Concert Hall sound

[STC]

We have seen many videos of audiophiles listening room. But the real sound recorded at you listening position in concert hall will sound like the video below. Ideally, our listening room too should sound like that when recorded at our sweet spot. Can this be done?

 

 

 

And album's sound here

 

 

 

[esldude]

No it will not work that way. 

 

You will have room reflections that your ears ignore at your in home listening position.  The microphones to record at your home listening position will not ignore those.  So it might sound much like it should at your listening position, but will not record that way.  

 

You also get some of the same problem if you record at actual concert hall listening positions.  Some of the reflections your ear at the concert hall will filter out.  The microphones will not.  You can end up with too much hall sound.  Making the musicians sound distant and indistinct.  Recording closer to the musicians than audience seats reduces the contribution from the hall to something closer to what the audience hears. 

 

 

[STC]

1 minute ago, esldude said:

No it will not work that way. 

 

You will have room reflections that your ears ignore at your in home listening position.  The microphones to record at your home listening position will not ignore those.  So it might sound much like it should at your listening position, but will not record that way.  

 

 

 

Exactly, most listening rooms are just too dry to bring out concert hall sound.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qa9zMCjmi-Q

[fas42]

 

1 hour ago, STC said:

 

Exactly, most listening rooms are just too dry to bring out concert hall sound.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qa9zMCjmi-Q

 

Ummm, that shows the typical deficiencies of audio playback - better than some, but falling well short of what it should sound like - "big sound" is not happening because the rig is castrating the recorded quality. A major round of tweaking is needed, to lift the SQ into the right region.

 

A simple smartphone recording picks up the audible qualities of a live performance with ease, as evidenced in the first clip of the OP. But the album has used very different recording techniques, and will never sound like the first, even on the finest setup - the captured ambience is completely different. But there should be an intense sense of the liveness of the performers, on a capture of the playback of the album via speakers - a quality which is quite absent in the AVShowrooms clip.

[STC]

9 minutes ago, fas42 said:

A simple smartphone recording picks up the audible qualities of a live performance with ease, as evidenced in the first clip of the OP. But the album has used very different recording techniques, and will never sound like the first, even on the finest setup -

 

All microphone will capture more room/Hall acoustics once outside the critical distance from the direct sound. 

 

You can tweak as much as you want but you will never get better sound than the same smartphone recording much closer than that. 

 

Although, the sound that reaches your ears and microphones is identical, we process the sound differently to distinguish the ambiance noise coming from thousands of different direction unlike when the recorded sound played via speakers because we can no longer distinguish the direct and ambiance sound direction. 

 

 

[Kyhl]

I'm not sure what you are asking.

 

If your room sounded like a certain concert hall then that hall sound would be applied to all recordings played in your room.  That addition would be on top of the sounds of the hall on the recording, doubling down on the hall sound, or adding a hall sound where it shouldn't be.

 

You want a neutral sounding room that is capable of recreating the sounds that are on the recording, be it a dry studio, a church, an outdoor event, or different reverb of different concert halls, without your room adding or subtracting anything.  Getting there is part of the pain fun.

 

For the record, I'm still getting there.  My listening room is bad and requires a lot of help.

[semente]

3 hours ago, STC said:

 

Exactly, most listening rooms are just too dry to bring out concert hall sound.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qa9zMCjmi-Q

 

If the recording was made in anechoic conditions then yes most audiophile rooms are too dry and too small to provide a beautiful reverb. The same would happen if the musician was playing in your room.

 

On the other hand, with recordings that captured the original venue's ambience or acoustic cues then the best way to listen to ther "original" acoustics would be in a very dead/dry room.

[semente]

2 hours ago, fas42 said:

 

 

Ummm, that shows the typical deficiencies of audio playback - better than some, but falling well short of what it should sound like - "big sound" is not happening because the rig is castrating the recorded quality. A major round of tweaking is needed, to lift the SQ into the right region.

 

A simple smartphone recording picks up the audible qualities of a live performance with ease, as evidenced in the first clip of the OP. But the album has used very different recording techniques, and will never sound like the first, even on the finest setup - the captured ambience is completely different. But there should be an intense sense of the liveness of the performers, on a capture of the playback of the album via speakers - a quality which is quite absent in the AVShowrooms clip.

 

As @esldude mentioned, capturing the ambience hall depends on the mic position.

 

Reproducing it depends on the "transparency"/accuracy of the system, the speaker and listener positioning, and the acoustic characteristics of the listening room itself; the deader/drier the better.

