First, a little bit about Dave McNair: Dave has written about the various parts of record production in great detail throughout his column, The Ivory Tower, published in Part Time Audiophile. He is qualified to do so because he makes fantastic sounding records for a living, and has been doing so for over forty years. From recording, to mixing, to mastering, to winning thirteen Grammys along the way—Dave’s done it all.
This is a fascinating and extremely insightful read into recorded sound from Mastering Engineer Dave McNair.
I recommend setting some time aside to click on the links for an engrossing appreciation of how the recordings we listen to are made and produced. It’s not as cut-and-dry and much more complicated than most can imagine.
IMHO I think it’s worth the reading time investment if you want to obtain a much better understanding of how recordings we like come about.
As always, YMMV. The following snippets are from Dave McNair and all of this was published in Part Time Audiophile in 2020.
Please enjoy
…………………………………………………
Now for some gems from Dave.
A better sounding system really enables me to get into the music more,” or some minor variation of the phrase. That, my friends, is some weak bullshit. Okay, before y’all get your knickers in a twist, hear me out
Reality Is Overrated When It Comes to Recordings
Creating a recording is all about stirring emotions in the listener. Not all artists think about this when they write and record stuff, but that’s what it comes down to.
When a group of young lads from Liverpool got the chance to record their tunes, the LAST thing they wanted was for the white lab coat-wearing engineers at Abbey Road to impose management-mandated “best practices” for their recordings. Those practices were arrived at from primarily recording classical music and musicals–distant microphone placement, minimal or no eq (equalization) and dynamics processing.
The earliest Beatles records actually WERE them playing live with no additional overdubs. I’ll grant you there is a certain charm and excitement to those records, but I’d much rather hear the studio trickery of say, Revolver.
The Beatles were huge fans of Tamla/Motown records (among other American chart-toppers). Those records sounded amazing on a table radio, in the car, jukebox, console hi-fi, etc. Okay, a lot of that amazingness was due to the talent of the performers, producers, writers, etc. but a big part of what makes old Motown records compelling is the sonic vibe, meaning their particular style of hyped sonics. Well, maybe not so sonically compelling on your pair of Wilson Audio Chronosonic XVXs, and therein lies the rub.
One thing I have noticed is that older ’60s or ’70s era pop recordings done entirely on tape and analog consoles can still be listenable on hi-rez systems even though there is that extreme type of processing that was designed to make the song jump out of the factory audio system in a ‘67 Chevy Malibu. Magnetic tape, vacuum tube or discrete op amp-based solid state eqs and compressors can be mighty forgiving even when used to an extreme.
So why don’t more modern recordings have the sonics designed to create the illusion of performance in your living room? There is a pesky little thing that almost always precludes a bonafide, audiophile-approved recording. It’s known as—the artist.
There’s another subtle aspect to purist-style recordings. Unless the artist or entire musical ensemble is very comfortable with performing AND playing as mistake-free as possible, an “audiophile” recording can feel pretty bland. Nobody wants to risk blowing the take so they play it safe. That results in a very different feel than when a singer or instrumentalist totally goes for it, knowing they have a wide safety net.
Digital got a bad reputation among audiophiles from the beginning, and rightly so—yet this was not the experience of most music fans in those early days. My first generation Sony CD player in many ways sounded better than the budget turntable setup I was using at the time.
So it should turn out to be no surprise that for a digital master mix, one more layer of analog colorations from a cutting system can be just what the doctor ordered.
Yes, poor digital can suck the life out of a signal. And poor analog, especially tape, can rob the signal of a lot of great things as well. Can the marriage of well done current digital music production when transferred to a record sound great? You betcha!
During an active listening session:
Liquid means a subtle sense of the sound being seamless or effortless but not in a dynamic sense. Things just flow. I think it’s harder for a hi-fi system with great dynamic contrast virtues to sound liquid, but I have heard some. And those systems usually cost a small fortune.
One person’s ‘transparent’ is another person’s ‘sterile’, but if we all heard things the same and liked the same things, that wouldn’t be any fun – now would it? What IS fun is articulating our individual perceptions and preferences by using terms that have a more or less shared meaning when talking or writing about what we love (or hate) about the sound.
Do some artists go too far in their quest for volume domination?
So if most streaming services use ‘volume normalization’ to make everything sound roughly the same volume level, why does the content creator want their shit so loud?
How Recordings Are Produced, and What It Means to Your Hi-Fi | The Ivory Tower
Why Do Records Sound Better? | The Ivory Tower
Hi-Fi: How Do We Listen? | The Ivory Tower
Hi-Fi: What Does It Sound Like? | The Ivory Tower
The Loudness Wars | The Ivory Tower
This is a fascinating and extremely insightful read into recorded sound from Mastering Engineer Dave McNair.
