Registered: 5-2002 |
Edwin; how many pieces are in the band and how many vocal parts? At times when watching a music DVD I find myself wanting to be able to get more, say piano, into the mix by turning up one speaker. Or if the lead guitar is too loud, turn down that one speaker. I love being able to hear the instruments spread out in front of me. And I like having the drums spread so that when the drummer rolls through all the toms you can "see" the sound move across the room. And you can "see" that the crash is to one side of center and the ride is to the other side. And when there are two guitar players, they need to be fairly separate. | ||
| bassdr
Junior Username: bassdr Post Number: 38 Registered: 10-2004 |
David i agree- the band should be spread across the soundstage so it sounds like they are in front of you in a natural way and you can localize the instuments and vocalists. The risk in this is making say a piano sound 30 feet wide  . I like the surrounds to have some crowd and room ambience that makes the illusion of a real performance in a real space. I use a passive Hafler network on my surrounds that does a good job of this on stereo recourdings. It hooks between my power amp and surrounds so you don't need another amp and has a volume control that only affects them. The main speakers run straight off the power amp | ||
| edwin
Intermediate Member Username: edwin Post Number: 116 Registered: 5-2002 |
The band is a 3 piece. Guitar, keys and drums. The keyboard player also plays bass (and kills. As bass player, when I first heard that they did it this way, I was skeptical, but man, he lays it down!). The keys are piano sounds and a B3 with Leslie. I probably will try to pan things to match the stage somwhat, the exception being to pan the drums across the whole stereo field, although he plays stage right. I also recorded a pair of mics on either side of the stage facing the crowd and put a large diaphragm condenser in the back of the room. The stage mics give a great sense of space, even in a stereo mix and I think having them in the back out of phase will be very nice. The actual back of the room mic will probably be mixed in a little, but my experience with this kind of thing is that usually it's just a lot of people trying to talk over the music. Until you get to the big venues with a very popular band, back of the room mics aren't worth a lot. I just got a small quicktime clip of a section of a song as a rough edit example and I think it's going to look great! Anyway, keep the ideas coming, if you feel like you have anything to say on the matter. Edwin | ||
| davehouck
Moderator Username: davehouck Post Number: 2956 Registered: 5-2002 |
Do we get to see the clip?? | ||
| gbarchus
Intermediate Member Username: gbarchus Post Number: 159 Registered: 6-2002 |
How about a mic that follows the camera? The closer or farther it gets from the player/instrument, the volume changes accordingly. | ||
| edwin
Intermediate Member Username: edwin Post Number: 118 Registered: 5-2002 |
I can't post anything until the project is done (after all, it belongs to the band and not me. I don't think it's right to leak stuff). As far as mics following the camera, I've thought of that. This really depends on what the video editing is like. If it's the modern style of many cuts per minute, it would be a little crazy to try to track that with the audio. If there are some nice long shots, I might try that. Edwin | ||
| adriaan
Senior Member Username: adriaan Post Number: 704 Registered: 6-2002 |
Remember people might actually be listening to the music, not necessarily paying much attention to what's being shown on-screen. Highlighting an instrument by changing the balance might be good for educational purposes, but I don't think it works outside of that scope. Then again, if you're even considering this for instance because you can't make out the solos, then perhaps there's a problem with the mix, and you're looking for more than a cosmetical solution. | ||
| kmh364
Senior Member Username: kmh364 Post Number: 1598 Registered: 9-2003 |
Actually, one of the reasons video with surround works as well as it does...considering the sonic artifacts such as image smearing, soundstage scrambling and coloration due to freq. cancellation/re-inforcement...is due in no small part due to the huge distraction the video is to "viewer". Notice I said viewer, not "listener". You're not "really" paying attention to the audio when you are fixated on the video. Surround audio system that serves as more than satisfactory for video sound usage often can fall short for audio only. The audible effects mentioned above can kill the audio-only experience when effects and coloration are not desirable. |
