Marvin Humphrey wrote:
> You know, I'm so much in agreement that I almost wish I hadn't spoken up.
> My conclusion is the same as yours with regards to nature recording. I h=
ad
> hoped to illustrate the point by showing the circumstances under which
> perceptual encoding _does_ become a problem, and point out that those
> circumstances are unlikely to be encountered by nature recordists. You
> know, giving shape to a shadowy monster, showing that there's nothing to
> fear so long as you don't stick your hand right in its mouth.
> As a mastering engineer working on a wide variety of music, for a variety=
of
> end media, I have run into problems from time to time. Modern pop
> recordings are subject to _very_ aggressive processing at the mastering
> stage -- clients demand it. This processing interacts unpleasantly with
> downstream perceptual encoding. For instance, I made a lot of karaoke CD=
s
> which used MPEG 1 encoding. MPEG 1 is pretty primitive and unforgiving a=
s
> far as perceptual codecs go. The less aggressive the limiting, clipping,
> and multi-band compression going into the encoder, the better the end
> result. The more pure the original source in general, the better the end
> result.
> Cymbals and roaring electric guitars, both of which have very complex
> spectral content, are among the hardest to make sound right. Also,
> Electronica frequently freaks encoders, producing surprisingly bad result=
s -
> because it is often an unnatural signal that the codec designers didn't -=
-
> couldn't -- anticipate. These observations aren't mine alone, they have
> often been made by people doing shootouts of MP3 encoders; the same
> principles apply to ATRAC.
Heck, a lot of that stuff freaks my ears, let alone a encoder. And the
processing can be going at the sound with a meat axe.
One should be careful equating ATRAC and MP3. I know the nice things
about what's going on put out for the masses describe them in much the
same terms, but they do behave differently in practice. It would be
interesting if there was a quality pro MP3 recorder equivalent to the
Portadisc, so we could have a proper comparison in nature recording.
(Just what we need another format to argue over)
The point, of course being if you are going to produce sound that's
mangled even before it reaches the mic, you are going to have problems
keeping it just as unnatural as it started and no more.
Then, of course after all this careful preservation of the sound it's
all compressed into the top few dB. Which seems to make all the care
kind of pointless. The point seems to be just who can make the loudest
sustained noise.
I'd really hate that job and don't envy what you have to do to keep the
customer happy. I suppose that's why I like nature recording, where the
point is to preserve the natural sound and processing is relatively
gentle. Probably the closest to that in music is classical music. I
listen to a lot of classical music, and in my cars do so with MD's. I
just could not stand the short life of cassette here in the heat, and
could not see exposing delicate CD's to the car environment. Again, this
is a one pass use, as I make the MD's from my CD collection via the Sony
combo deck. Such copies are the same as the original CD every way I play th=
em.
> However, if you begin with natural sounds of reasonable level, that is
> precisely what the encoders were designed to handle. They will perform a=
t
> their maximum capabilities -- which are pretty astonishing.
A point that quite a few don't seem to grasp. You simply cannot apply
much about music recording and studio work to nature recording. And even
if you mix music and nature recordings, it's rarely with the rock music
and is fairly lightly processed. I've a few mixed with new age/celtic as
well as some classical music ones. Some really pleasant stuff there.
Walt
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