5.1 mixes

Hi,

And that means that we should make an effort to explain to folks that it does not change the music, although comparatively speaking it sounds better ... heck, to you all (unless you saw it at the Cinerama Dome), 2001 sounds like merde! Because the recording is not as clear as we think it should be now that we have "found" a new standard for it, one that is manipulative and not about the music and its feeling ... in other words, THE REAL THING.

tempest_77 wrote: ... If you really want to "get back to the music and "not exactly the recording process", you should eschew recorded music all together in favor of live performance. If that doesn't sound appealing to you, then it's not exactly the recording process you have a problem with; it's just the fact that it's being used in a way that's unfamiliar and different.

My point is that the "recording" side of things is taking away the true force and element of the instrument and giving it a false sense of identity. This will work for electronics, since there is no "standard", but it will change the way you and I feel about guitars, basses, drums, violins, and any instrument that is older than you or I! And the majority of bands will not be good because of it, I bet ... another reason to give the top 5 even more commercial backing!!!!!

(For a better idea and feel about this in electronic music, check out Klaus Schulze's DVD with Lisa and see if you can find the bit that he and his engineer work on ... you won't, and neither will any of us more often than not!) ... but it also tells you, even though in this case not quite significantly, that the feeling for the whole thing LIVE becomes a weeny teeny bit different ... that we would not normally find or see at all!

Hi,

I don't look at "reality" as being defined by stereo, mono, 5.1 or 6.9!

There is no such thing as a "true representation", and for me, the 5.1 mixes are simply another INTERPRETATION of the whole of the music, which, for most folks here, has a tendency to show something about the music that was not there before, which could be nice in a lot of ways, but at the same time distracting.

I can not say, having directed in theater a lot, that every night is the same, or that everyone was the same. One night they were 5.1, the next 1.5, the next stereo and so on ... that's PEOPLE. However, in my experiences, these "new" interpretations are strange, and for my ears most of them simply separate the instruments and fool around with the "placement" of the instruments, which has a tendency to change the focus of the music. I'm OK with that, actually, since so many conductors did just that on so many pieces of music, and unlike a lot of rock folks here, this is something that classic music displayed for many years, when so many conductors became well known for their versions of things. To me, these are not any different than the 5.1 thing ... it merely changes the focus of one or two things, and it does not quite change the over all picture of the music, but it does come to your imagination differently ... with one really difficult issue ... if you hear this now, and then go back 50 years and hear something out of the 5.1, you probably not going to like it because it was dirty, and not clean and you could not hear details and so on. 

tempest_77 wrote: ... Also, I have no idea how the experiences of blind musicians has anything to do with speaker layouts, although you are right that they can hear much more than we can. Just not really sure why you decided to bring it up.

Simple. What they hear, often has more in it than we can grab, and SPECIALLY are used to as we tend to over listen to the hits and things that we are familiar with, and rarely spend more time on material that we do not know or understand, because it is not always "good", or "famous" or a "hit" in the top something of many websites. 

In some ways, what 5.1 does, is a nice idea, but one that should/could have been done at the start if folks had thought about it, but the timing and era defined how well music was recorded, and other than the Beatles and Rolling Stones, not very many bands had access to the best recordings done, which were specifically designed for classical music. It was after that, when record companies saw the money they could make with it that all things changed. And of course, only paying 4 or 5 musicians beats an orchestra any day of the week, plus the bizarre antics of the unions that prevent the musicians from working better, and not lose their concentration. 

The idea, of the blind person, is more about the "potential" for listening, than the clean thing you hear in 5.1 or any other process. It needs to be more about the MUSIC and not so much about the technical side of it, since the technical side IS NOT the artist, although since the 60's a lot of the technical side has become the artist and made a lot of bands sound better and stronger ... and I suppose that we can say that 5.1 is a continuation of that ... although it is my opinion that we should concentrate on the music itself, and not on the recording process and manipulation thereof. It wasn't too long ago, that some folks fell into disarray because it was a studio thing, and not the actual named singers/artists, who all of a sudden were disgraced, when the studio and recoding company took the money home, and laughed their way to the bank.

We're getting stuck on the wrong motive, is sort of the way I think. We need to get back to the music, not exactly the recording process.

Hi,

I totally disagree, and specially when what is suggested here that ones listening can not possibly be clean and clear. That is NOT the sign of a musician and artist that is clear on his attempts to express his own feel of things through music.

There are, no words, to describe the sensation of the clarity of the wholeness of everything, specially around you and I. However, we are so damn selective about what we hear and what we want to hear, and how we want to hear, that the ability to be able to listen to it all, is nearly impossible, and the suggestion that your sense of the acoustic space which can't be matched ... is but an illusion, because regardless, the real thing in front of you is always the very best ... maybe for your taste and mine, in the right hands of course.

Stereo/mono and even 5.1, are IDEAS that have been added since the beginning of time ... let me change that ... the beginning of "sound" in the 20th century from movies and recordings on to today ... that were/are a great attempt at making the real thing sound better than it really is, and all that is saying is that it is filtered and touched up to sound cleaner and better than the real thing.

YOU HAVE NO FILTERS, if you are outside and trying to pick up as much as you can for each specific second in time. And the ability to pick up more than one thing for us, is nearly impossible since our senses are defined by our culture from day one. NOW, there is something else here. Take a blind person, and they are taught from day one to use their 4 senses to make up for the missing sense ... and what do you get? Blind musicians can hear more than you and I do, and they show it all the time, although some folks in older days did not have the ability and the studio ability that someone like Rachel Flowers does today ... but when you hear her do some KC (the Bill Bruford versions) you can hear that she added the little touches that Bill had in the music that almost no mixes of KC had shown ... and it makes the music richer ... and all this showed me, from my experiences on stage, was how much more was there that even we can not see, or hear or experience.

tempest_77 wrote: ... Also, I've studied improvisation, both acting and musical. I've spent a lot of time learning about listening.

My studies in this will include a book I'm working on, about improvisation in many artistic disciplines. The hardest part of it all is learning its history, since it can go back to many "occult" studies and how so much was used, and experimented with. And, in the end, this all reminds me about don Juan in the Castaneda series when Carlos asked about the drugs. "You were so plugged up that we had to distract you, so you could learn about one little thing or two!" 

The day we stop being fooled by "imaginary" processes that supposedly show an instrument better than it really is, is the day that music will die! Because in that day, you are no longer needed, and neither are "listeners". A sort of Arthur C. Clarke Overlord thing, if you will!

I am sorry, but I am not one that thinks that all of us humans do not have the ability and that some technical invention is better than what you and I have. That's for robots, not people in my book!