> With the introduction of digital, it has become the norm to remove all
> background sounds before and after a music recording. No longer do you
> hear the audience hush anticipating the conductor raising the baton,
> and on studio recordings, the musicians apparently do not breathe.
> This ruins the recording for me by dehumanising it.
A good point on mastering style. In analog days, it was important not to ha=
ve the tape noise bang in at the head of a piece, so we either edited tight=
where there was a loud start, or loose and did a manual fade-in of the his=
s+ambience live during disc mastering.
With digital we have much more flexibility, and I agree with you, getting a=
sense that you have entered the space before the music starts is pleasing.
I would like to start dawn chorus recordings with the silence of the night,=
but that is a problem because the listener has no reference for setting th=
e playback volume. If the night is really quiet, the listener may turn it u=
p too far at the beginning, expecting to hear something, and then be annoye=
d later when the birds get loud.
Gordon Hempton tried having a low-frequency tone at the head of an album, w=
ith the instruction to adjust volume to where it was barely audible. I don'=
t think this was successful, first because a pure low-frequency tone's leve=
l is unpredictable in a playback system because of typically large peaks an=
d dips in room response, and second because few listeners are going to foll=
ow instructions.
-Dan
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