I recommend setting some time aside to click on the links for an engrossing appreciation of how the recordings we listen to are made and produced. It’s not as cut-and-dry and much more complicated than most can imagine.
IMHO I think it’s worth the reading time investment if you want to obtain a much better understanding of how recordings we like come about.
As always, YMMV. The following snippets are from Dave McNair and all of this was published in Part Time Audiophile in 2020.
Please enjoy
…………………………………………………
Now for some gems from Dave.
A better sounding system really enables me to get into the music more,” or some minor variation of the phrase. That, my friends, is some weak bullshit. Okay, before y’all get your knickers in a twist, hear me out
Reality Is Overrated When It Comes to Recordings
Creating a recording is all about stirring emotions in the listener. Not all artists think about this when they write and record stuff, but that’s what it comes down to.
When a group of young lads from Liverpool got the chance to record their tunes, the LAST thing they wanted was for the white lab coat-wearing engineers at Abbey Road to impose management-mandated “best practices” for their recordings. Those practices were arrived at from primarily recording classical music and musicals–distant microphone placement, minimal or no eq (equalization) and dynamics processing.
The earliest Beatles records actually WERE them playing live with no additional overdubs. I’ll grant you there is a certain charm and excitement to those records, but I’d much rather hear the studio trickery of say, Revolver.
The Beatles were huge fans of Tamla/Motown records (among other American chart-toppers). Those records sounded amazing on a table radio, in the car, jukebox, console hi-fi, etc. Okay, a lot of that amazingness was due to the talent of the performers, producers, writers, etc. but a big part of what makes old Motown records compelling is the sonic vibe, meaning their particular style of hyped sonics. Well, maybe not so sonically compelling on your pair of Wilson Audio Chronosonic XVXs, and therein lies the rub.
One thing I have noticed is that older ’60s or ’70s era pop recordings done entirely on tape and analog consoles can still be listenable on hi-rez systems even though there is that extreme type of processing that was designed to make the song jump out of the factory audio system in a ‘67 Chevy Malibu. Magnetic tape, vacuum tube or discrete op amp-based solid state eqs and compressors can be mighty forgiving even when used to an extreme.
So why don’t more modern recordings have the sonics designed to create the illusion of performance in your living room? There is a pesky little thing that almost always precludes a bonafide, audiophile-approved recording. It’s known as—the artist.
There’s another subtle aspect to purist-style recordings. Unless the artist or entire musical ensemble is very comfortable with performing AND playing as mistake-free as possible, an “audiophile” recording can feel pretty bland. Nobody wants to risk blowing the take so they play it safe. That results in a very different feel than when a singer or instrumentalist totally goes for it, knowing they have a wide safety net.
Digital got a bad reputation among audiophiles from the beginning, and rightly so—yet this was not the experience of most music fans in those early days. My first generation Sony CD player in many ways sounded better than the budget turntable setup I was using at the time.
So it should turn out to be no surprise that for a digital master mix, one more layer of analog colorations from a cutting system can be just what the doctor ordered.
Yes, poor digital can suck the life out of a signal. And poor analog, especially tape, can rob the signal of a lot of great things as well. Can the marriage of well done current digital music production when transferred to a record sound great? You betcha!
During an active listening session:
- Are you listening primarily to the music?
- Are you listening to your system (or a particular component)?
- Are you listening to some mix of both?
- If you move between states, what triggers this?
- How does the joy of gear listening compare to the joy of music listening?
- Is one way more tangible or meaningful than the other?
- Does the sound of the gear itself influence the pure music listening experience?
- What are our individual listening biases and how much does our bias inform these questions?
Liquid means a subtle sense of the sound being seamless or effortless but not in a dynamic sense. Things just flow. I think it’s harder for a hi-fi system with great dynamic contrast virtues to sound liquid, but I have heard some. And those systems usually cost a small fortune.
One person’s ‘transparent’ is another person’s ‘sterile’, but if we all heard things the same and liked the same things, that wouldn’t be any fun – now would it? What IS fun is articulating our individual perceptions and preferences by using terms that have a more or less shared meaning when talking or writing about what we love (or hate) about the sound.
Do some artists go too far in their quest for volume domination?
So if most streaming services use ‘volume normalization’ to make everything sound roughly the same volume level, why does the content creator want their shit so loud?
How Recordings Are Produced, and What It Means to Your Hi-Fi | The Ivory Tower
Why Do Records Sound Better? | The Ivory Tower
Hi-Fi: How Do We Listen? | The Ivory Tower
Hi-Fi: What Does It Sound Like? | The Ivory Tower
The Loudness Wars | The Ivory Tower
- are used to minimize issues with rumble, arm/cartridge resonance, and general LF nastiness (feedback and vibration sensitivity) that are unique to records as storage media for audio recordings. Bass can be handled very differently in the digital world, since the problems with playing a record (all?!?) go away. 
😎 edge for bass reproduction, though (and FWIW).
