Dancin' to the Words
-- Your Guide for the Platinum Age of Recording!
I know some audiophiles who are totally fixated on the
past. To them, all the great recordings were made almost 50 years ago in Mercury’s
and RCA’s Golden Age. A few will even grant you that Decca’s Silver Age of the
'70s produced some gems. But bring the topic around to the contemporary recording scene
and they’ll totally blank out on you. To them, it’s only gold if it’s old.
I don’t buy that. No one has a higher regard for the
classic recordings than I do, but I happen to think we’re in the midst of a new epoch
of great recordings -- since we’ve already had a Golden Age and a Silver one, too,
perhaps this is our Platinum Age -- but the fact is that there are more great-sounding
recordings available right now that has ever been the case.
To some extent, this is assuredly due to the current
affordability of high-resolution digital recording and editing gear. Once upon a time, the
entry price for the gear to make studio quality recordings was around the price of a
house, a fancy one; these days, it’s more like the price of a car, and the price of
data storage is dropping fast.
Of course, the mere prevalence of high-tech recording gear
by itself doesn’t guarantee great-sounding recordings -- that requires the attention
of engineers and producers who understand what good sound is. That’s where we’re
extremely fortunate right now: we have an entire generation of engineers who are first and
foremost audiophiles making recordings for audiophiles: John Atkinson, Da Hon
Seetoo, Michael C. Ross, David Smith, Tom Jung, Ken Christianson, David Baker, and Tony
Faulkner, to name a just few. And then there are the producers, such as Joe Harley, Arthur
Moorehead, Andrew Keener, and Robina G. Young, who always seem to be associated with
extraordinarily natural-sounding discs. These are the folks who are creating our Platinum
Age.
 Ironically,
amidst all these sonic riches, your chances of buying a genuinely crappy-sounding
recording are still high. Despite the efforts of all the producers and engineers I’ve
named -- and oh, so many others -- many of the major labels simply don’t put natural
sound as a priority. Take, for example, Santana’s multi-platinum,
multi-Grammy-winning Supernatural [Arista 19080-2], which was clearly a special
project for its label. Santana was surrounded with guest stars, was obviously lavished
with studio time, and had risen to the occasion with some of his strongest material in
years. But the engineer or producer made a decision to compress the signal to make the
album sound "louder" and, in the process, removed everything that sounded
natural.
I’m not the only one to complain about this -- John
Atkinson wrote Stereophile’s December 1999 "As We See It" on the
subject and called Supernatural "anti-hi-fi." I think that’s about
right -- all of the contrast between soft and loud has been removed. The album was
deliberately mixed to sound good on a 3" radio loudspeaker (and it does, like
millions of others, I bought Supernatural because it sounded great on the
radio) and no one much cared how it would sound on a real stereo.
I hate that mentality. It’s a form of cynicism
I’ve seen manifested in waaaay too many studios. After hours (or days or
weeks) of getting a piece right, some A&R bonehead will announce, "Time to
tweak it for the masses!" and pull out a 3" radio speaker and place it on the
recording console. Before signing off on the project, he’ll make sure that the mix is
"radio friendly." To hell with how it sounds on anything better.
Compression has become ubiquitous in some studios.
Fastball’s breakthrough album All the Pain Money Can Buy had so much
compression that it was hard to tell one song from another, which considerably dampened my
ardor for what should have been a fun record. Buddy Miller’s Poison Love is a
great album, full of stunning songs, but thanks to compression, it’s an album with
almost no dynamic contrast. It could have been a contender.
And compression isn’t the only sonic sin. Modern
studios have racks upon racks of equipment whose only purpose is to make recordings sound
"good" on the radio, where limiters, compressors, and "exciters" have
removed every vestige of natural sound. In other words, we’ve made radio sound so
crappy that it takes special devices to cut through the murk -- and now some folks are
actually confusing that with how a record should sound.
 So
what’s the answer? Stay away from major-label albums? Well, no. One of the
best-sounding recordings I’ve heard so far this year has been The Emerson
Quartet’s Complete Shostakovich String Quartets [DG 447-076-2] on DG. Da Hon
Seeto’s recording complements the Emerson’s strong performances, making the
cycle a contemporary masterpiece. And why did Seeto get the nod for the job? Because the
Emersons care about how their recordings sound and participate actively to get the best
they can.
And that’s from DG, a company that audiophiles have
singled out for poor sound for years! Yet, if you pore through their catalog, you’ll
find recordings by Max Wilcox that rival any for sound quality and craftsmanship. So
it’s not just a label thing.
No, we have to do what audiophiles have always done: look
out for one another. If you hear a great-sounding disc, spread the word! Tell your
musically passionate friends and play it for your friends who don’t quite get this
whole "hi-fi thing." That’s what I’ll be doing here in
"Dancin’ To The Words" -- I’ll be listening to everything I can get my
hands on, trying to separate the wheat from the chaff. I’ll share what I’ve
heard on a weekly basis in the Music section of onhifi.com. Y’all come back now,
hear?
...Wes Phillips
wes@onhifi.com
| Once, somewhere in
Georgia, somebody was watching the rednecks dance. It seemed like they were all bouncing
around differently. He asked a good ol' boy nearby what was the trouble. "Hell,"
he said, "they ain't dancin' to the music. They're dancin' to the words." ...Jimmie Dykes (back to top) |
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