And Now, Semi-Live from
Center-Stage...
On several occasions, I have talked
about the notion of "live sound" as the absolute reference against which we
might compare the audio quality of our stereo systems (see "Is
It Live or Is It Irrelevant?" and "Fidelity: Faithful
to What?"). I pointed out that for most music there is really no such thing as a
live version to compare against, and if there were, most of us couldn't know what it is.
Most popular music is constructed note-by-note in a studio
over long periods of time, not performed all at once in a real acoustic environment. And
even recordings made at live performances have their perspective shaped by microphone
placement and the judgments made in the control room after the fact. Classical music gets
a little closer to the ideal, perhaps, but frankly only a tiny portion of the population
ever attends a live classical concert.
But there is one thing that city dwellers do in quite large
numbers: attend the theater. The big-ticket performances are live and they're usually
musical, so perhaps they might serve as a reference.
Generally I try to avoid the bombast of the big
international shows so popular today, with their overblown stagecraft and repetitive
scores, but I do have a weakness for the old-style Broadway musical that was still going
strong when I first encountered it in the 1950s.
One of the leading practitioners of this style of show is
Steven Sondheim, who's had a hand in shows ranging from Gypsy to West Side Story
to A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. One of his later products was Into
the Woods, based in part on a group of fairytales. As a long-time Sondheim admirer, I
was happy to catch a revival of this musical in a nearby theater.
The result was a mixture of enjoyment and infuriation. The
enjoyment came from the show itself and its cast. It may not be the best thing Sondheim
has ever done, but it's great fun and has some wonderful music. And the terrific cast
romped through it, with some of the best voices around.
At least I think so. Every single human being on the stage
was wearing a microphone, and all the singing and dialogue was reproduced through the
theater's audio system. Not the music, mind you; as far as I could tell, we were hearing
the pit orchestra directly, and it sounded fine. But the voices were all amplified
electronically.
It was absolutely unnecessary. For one thing, the hall
where the show was performed was quite intimate as those things go, and anyone with any
musical stage training should have had no trouble projecting into that space without
assistance.
And in fact, the voices seemed to be uniformly powerful in
a Broadway sort of way. It occurred to me that the audio enhancement might have been added
to compensate for some voices that weren't as strong as others, but I concluded that that
was a casting problem rather than an audio one.
The result was not as excruciating as with some shows I
have endured, but I don't think there needed to be a problem at all -- they should have
just let the people sing.
But they didn't, and there were some unpleasant
consequences. First, it was often difficult to tell exactly who was singing because all
the voices came out of the same speakers, and my ears could only localize there. There
were a number of times in the show when groups of actors were singing in counterpoint at
various places on the stage, and to make sense of what was going on, you had to be able to
sort out the voices. Forget it.
Also, a couple of actors in particular had singing voices
of such strength that they repeatedly overloaded the audio system, causing an
only-too-noticeable level of distortion. So the already unnecessary microphones simply
made the sound much worse.
And overall, the loudspeakers used were, to my ears,
inferior to even quite modest home speakers. That's not all that uncommon in
sound-reinforcement systems, where the criteria are high output and a directional pattern
that sends the sound toward the audience and away from reflecting surfaces, rather than
the smooth response and dispersion we expect at home. But the result certainly didn't
flatter the voices, and sounded decidedly peculiar when blending with the unreinforced
orchestra.
I may be nitpicking about all this, but it did lessen my
enjoyment of the experience to some degree. However, if the unwary consider this sort of
"live" music as the ideal, what hope have they of building a really good audio
system?
...Ian G. Masters
ian@mastersonaudio.com
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