From dacc@tigerden.com Mon Aug 8 14:53:26 1994 Date: Mon, 8 Aug 1994 17:37:11 +0100 From: "D.A.C. Crowell" To: Mike Perkowitz Cc: analogue heaven Subject: Re: talking *real* vintage On Mon, 8 Aug 1994, Mike Perkowitz wrote: > this weekend, while driving across the great state of washington (lovely, > but that's another story, for another mailing list) i tuned in at one > point to a show called "jazz decades". they were playing all recordings > from 1930, more or less. fun. :) > > my question is: what is it about recordings from that era that give them > that distinctive sound (i mean sonically, not the musical style). vocals > in particular, especially the backup singers choruses (chori?) have a > definite sound that is instantly recognizable. i think it has something > to do with what frequencies are emphasized.. lots of treble, maybe. i > assume something about the equipment and recording techniques causes > this. and this is, of course, true for other eras as well -- the 60s or > the 70s have a recognizable sound (just as older movies are recognizable > by the way the colors look, or the amount of flicker). Yep...a lot of it is in the gear used, and in the case of acoustic instruments, the _microphones_. During the 1930s and 40s, up until condenser mikes became more available, the mike of choice for many applications was a ribbon. These mikes have lots of warmth and presence...especially the older RCA DX44 and 77 models, as well as the Western Electric/Altec "birdcages". Ribbons _do not_ sound at all like your typical condenser, and many people still prefer them for vocals, horns...things that tend to peak out in the 1-2kHz range. Another more salient point to AH is in the fact that a lot of gear of the period used _tubes_. Tubes are good. Tubes exhibit certain characteristics in the audio range that make them inherently suitable for musical applications, such as soft limiting, hysteresis, and so on. You still find people duking it out at the higher ends of the recording field over certain tube devices, such as the Teletronix/UREI LA-2A and LA-3A limiters, the UREI LN-1176 compressor, and filters and EQs by Pultec and UA. I myself have a marked preference for the tube sound, as well; I use processors by Krohn-hite, SKL, and Bruel & Kjaer, as well as tube-driven audio generating gear by Hewlett- Packard and General Radio. Believe me..._none_ of this stuff sounds or behaves exactly like their counterparts in the solid-state world. As for the sounds of the 1960s and 70s, that was the "transitional" period in both studio equipment and methodologies. Track widths got tighter, tracks increased, people moved from using the sound of the cutting room for ambience to constructed ambience, first utilizing artfully-designed acoustic chambers and electromechanical time-domain processors such as plate and spring reverbs to the early solid-state and salad-days digital units. I still recall the first Lexicon delay line I saw...a hideously-colored orange rack panel on which you changed delay times with an attached patchcord and a field of banana jacks...strange device. But the solid state devices of the period were for crap, as we all know on here; the 741 op-amp was the cat's meow, and now there's much better. Also, tubes went out of vogue, except for a few sparing examples, such as the LA-2A. I look at the 1970s as the "period of dumb engineering"...the "total isolation" concepts, the cutting of everything dry to multi, and the race to get more and tighter tracks, seen in the MCI 32-track _3"_ machine, then later on in the Stevens 2" _40-track_...all of these were unbeknownst contributors to a gradual degradation of overall studio sound quality. Anyway, this kinda gets away from the list's normal focus, even though it does touch on a lot of analog sound devices. Still, I thought I'd try to answer as much about this as I could, since I'm about the only person I know on here who uses some of the arcana from those older periods. <><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>\ "...the language of classical music is D.A.C. Crowell |not any use for what people are doing in Audio Design and Programming |music now. It's a very crude approxi- The Aerodyne Works |mation. It's even less useful for talking Champaign, IL, USA. |about texture because it never bothered (dacc@tigerden.com) |to evolve any terms for it. It didn't <><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>/ need to." --Brian Eno