Records and Recording: The Ears Minus the Eyes (March/April 1977, Vol. 1, No. 2)

By Max Wilcox

Editor's Note: This is the second of a series of articles exploring why records sound the way they do. You may or may not be aware that the author, who is also our Associate Editor and one of our regular listening panelists, recently won the top classical Grammy award for 1976 (Album of the Year) as the independent producer of the Rubinstein-Barenboim set of the Beethoven piano concertos. (But then what do those tin ears at the Academy know about good sound, right Max?) You may also be wondering whether we'll ever run record reviews in this column. The answer is yes, beginning with the next issue, there just hasn't been an avalanche of recent releases of irresistible sonic quality and we weren't particularly eager to rehash any widely reviewed favorites.

Let us imagine you have just entered a con cert hall. Going to your seat you are already beginning to participate in the atmosphere of a live performance. The hall is comfortable and beautiful, and you enjoy glancing around at other members of the audience while the orchestra members are making their way to the stage.

The house lights dim and the conductor enters. Your impression of his stage personality starts to form even as he approaches the podium. Then the music begins and you are flooded with a multitude of aural and visual impressions. You listen to the music, and you also become closely involved with the physical presence and actions of the performers. Both your ears and your eyes are sending you messages.

Your impression of the music, of the per formers and of the general atmosphere of the event is made up of thousands of visual and aural impressions. At the moment they are happening it would be difficult for you to separate those impressions. And so it always is at concerts, operas or any live musical event. Whether you are attending a solo guitar recital in an intimate room or hearing the Berlioz Requiem in a huge cathedral, your ears and eyes are fully involved.

I'd like to discuss what a subtly but significantly different experience any of these performances would become if you heard them on a recording in your listening room. Suddenly you would only respond to what your ears were telling you. Your mental energies would no longer be divided between visual and auditory impressions. There would only be the sound of the music to create the impact and emotional tone of the performance, and it has been my experience that the ears operate quite differently when they are solely responsible for your musical judgments.

Let me give you a few examples. Many of you heard the recent premiere telecast of a live performance of Puccini's La Boheme direct from the stage of the Metropolitan Opera.

Watching Luciano Pavarotti and Renata Scotto, you soon became involved in the lives of Rodolfo and Mimi as you responded to the singing and acting skills of the principals, the skillful camera work and the colorful set tings. If somewhere during the performance you had closed your eyes for a few minutes and just listened, you might have heard things that you had not consciously focused on before.

Without the visual impact that is such an integral part of opera, you would have been

more aware of vocal production, intonation, the acoustic surroundings of the opera house, the balance between the voices, and the quality of your TV audio. Opening your eyes again, these factors would still be important, but the visual involvement would again consume a fair portion of your attention, and your perception of the opera would come from the total of your various responses.

As another example let us say we are at a piano recital. The pianist is playing the elegiac slow movement of Beethoven's Sonata Op. 111.

His face is transported with ecstatic agony as he plays and he gazes at some vision known only to him. His body is giving us one kind of musical message, but are his hands conveying the actual music with equal intensity? If we closed our eyes we might find the performance was less emotionally involved than the visual impression suggested.

In contrast, many great artists remain relatively motionless while giving performances of great emotional intensity. Rachmaninoff barely moved as he gave performances of volcanic impact. It is unfortunately true that a few listeners need physical evidence of emotions from their performers, and they perceive as "cold" a performance that is not "acted out." They are using their eyes, not their ears, to judge.

As the last example, how many of us could give a critical evaluation of the audio quality of the sound track of a fine dramatic film if someone asked us for a critique at the conclusion of the picture? Most of us would have to say we were caught up in the drama of the film and the performance of the stars. While we were sure the score contributed to the overall impact of the picture, we wouldn't have the slightest memory of the actual technical quality of the audio track. And this response could easily be from serious audiophiles who could give you a very good impression of the sound track's quality if someone asked them to close their eyes and listen during the picture. Of course a movie sound track is not meant to be given close attention by the audience. Assuming it is of decent quality and is suffering from no serious distortion, it will serve the purpose for which it is designed and we will not be aware of it as a separate entity. But, it is there the whole time, and the same ears that would be discerning and demanding about the sonic characteristics of a record are probably not discerning at all about the sound track.

