Went to an MN orchestra concert today

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One of my kids had a field trip to see the MN Orchestra today, and I went as a chaperone.

As always, Steve Campbell absolutely nailed it on his B&S MRP. He has such a clean and clear sound, it's always nice to hear him play. It was all Disney stuff, so nothing too serious, but pleasantly heavy and thematic.

It also always reminds me, that even with high quality recording devices, high quality stereo equipment, speakers, etc... it never sounds as good on a recording as it does in person.

It still feels like a luxury to attend an orchestra performance, but it's also nice to know that there is a clearly discernible difference.

I think John Philip Sousa would at least be partially reassured by that. I don't think he would quite draw the audiences and the numbers he used to, but then again, the price per head is certainly a lot more too.

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PS -- the best part -- when I took my son to school this morning...

Son: wait, where is the field trip?
Me: Minnesota orchestra
Son: Will you be playing?

(I wish)

I told him I had my own concert tonight (which I just got home from), but it was too late and probably too much for him to sit through.

Although, he said the only thing he didn't like about the MN Orchestra performance was that it was "too short."

It was 50 mins long, and with an audience of elementary school kids I think the amount of wiggling in their seats has already increased exponentially in the last 5-10 mins.

I promised to bring him back sometime soon for another concert. And sit up higher so he can actually see the group next time.

I love going to orchestra concerts. Although, even at 45 years old, my wife still points out that we are seriously dragging down the average age in the audience. Shes been saying that for a good 20 years. I tell her I'm happier to hear that than "we are the average age of the audience"

[Rick Denney]

I ran across a paper the other day in which the authors reported tests they had conducted of orchestral instruments. They measured 40 instruments, played by professional musicians at their musically loudest and softest levels, for every note in the useful range of the instrument. The measurement apparatus was a large anechoic chamber, and the musicians were surrounded by a sphere of 32 calibrated test microphones. They reported "acoustic power" as the integration of those 32 microphones, approximately similar to sound pressure level with units in dB.

The tuba used was a B&S F tuba, the performer a solid pro in Berlin, and the measured range was 71 dB at the softest and 122 dB at the loudest, normalized to one meter from the instrument (they didn't say what part of the instrument, but one presumes the bell opening). That is a dynamic range of 51 dB, and I doubt there has ever been a recording of orchestra music where the dynamic range was allowed to be that large. Back when recordings were done on tape, the tape itself would saturate and compress peaks (and it did it smoothly enough that tape is often now used for compression purposes). And LP records can barely contain that much dynamic range and were rarely pushed to that limit. Digital recordings can easily cover that range, but usually recordings are mixed and then mastered with enough compression to reduce that to something in the 20's (which are still considered to be highly dynamic--the typical brickwalled pop music is more like 4-6), mostly so that the music can be played back in environments with high ambient noise levels (like cars).

(The tuba did not have the widest range--that honor was earned by the clarinets--and even then the ranges for the instruments did not align at the end points, so the true dynamic range for orchestral performance is greater than the range for the tuba).

That's why recordings never quite pull off a live orchestral sound. Plus, who is going to play their stereo back with orchestral peaks at over 100 dB if they 1.) have neighbors, 2.) have spouses, 3.) have children, or 4.) have playback equipment that can't deliver that without noticeable distortion? I'm safe in those categories (at least when the Redhead isn't home) and still putting a system together that can really pull that off wasn't trivial (it is a lot less expensive than it used to be, however.) The best recordings played on proper systems can get close.

And finding recordings that capture the acoustics of a proper performance venue in a consistent way for the whole ensemble requires approaches that a lot of the record companies did not use. Most recordings were done with dozens of microphones, so that the final orchestral balance was determined more by the mixing engineer than by the performers, and not always in musical ways. The mixing engineers have lots of constraints, and from their perspective it's always easier and cheaper to fix in post rather than to get it right during the recording. That includes adding room acoustics digitally.

So, you are right that there's nothing like hearing the music performed live.

(I recorded the orchestra I played in back in the deeps of time on video tape using VHS HiFi, which had a signal/noise ratio of well over 70 dB--probably the best analog was ever able to pull off before proper digital recordings. I used two microphones only, appropriately placed. When played back at live levels on a decent system, it sounded wholly realistic, which, for that orchestra, was sometimes a bug rather than a feature.)

Rick "still has to gain-ride orchestral music when listening in the car" Denney

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Gee thanks Dr. Science!

But actually, that was extremely interesting and fun to finally, at age 45, learn kind of what that's all about.

I have some decent stereo equipmentnat home, so whenever I'm here alone (not often) I really crank it up.

Our car has a very good sound system too*, Bowers & Wilkins, 20+ speakers, like 1000+ watts or something. I usually listen to talk radio in the car though. When I get in the car after my wife's been driving though, it's cranked way up, she's totally rocking out.



*Bought at my wife's insistence

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By the way, this reminds me of something I thought about for a long time.

Music from the '60s and '70s sounds good enough and everything now, the remastered stuff is nice and all. But it must have sounded good as s*** when it was performed live on all the old tube amps and stuff. I think everybody that I had met that saw the classic bands play live was probably drunk and high and whatever of course it sounded great for that... But realistically, it probably actually did sound pretty incredible compared to the lousy transistor radio speakers, home stereos, car stereos of the time. Even now, sometimes I hear new music that sounds like crap on the radio in the backyard, but when I listen to it on a decent stereo, it sounds a whole lot better.

And I feel like such a fool!

[jtm]

...

I told him I had my own concert tonight (which I just got home from), but it was too late and probably too much for him to sit through.

Congratulations!

What are you playing now?

[Rick Denney]

By the way, this reminds me of something I thought about for a long time.