[STC]

25 minutes ago, Kyhl said:

If your room sounded like a certain concert hall then that hall sound would be applied to all recordings played in your room.  That addition would be on top of the sounds of the hall on the recording, doubling down on the hall sound, or adding a hall sound where it shouldn't be.

 

No recording will contain the full ratio of the hall acoustics. That's the reason the mic placement for the front stage hardly exceeds the critical distance. This is to avoid capturing the full reverbs of the hall acoustics which will make the recording muddy.

 

Quote

On the other hand, with recordings that captured the original venue's ambience or acoustic cues then the best way to listen to ther "original" acoustics would be in a very dead/dry room.

 

Direct sound comes from the front stage. Stereo speakers try to recreate the placements as close as possible to the original sound. However, the hall ambience comes from many direction which is different from the direction of the main direct sound. It is a fallacy  to believe that the recordings contain exactly the same amount of the hall acoustics because that will not sound right when playing both direct and hall acoustics from the two speakers.

 

 

[STC]

18 minutes ago, semente said:

On the other hand, with recordings that captured the original venue's ambience or acoustic cues then the best way to listen to ther "original" acoustics would be in a very dead/dry room.

 

Can you show me one example of live concert music where you can hear the 1 plus second reverb trail? In concert hall, when the music pauses suddenly you still hear tail trail of the reverbs but you cannot get that with playback.

[semente]

1 hour ago, STC said:

 

Can you show me one example of live concert music where you can hear the 1 plus second reverb trail? In concert hall, when the music pauses suddenly you still hear tail trail of the reverbs but you cannot get that with playback.

 

I'd look here for a possible explanation:

 

5 hours ago, esldude said:

You also get some of the same problem if you record at actual concert hall listening positions.  Some of the reflections your ear at the concert hall will filter out.  The microphones will not.  You can end up with too much hall sound.  Making the musicians sound distant and indistinct.  Recording closer to the musicians than audience seats reduces the contribution from the hall to something closer to what the audience hears. 

 

 

[STC]

7 minutes ago, semente said:

 

I'd look here for a possible explanation:

 

 

 

 Esldude is telling that we shouldn’t  capture all the sound because microphones cannot filter out. 

 

So so why we are suddenly incapable of the same sound coming out of the front speakers. Why the filtering out mechanism cannot function as how the same sound that reaches the ears/microphone. It is in the direction of the reverbs. 

[semente]

15 minutes ago, STC said:

 Esldude is telling that we shouldn’t  capture all the sound because microphones cannot filter out. 

 

So so why we are suddenly incapable of the same sound coming out of the front speakers. Why the filtering out mechanism cannot function as how the same sound that reaches the ears/microphone. It is in the direction of the reverbs. 

 

I can think of a couple of possible causes: at home there are no visual cues, reverb and direct sound come from the same place unlike in a live performance. Not sure if they're the most important.

But I understand where you are coming from.

 

I have a recording of the Hilliard Ensemble singing Morales' Mille Regretz mass. In the quiet moments one can hear sparrows chirping. This gives a good sense of the large space of the Monasterio de Nuestra Señora de Loreto in Sevilla which I don't get when the choir is singing.

[fas42]

7 hours ago, semente said:

 

I have a recording of the Hilliard Ensemble singing Morales' Mille Regretz mass. In the quiet moments one can hear sparrows chirping. This gives a good sense of the large space of the Monasterio de Nuestra Señora de Loreto in Sevilla which I don't get when the choir is singing.

 

 

Well, you should. If the recording was made in a large space then that's what you should hear, while the choir is singing - the cues are in the recording, but the SQ of the playback chain has to be of a certain level for one's mind to pick up on them, and "conjure" up the illusion. The word "blossoms" is thrown up regularly to describe what the subjective impression of the sound can be, and that's not a bad descriptor ... unless I'm getting that type of illusion from the recordings while playing then the setup is still below optimum.

 

The acoustics of the room you're in don't matter - if you place the rig in a huge concert hall, listen to some recordings; then move that rig to a tiny room in one's home, and listen to the same recordings, the subjective experience should be virtually identical - yes, the recorded soundfields will differ, but in your mind's eye they match.

 

Some recordings throw up gargantuan spaces - Led Zeppelin I, in the original release, does this - huge chasms of sound which stretch to forever - this makes a classical symphonic work sound highly claustrophobic, .