All of this is to show how the same listener will listen differently when varying demands are being made on his other senses. If during a film his involvement is almost totally visual, his ears and eyes are definitely equally at work during a concert, an opera or a Broadway musical. And when he listens to recordings only his ears are sending signals to his brain.

* kx Xk Which finally brings me, in case you have been wondering, to the audiophile point of this rather philosophical treatise. Anyone who is reading this publication is certainly interested in sound. And I will even venture a guess that the readers can be divided into two or three groups: music lovers, sound lovers and an in finite variety of combinations of the two. Some of you are mainly interested in music, and have learned that you gain even more pleasure from musical experience when the sonorities are clean, clear, well-balanced and full-ranged.

Some of you are quite straightforwardly ex cited by the sonorities themselves, and you have embarked upon a never-ending search for the most exciting and realistic reproduction of these sounds that you can manage to bring into your listening room. Sound itself is a very sensual experience and some musicians can make a case that composers like Ravel deal mainly in textures and sonorities. These textures and instrumental colors become the sub stance of their music, so addiction to sound is certainly not a second-class mode of pleasure.

Whatever your main interest in listening to reproduced music may be, you all share a de sire and an appreciation for the best possible sound. I have tried to show you that we all use our ears with different degrees of concentration under different circumstances, and I feel that a person listening to a recording is more demanding about sonic qualities than any other listener. An acoustic environment that he would accept and adapt to in a live listening situation would prove to be intolerable to him if it were the hall used for a recording.

The major recording companies are well aware that their productions should be made in the best possible acoustic settings, and they go to rather elaborate lengths to find and use such places, however offbeat they may be.

A major truth in the art of recording is that if you don't have a good room you don't have a good recording. The best microphones and microphone techniques available will not make a bad room sound good. (If you work at it, you may be able to make a good room sound bad, but let's not talk about that.) So, we must give the listeners a good hall or studio.

If it's a hall with depth, richness and smooth ness throughout the musical range, we will listen to a recording of a good performance with pleasure. The sonic pleasures will serve as a support and enhancement for the performance. However, give us that same fine performance recorded in a hall with shallow and dry acoustics, leaden or soggy bass, a dull or harsh midrange and high frequency range, and our pleasure in that performance is dramatically diminished. It doesn't sound good. Our eyes have no performer dramatics to distract our ears from the poor acoustics, and the artist's communication with the listener suffers.

If we had actually been part of a live audience for that same fine performance in that same bad hall, our eyes would have filled in some of the acoustical deficiencies, but with a recording our ears immediately and persistently tell us the tonal truth.

Let me hasten to add that, as a musician who has given many public performances as a pianist and a few as a conductor, I am not saying that recordings are superior to concerts for discerning listening. Long live the concert hall, for it has a dimension unattainable in any recorded form. As we listen to recordings it is simply that we are more finely tuned to the pure sound of the experience, and it is the goal of any recording production crew to give the performer and the listener the best possible sound stage for the musical experience that is being offered.

Which brings us to the main question-how is the hall or studio chosen for a specific recording? It would be ideal to say that each recording locale is chosen for its suitability to the music at hand and for the best possible projection of the tonal and dynamic qualities of the performance to be recorded.

Within practical limits that is always the desired goal, but no recording company has access to an unlimited variety of halls and studios. The practical hope is for one fine large studio for solo and instrumental recordings, and an equally fine and still larger hall for orchestral recordings. Well, all major companies can provide you with the large studio.

