I used to be a sound engineer when not taking photographs. I recorded concerts, mainly classical music. For classical music, one of the objectives for the sound engineer is to sound as close as possible to the live performance.
Surprisingly few sound engineers can actually do that. Most recordings sound nothing like an actual concert. This is a continuous source of frustration for the performers, who actually know how the instruments sound like because they actually go to concerts. “Audiophiles”, on the other hand, rarely listen to music outside of their sound system, so they have no external reference points.
I’ll give an example. We recorded a piano concert. The piano is an instrument that is notoriously difficult to record and the musicians told us that it was the first time that a recording sounded like a real piano. On “audiophile” forums, our recording was criticised as “lacking dynamic” and “being almost monophonic”. I pointed out that there was only ONE piano, it was right in front of the audience and, in a concert, the sound indeed came from a single point: the piano. There. Right in front of you. Of course it sounds “almost monophonic”, because there is only ONE piano. On other recordings, less “monophonic” ones, the listener had the effect that bass notes and treble notes would be on opposite sides, but this is not what happens when one listens to a real piano unless one puts its head right into the instrument.
The “audiophiles” would not have it. They did not want a recording which sounded “almost monophonic” and mocked us.
I could record differently. It is not particularly difficult and, for example in the case of pop music, the sound engineer needs to create a particular rendering for the sound of the instruments. There is a whole industry of filters for that. On forums catering to people recording music, I would get praise if my recordings sound like the latest fashionable filter, but what satisfaction is there in applying the design of others? In these forums, there are groups of people defending particular trends in processing, it sometimes even seem that some accounts are shills from a particular company. What I hoped in joining a forum was to meet like-minded people and discuss how to record audio. I did not get that, the forums appear to be advertisement for particular processing, religious wars and bragging about expensive microphones.
Then, there are the forums catering to amateurs of music. I don’t have a place there, they are only interested by the performances. The heroes there are the musicians, but I don’t compose music or play an instrument, I just record. The amateurs of music have no interest on how the music is recorded, if the performance was recorded on an iPhone they would be almost as pleased, as long as the performance is interesting.
What if I recorded something else than music? This also exists: there are people who put in microphone in a crowd, record the sound for half an hour and have a CD pressed. Unfortunately for me, this works like the art market and I don’t have the contacts to do that. Besides, the buyers have no real interest in the quality of the recording (some of them sound quite bad) but only in the fame of the artist who did the recording.
So I left this hobby. It was just incredibly frustrating not to find anyone like minded, to have nobody to actually share on the subject of recording. I could have made it a profession and record concerts for a fee, but the pay was far too low to be worth it. And just doing that on week-end was too frustrating when I had nobody to discuss what I was doing and, when a CD was produced, everybody congratulated the musicians and forgot about my work.
