Editorial -- Too High Fidelity?
by Leonard Marcus
I don't know about you, but I've become fed up with recordings of gasps, pants, finger-poundings, hand-slidings, and all the other aural paraphernalia that is incident-and incidental-to a performer's technique for producing music. Music students practice for years to tame these extraneous noises. But if they progress to such virtuoso class that they are asked to make recordings, these days they find that all their practicing has gone for naught and that all the sonic garbage they thought they had disposed of has been not only returned, but amplified.
Groans, humming, and other expressive sounds-well, maybe okay, since they result from a musician's personal, emotional involvement with his music. I still treasure memories of Toscanini singing along with his soloists and orchestra in perhaps the most moving Boheme I ever heard, of Glenn Gould humming to accompany his fingers. These at least were musical expressions.
But why, when I want to hear a world-famous flutist playing Tartini, do I have to put up with the sounds of the keys hitting the flute and with such loud and obvious grasps at air that one can imagine Rich Little mimicking Raymond Burr? Why, to hear a guitar virtuoso I admire playing some Spanish classics, do I also have to tolerate the sounds of his fingers not only hitting, but leaving the strings, his hand sliding up and down the fingerboard, and what sounds like his guitar rubbing a-rhythmically against his shirt? Or why, if I want to sample a new Russian cellist playing Bach, must I also take the grunts of effort he produces as he tries to negotiate his instrument? These sounds of a musician's technical procedures and trials are just as irrelevant and just as intrusive-to the music he is making as his stomach rumble would be.
The problem turned epidemic during the 1970s as more studios switched from four-track to sixteen-track tape recorders. With microphones available for nearly every voice or instrument in an ensemble, a new ideal emerged: "presence," which soon became for record albums what "natural" became for the decade's junk foods. And how does one get "presence"? Stick one or more of those microphones as close as possible to the performer, the one place he would never let you listen to him in a concert hall. Record producers also tended to emphasize "highs" in their mix, both to make their records "hotter" and more "brilliant" and to anticipate the loss of highs to be expected in the plating and manufacturing process-not to mention in the re production process over second-rate speakers in the average purchaser's home. Unfortunately, there is a greater proportion of highs in much of these obtrusive noises than in music, so the noise was further emphasized. (To make up for the loss of ambience in their tight miking, they added echo electronically.) More recently we have seen the proliferation of "audiophile" recordings that have radically cut down the number of microphones. As a consequence, at least when there are large ensembles, the mikes are placed at a distance from the musicians. The result is a greater music-to-noise ratio.
Soloists, however, still too often get the down-the-throat treatment. To quote one of them, whose analysis may have been inaccurate but at least was eloquently put: "The trouble with some of today's recordings is that they are too high fidelity."
(High Fidelity, Apr 1980)
Also see:
Predictable Crises in Classical Music Recording, by Allan Kozinn
Audio Research SP-6 preamplifier