Is It Live or Is It Irrelevant?
Recently I've been musing about live
and recorded sound and the increasingly blurred lines between them. What got me thinking
about it first was a revisit to the Beatles compact disc Live at the BBC, which is
a collection of unreleased tracks recorded for various British radio programs between 1962
and 1965.
One thing that struck me was the recording quality. Back
then, the Beeb had a reputation for technical superiority; much of the research into
speakers and other audio equipment that had been done up to that time was the result of
BBC efforts, and their engineering department was considered second to none. But some of
the tracks included in this collection are embarrassingly badly recorded, with lots of
noise, wow and flutter, bad mike placement, and so forth. Mysterious, because the
equipment most broadcasters used then was capable of much better -- and, indeed, the well-recorded
tracks included are a testament to that.
But once you get past the recording quality, what stands
out are the performances themselves, which are mostly terrific. On my first introduction
to the set, almost a decade ago, I was amazed at how close the re-recordings of certain
songs resembled the versions on the early Beatles LPs. By and large, those cuts that exist
in both forms are well nigh identical.
But actually, it shouldn't have surprised me. The boys were
a bar band after all, and they would have performed any song in their repertoire hundreds
of times. Plop them in front of a microphone, and they could perform those numbers in one
take, probably. That's why, as the liner notes point out, on one occasion they recorded 16
tracks in a single day.
The same was true with the commercially released records.
They sang the songs in the studio as they had been doing them for years in the bars (and
as they would sing them for the BBC). The purpose of both sets of recordings was to
preserve the sound you would hear if you attended a live performance (minus the screams,
of course).
Now, many performers hone their music in the studio, and
then try to duplicate it in concert. I once attended part of a recording session in which
the lead singer spent something like half an hour working on a few seconds of a recording.
He'd sing a phrase, listen to it, maybe re-do it, maybe have the producer clip out a bit
of sound, and on and on. Every moment of the final recording presumably had this
microscopic care lavished on it. That became the definitive "performance," not
something that had evolved over many performances in front of people.
It may be no coincidence that the Beatles stopped doing
their BBC recordings about the same time they started releasing mostly new songs, crafted
in the studio. And they stopped touring shortly afterwards, presumably because much of
what they did in the studio couldn't be duplicated on stage.
And yet, people still take me and other audio writers to
task for suggesting that the ultimate reference may be something other than live sound.
In any event, "live sound" is a loaded phrase. I
may think I know what an acoustic guitar sounds like, but I am unlikely to know exactly
what every guitar on every recording I own sounds like -- and they're all different. In
addition, to have a proper "live" reference I would not only have to be aware of
the precise characteristics of whatever hall or studio the instrument was recorded in, but
I would also require a much better sound memory than most of us have. In reality, the best
any listener can do is appreciate that a particular recording played on a particular
system achieves a plausible sound.
With classical music you might have a reasonable idea of
what sounds correct, but with other sorts of material there is usually no single reference
at all. What with signal processing, multi-tracking, synthesizing, and the like, there is
no acoustic original to compare a recording to. And though many live performances of
popular music seek to duplicate the sound of the artists' records, they usually don't even
come close -- if even a modest hi-fi system sounded as bad as most live performances, it
would be totally unacceptable.
Nobody would argue with the idea that the aim of
high-fidelity is realism, but that is a goal nobody has yet attained, although some
designers have come very close. Audio products -- particularly speakers -- are all
unrealistic to some extent, but in different ways. It would be ideal if we could indeed
make comparisons with some "natural" standard, but since that doesn't really
exist for most of us, our appreciation of what our audio systems are capable of must be
referred partly to what other equipment can do, and partly to what sounds best to us.
Still, components that exhibit the fewest identifiable
sonic idiosyncrasies are likely to come closest to what the artists may have intended when
producing their recordings.
...Ian G. Masters
ian@mastersonaudio.com
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