EMI's Studio 1 on Abbey Road, London, has been the site of major recordings from the time of Schnabel and the early Budapest Quartet to the present day. It is very large, has warm natural acoustics, and fortunately it hasn't been ruined by the well-intentioned renovations that have recently marred such great halls as Orchestra Hall in Chicago. English Decca (Lon don) has a fine studio in Studio 3, although they often prefer to record chamber and instrumental music in the many churches in London.

Many years ago Columbia Records took just such a church on 30th Street in Manhattan and converted it into a fine studio. It is used for a wide variety of music, ranging from the Juilliard Quartet to Broadway musicals. Most of the non-orchestral classical Columbia records made in this country come from this studio.

RCA Records has an excellent large studio in Studio A in New York. Patterned after Studio A at RCA Italiana (where many RCA opera recordings were made), the New York studio has been my most frequent working ground since it was built eight years ago.

Philips and DGG have equally good studio facilities in Europe, although these ''studios" are just as likely to be churches and small concert halls when it comes to solo and chamber group recordings.

The qualities of the concert halls, churches or studios used for orchestral recordings are more variable. Often a recording company must choose between the home hall of the orchestra or an alternate site in the same city.

Halls that have served for many years as con cert sites for some of our major American orchestras are not used for the recordings made by these orchestras.

Orchestra Hall, Chicago, was used for many great Chicago Symphony recordings dating from the days of Stock, Kubelik, Rodzinski, and, most particularly, Reiner. Reiner's recordings from Orchestra Hall in the 1950s and early '60's are still exceptional in their depth and dynamic range. In the middle '60's Orchestra Hall was rebuilt because it was rather uncomfortable for the audience and its acoustical response with a full house was uneven.

Unfortunately, the hall that we came to know from the Reiner recordings was altered dramatically. Its acoustics had always been far superior when there was no audience, but now it was altered to sound the same whether empty or full, and the depth and resonance of the old hall were no more.

RCA, EMI, London and DGG moved to the Medinah Temple, a large church-like room with good acoustics, for the Chicago Symphony recordings. It is a very good hall, but it's still not old Orchestra Hall. Many voices have been heard urging the restoration of Orchestra Hall to its old glory and there is an increasing hope that this will occur. Keep your fingers crossed.

The Philadelphia Orchestra has long made its home in the historic and beautiful Academy of Music. The sound is warm, intimate and very clear. Its character can be heard in the early Stokowski recordings that were far ahead of their time in technical quality. Unfortunate ly, when stereo was developed the lack of depth and reverberation of the Academy became more apparent than it had been in monaural recordings.

Columbia began a search for more spacious-sounding acoustics. For a few years they recorded in the large ballroom of the Broadwood Hotel and then moved to the seventh-floor ballroom of what was then called Town Hall and is now the Scottish Rites Cathedral. Originally built as a Masonic Lodge and now again in the hands of its original owners, the ballroom is currently used by RCA for its Philadelphia Orchestra recordings.

During my four seasons as Ormandy's RCA producer, several improvements were made at the suggestion of engineer Paul Good man and myself. Thirty-six large lead window coverings were installed to quiet the traffic sounds that had been all too audible in previous years. More important, an industrial humidification system was installed to assure year round resonance in the hall. Previously the hall had been warm and resonant-sounding in the months when the heating system was off, but dramatically drier and smaller-sounding as the steam radiators began to dry out the walls of the large room. In the fall and spring seasons the walls contained sufficient humidity to create reflections and consequent resonance, but the walls dried by winter heating were no longer reflective. They now absorbed high frequencies, cutting down on the sound reflections and reducing the resonance. The humidifier now maintains a relatively constant humidity in the room throughout the year, and the result is an acoustical environment that is much the same no matter what the season. ( Columbia's 30th Street studio contains an even more sophisticated humidification system that they use to very good effect in controlling the acoustics of the room.) The Boston Symphony is blessed with one of the great concert halls in the world in Symphony Hall. It ranks with Vienna's Musikvereinsaal and Amsterdam's Concertgebouw as a nearly perfect place to hear music.