 

[fas42]

To take an example from this very thread, if I downloaded the best quality version of the audio track from the first YouTube clip, in the concert hall - and then played that over a competent setup at high volumes, and recorded the soundfield from the speakers - the subjective impression when listening to that final step should match what the original YouTube video conveys.

[STC]

9 hours ago, semente said:

.....reverb and direct sound come from the same place unlike in a live performance. Not sure if they're the most important.

But I understand where you are coming from.

 

They are very important. In 5.1 SACD the rear channels reproduce the rear hall ambiance and that make a big difference in the sense of envelopment when compared to stereo recording of the same. In normal stereo recording the rear ambiance is deliberately omitted. 

 

[fas42]

1 hour ago, STC said:

 

They are very important. In 5.1 SACD the rear channels reproduce the rear hall ambiance and that make a big difference in the sense of envelopment when compared to stereo recording of the same. In normal stereo recording the rear ambiance is deliberately omitted. 

 

 

The sense of envelopment happens automatically, with stereo - when competent sound is achieved. I had some "Well, I'll be ... !" episodes with the Philips all-in-one, when the surround sound mode was activated, by accident - and I didn't pick that this had happened for ages; say, during the whole album!

 

Even if the recording is highly lacking in reverb, an immersive quality is realised in the presentation - one is "swimming in the sound", everywhere in the listening space; it should never feel like the sound is just "over there", confined to an area between the speakers only - the MBL watermelon speakers in good form give a very good sense of the subjective experience.

[STC]

17 minutes ago, fas42 said:

The sense of envelopment happens automatically, with stereo - when competent sound is achieved. I had some "Well, I'll be ... !" episodes with the Philips all-in-one, when the surround sound mode was activated, by accident - and I didn't pick that this had happened for ages; say, during the whole album!

 

 

So with stereo in surround mode is gives you envelopment? In a way that's true. Some also feel sense of envelopment when the speakers connected out of phase. 

 

And......80 years ago they too perceived sense of envelopment like being in the cathedral.

 

 

[gmgraves]

18 hours ago, STC said:

We have seen many videos of audiophiles listening room. But the real sound recorded at you listening position in concert hall will sound like the video below. Ideally, our listening room too should sound like that when recorded at our sweet spot. Can this be done?

 

 

 

And album's sound here

 

 

 

Looks to me like there's a microphone per instrument in the picture. Assuming those are the recording microphones and not just some house SR, there's no way that the sound of the recording above is a real representation of what those instruments sound like in a concert situation.  OTOH, there's an awful lot of reverb in the sample, which kind of indicates to me that those are not the recording microphones and that the recording mike(s) are out in the audience someplace. Perhaps the recordist is using a ZOOM H6 or something. The music's kind of interesting though.

[STC]

27 minutes ago, gmgraves said:

Looks to me like there's a microphone per instrument in the picture. Assuming those are the recording microphones and not just some house SR, there's no way that the sound of the recording above is a real representation of what those instruments sound like in a concert situation.  OTOH, there's an awful lot of reverb in the sample, which kind of indicates to me that those are not the recording microphones and that the recording mike(s) are out in the audience someplace. Perhaps the recordist is using a ZOOM H6 or something. The music's kind of interesting though.

 

Sitar can be louder than guitar but definitely not enough for the hall without SR. Anyway, the point is even with a proper mic, the reverbs will be overwhelming if recorded outside the critical distance. I used to have a short recording in the concert hall but deleted them due to bad sound.  I didn't know then the reason for it and blamed the microphone. You do recording and you can prove or disprove this point easily with a short 30 second audio sample.  

 

[fas42]

1 hour ago, STC said:

 

 

So with stereo in surround mode is gives you envelopment? In a way that's true. Some also feel sense of envelopment when the speakers connected out of phase.

 

 

No, not what I meant - rather, that conventional stereo produced envelopment, and 'enhancing'  it by also driving the rear speakers did virtually nothing to make the experience different.

[Ralf11]

what kind of envelopment?

 

cryptical envelopment ??

[esldude]

33 minutes ago, Ralf11 said:

what kind of envelopment?

 

cryptical envelopment ??

Frankenvelopment obviously.

[fas42]

In the sense that ST originally used the word, above ... . With any sort of surround, multi-channel setup there is a feeling of being within the sound, rather than it happening in a specific area of the space you're in, say, "where the speakers are". Convincing stereo has the same impact - the sound "is everywhere".

 

All that is actually happening is that the ear/brain has accepted the illusion that one is hoping the rig can trigger - a switch has gone on inside one's head, "I'm happy to keep being fooled ... ".

 

[Ralf11]