Live Music.
I went to a Blues Band show Saturday Night. Real musicians on a stage playing real music. It was a 6 piece group called the Powder Blues. They have been around for a long time and they advertised this as their 44th anniversary tour. Great stories between songs.
The venue was a place called "Blue Frog Studio". It is / was a recording studio where they put about 200 folding chairs in front of a nice reasonable sized stage. They stream the shows on line with a subscription. This show at 9:00 pm June 11 is worth watching.
The energy of people doing and enjoying a solid good performance is a wonderful experience. That is why live music is so great. But.
Since this is about audio lets get to that.
Everyone had at least one mike, the two guitars and the electric organ and piano had their own amps and speakers but everything was also miked and pumped through a PA system. All the players had monitor speakers at their feet. Usual rig I guess.
The main sound was through the big PA speakers. Big black things I could not tell the brand, not that its important. They were not audiophile or even close to it. I was front row center and I could hear the lead singer and his amp directly. I could hear that there was reverb on all the lines cuz it sounds nice. I could also hear the sax and trumpet (blues bands have "horns" you know) directly as they are naturally loud too and maybe 10 feet to my right.
Being an old school bluesman the lead, Tom Lavin, had an old Guitar and a really nice condition old amp certainly tube. The grills were woven wicker for chrisake. He had the poor old thing sweating and clipping as that is the sound they like. It is always thus where the output of a 20 Watt amp going at 120% is miked and fed into the show. That is the tube sound of a show. Distorting like mad, nicely.
The room was treated since it is a studio and had a full control room in back. So the sound was really clear. Hey they were having a blast and so was the audience. That is what it is all about.
I was lucky as I had direct sound, but most of the waves in the room were from those big black boxes and unknown electronics through a mixing board and nothing natural. This is how most music is made and recorded and sent out into the world. It totally undermines the idea of excruciatingly expensive and exotic devices to bring "real sound" into your home. There really is very little real sound. If the power went out all you would get was the horns and drums. The keyboards would be silent and the guitars tiny plinking things.
Singers sing into microphones 90% of the time. Even a little folk group uses amplification it is so cheap and convenient. Only exception would be a jazz piano or classical group like a quartet or orchestra. Even Opera now is usually miked in smaller places.
The process of recording brings all that reality into an artificial world. If you get an illusion of space it is usually just an illusion. For the most part it is not extracted from a recording it is created or enhanced by the usually deliberate flaws in your system.
My reference for space is the Cowboy Junkies Trinity session recording. It was recorded in a real space with a very simple setup. The space on that recording is real. You will hear it with a cheap system too. A four figure system like mine will extract clarity and reduce noise. But the illusion is not better or worse.
If you have a less sophisticated system other recordings will be flat where in a fancy high end rig you get glorious depth and width. A moving coil cartridge will bloom and enhance the sound with a ringing reverb effect that sounds really nice. Reverb sounds nice. But it aint real. The performance at the Blue Frog has no real space in the recording or PA lines.
If you hear it in the show recording it is artificial just like they intended.
You can record a show so that it is exactly like what I heard where I sat. Not simple, and there are two respected ways to do it. One is Binaural recording with a dummy head rigged with mikes in the ear locations. Another is Ambisonics that encodes a 3D model of the sound in a thing called the B-Format. It can be processed to recreate the sound for headphones or stereo speakers or even surround systems.
Binaural needs headphones and can get spooky but is never right for speakers.
Once you decide to put sound into stereo for two speakers the choices are made for you. Natural is off the table. That is not a bad thing. Before the date we listened to a couple of their albums bought new 40 ish years ago. It was fun and good music. It did not sound like the show the next night, and it should not have. It was an illusion.
Live music is good. It is better than vinyl, but when flat disks are what you got that is good enough.