Music from the '60s and '70s sounds good enough and everything now, the remastered stuff is nice and all. But it must have sounded good as s*** when it was performed live on all the old tube amps and stuff. I think everybody that I had met that saw the classic bands play live was probably drunk and high and whatever of course it sounded great for that... But realistically, it probably actually did sound pretty incredible compared to the lousy transistor radio speakers, home stereos, car stereos of the time. Even now, sometimes I hear new music that sounds like crap on the radio in the backyard, but when I listen to it on a decent stereo, it sounds a whole lot better.

And I feel like such a fool!

Few bands could do on stage what they did in the studio. The 70's were a tumultuous time for recording, particularly rock music. Even though Les Paul had demonstrated (in the 50's) the concept of multi-track recording where one performer could lay tracks, The early multi-track tape machines only had four tracks, which limited the concept. By the early 70's, though, the cheap studios had 8-track recorders and the high-end studios had 24-track recorders.

A lot of classical music was recorded with microphones all over the orchestra, in as dead a sound stage as they could manage without attempting to make it an anechoic chamber. DG was famous for that, for example. A lot what we hear in orchestral music from the big-name companies was as much the opinion of the guy that mixed the 24 tracks into stereo as much as the balance of the orchestra. A few studios went the other way, using (often) three microphones. One favored setup was two microphones pointed at the orchestra and one pointed away to capture room effects that could be mixed in as needed. These recordings would maintain a much more realistic stereo image.

For rock music, the musicians were often recorded independently, listening in headphones to the backing tracks. The mixing guy would then pan them between left and right as he saw fit, and often the same musician would sound on stage left and 20 seconds later will have moved to stage right. That was part of the game in those days. All mixing desks have a "pan" button that controls where in the stereo image that channel will be placed.

Here's an example of the three-mike technique, in a high-school auditorium using a Tascam 80-8 record deck. The three channels were mixed to stereo using a Tascam 22-2 half-track deck (I still have that master tape, but the splices have come undone and I need to redo them). This recording was made in 1992, the year the TubaMeisters played at Fiesta Texas.


(Performers: Al Tapia on a Miraphone tenor tuba, Richard Wallace on a compensating euphonium, Ray Grim on a 186 C tuba, and me on my Yamaha 621 F tuba. My friend Bill, a radio broadcast engineer and electronics technician extraordinaire, in addition to be a competent piano and guitar player and singer, made the recording. I did the goofy artwork. Lots of room noise and some tape hiss, but still this sound more realistic to me than a lot of current recordings that are excessively processed.)

There was absolutely no compression or any sort of dynamic manipulation in this recording. The need the listener may feel to add some treble in the mix is a statement about tuba quartets, not about equalization :)

As to using vacuum-tube gear, I personally find it really ironic. Any proper amp designer will know (whether or not they admit it) that great amps can use vacuum tubes or transistors, and even in the case of transistors can use any of several different architectures (Class A, Class AB, Class H, Class D) and still work very well. Rock bands of the 70's used solid state stuff wherever they could make it work for the simple reason that it was much more reliable on the road than vacuum-tube stuff. This is true when discussing PA amps, but not so much when discussing guitar amps, for which the characteristic distortion of overdriven vacuum tubes was part of the art.

Yes, for example, used Phase Linear 400 amps for stage monitors and Phase Linear 700 amps for PA amplification in the early and mid-70's headline tours. These were 200 and 275-watt/channel stereo amps. Even though their nickname was "Flame Linear" they were actually pretty reliable if not abused. But they were most certainly abused. They would just stack as many as they needed to make the racket they wanted to make. The Class D amp I'm using in my main system is nominally 500 watts/channel into 4-ohm loads (probably about 330 watts/channel into my Revel tower speakers). The loudest I can get in my living room is about 110 dB SPL unweighted, which is freaking loud, but barely stage-loud even for classical performance.

Most new music is "brickwalled"--compressed so that the quiet bits are barely less loud than the loudest bits. This makes the louder on average, but the loudest parts are not louder. FM radio stations first did this starting in the 70's to make their stations sound louder than the next station on the dial, and thus was started the "Loudness Wars". The wars continued starting in the 90's with pop music to the point where now there are hardly any dynamics left and you can only get dynamic cues from tone rather than loudness. A typical spread for a modern pop song is about 6 dB or even less.

The rock recordings from the 70's could easily deliver 30 dB of dynamic range, and often did. A lot of the reissues of those recordings are much more compressed than the originals. That's why I keep my old vinyl and CD library intact (and also because owning the physical media gives me an unassailable right to listen to the music forever without paying anybody anything as long as I can keep the equipment working).

Rick "just found those YouTube links even though I know Ray or someone uploaded them years ago" Denney

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Orchestral brass players - today (particularly with these young/handsome/pretty far-from-maestros) - are under a lot of pressure to make LIVE performances sound like the youtube recordings that these young "maestros" listen to (while they are learning to conduct the classics on-the-fly).

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I go to many Minnesota Orchestra concerts. I love how lively that hall is. The strings are particularly impressive to me. The brass does have a unique sound that I enjoy as well. They will need a Principal horn (no hire last audition) and Principal Trumpet (current guy is going to Philly) for next year though.
I think Steve recently switched to a 6/4 piston tuba of some sort, maybe Eastman?

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I go to many Minnesota Orchestra concerts. I love how lively that hall is. The strings are particularly impressive to me. The brass does have a unique sound that I enjoy as well. They will need a Principal horn (no hire last audition) and Principal Trumpet (current guy is going to Philly) for next year though.
I think Steve recently switched to a 6/4 piston tuba of some sort, maybe Eastman?

I didn't realize there was another Minnesotan here on the board.

Interesting! He was definitely using the MRP for the kids concert.

It really is a nice sounding hall! Even the weekly live radio broadcasts sound nice.