Boston Symphony recordings have varied in quality over the years, but that is a question of microphone techniques. Lewis Layton of RCA began the procedure of removing the first thirty or so rows of seats from the main floor of Symphony Hall and seating the orchestra on the floor. This gave an even more spacious sound to the orchestra, and it enabled the engineer to spread the orchestra out so he could have more individual control over the micro phoning of the various sections. Charles Munch's still famous recording of the Saint Saens Symphony No. 3 was the first recording made on the floor. The orchestra understand ably prefers to sit on the stage because they can hear each other better in that position, but a well-made recording made from the floor position is always richer and more spacious.

The Cleveland Orchestra has a good hall in Severance Hall. It has a relatively short resonance, but the sound is clear and well-balanced.

It only lacks the glow and warmth of the greatest halls. Until recently all of the Cleveland Orchestra's recordings were made in Severance Hall, including all of their recordings with the late George Szell. When English Decca (London) began to record the orchestra with Lorin Maazel, they moved to Cleveland's Masonic Auditorium, a room of quite spectacular acoustic properties, and some very beautiful sounding recordings have resulted (particularly the Prokofiev "Romeo and Juliet').

The Los Angeles Philharmonic plays in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion at the Los Angeles Music Center. It is a very comfortable auditorium with a superb stage facility for ballet, opera and such events as the Oscar presentation, which takes place there each year. It was unfortunately designed more for audience comfort than for optimum acoustics.

It is heavily carpeted throughout and the sound is clear but lacking in resonance and depth. English Decca moves the orchestra to Royce Hall at UCLA for their recording sessions, and the sound has more of the desired spaciousness and warmth.

The New York Philharmonic has recorded in many locales around New York during the last fifty years. As early as 1928 Mengelberg recorded Strauss's "Ein Heldenleben' in Carnegie Hall, and the great Toscanini/New York Philharmonic recordings were all made in Carnegie Hall, which was the home of the orchestra. When Columbia signed the orchestra they moved the recordings to Liederkranz Hall, then to the Columbia 30th Street studio, then to Brooklyn's St. George Hotel ballroom, and then back to Carnegie.

When Lincoln Center was built, the orchestra moved to its new home, Philharmonic Hall (renamed Avery Fisher Hall a few years ago). I will not go into the very sad story of the hall's plagued acoustics, but after a few attempts the orchestra’s recordings were moved to the ballroom of the Manhattan Center. Manhattan Center had become the prime New York orchestral recording location in the 1950's.

The RCA recordings of Stokowski and his orchestra were all made at Manhattan Center, as were most of Artur Rubinstein's concerto recordings with Krips and Wallenstein. Morton Gould recorded there, and I produced several Rubinstein solo and concerto recordings there in the early 1960's. This large and very resonant ballroom has been the recording hall of the Philharmonic for many seasons. It has produced some excellent recordings, particularly those produced by Andrew Kazdin in recent years.

I am not aware if Columbia is planning to record in the completely rebuilt Avery Fisher Hall which replaced the previous interior this season, but I am sure they are investigating the possibility.

As you can see, American orchestras have not had an easy time finding suitable recording locations and it serves to prove the point I am making. Many of their home halls are adequate but hardly sensational in acoustical terms, but with the notable exception of Avery Fisher Hall, the patrons have not been clamoring for new halls. The old halls are comfortable, they exist, and everyone is used to them. If the concerts are exciting and well played, the audience can fill in with their eyes the absence of acoustical glories they have come to expect (or at least hope for) from recordings played in their living rooms.

In the recording industry no one makes such accommodations for the acoustics in our productions. For our audience, it's the ears minus the eyes at all times. For them, the best is none too good.

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[adapted from TAC, Vol.1, No.2]

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