Editorial - Detached listening


I had a fascinating conversation by phone earlier this week with a long-time customer and friend of Pristine's in Melbourne, Australia. We discussed a number of topics - Toscanini, cricket, downloads and CDs - but one comment stuck in my mind sufficiently to prompt some expansion in this week's editorial.

How, I was asked, do I manage to cope with the listening when remastering recordings? How do I listen to the same thing over and over? How do I keep from getting carried away by the music?

It's a difficult question to answer, but I think I may have a better one than I was able to give by telephone - one which I suspect many people reading this will immediately understand and recognise themselves - albeit from the opposite perspective.

Imagine you are listening to a particularly crackly recording of a really great performance. Something old, and it sounds it. There are all sorts of sonic nasties in the way, yet somehow - perhaps immediately, perhaps after a few minutes - you're able to mentally put these to one side as you're drawn into the music and the performance.

It's as if your brain is able, at least partially, to filter out or compensate for the imperfections of the recording. Yes, it would be nicer if they're not there, but you're still able to follow and concentrate on the music, and only the very worst technical flaws get in the way of your enjoyment once you've adjusted your ears.

The human brain is a remarkable instrument when it comes to filtering what arrives from your ears so that you are able to concentrate on what is important to you at the time. A conversation held in a noisy room would be just about impossible if you couldn't somehow bring the sound of the person speaking to you to the forefront of your consciousness and subdue the hubbub to the back of your mind, for example.

This almost certainly dates back to our very origins as humans - the crucial ability to discern the hiss of a snake or the roar of a lion amid the din of a jungle was surely vital to our survival and success as a species. And this same ability allows us to follow the line of a clarinet or a cello within the sound of a full orchestra, should we choose to focus our minds upon them.

It would be great if we could teach computers to do the same thing - we take it for granted that when listening to a piano trio we can tell which is the piano, which is the violin and which the cello (though it's a bit trickier when the cello is replaced by a viola, as in one of this week's releases, even when it is Lionel Tertis playing it!), and yet this is beyond the abilities of the most powerful computers. Perhaps one day this will be remedied in the way I suggested a couple of weeks ago, enabling me to say to my PC "piano in the middle, violin to the left a bit, cello on the right" and create stereo placement from mono recordings...

Getting back to reality, though, and the idea of focussed listening. Here I have to confess something: I rarely listen to the recordings we put out in the same way that you do. For all of the time that I'm working on them, my mind is focussed on everything but the music and the performance itself. I'm listening to hiss, rumble, noise, swish, dropouts, clicks, clunks, coughs, sneezes, traffic noise, aeroplane noise, distortion, tonal balance, stereo width, wow, flutter, and any number of other flaws which may or may not exist within a given recording, and doing my level best not to be distracted by the music.

This takes a bit of time to get used to, but I think I'm fortunate in that my previous career in live radio news (amongst other things) set me up for it. You simply cannot stop to listen to the content of a fast-paced radio show when you're concentrating on how each component part sounds (fixing bad lines on the fly), managing levels and equalisation, keeping an eye on timings, getting ready for what's coming next, and so on. After a two or three hour show where interviews and guest slots rarely extend beyond two minutes I would have to sit down and put the TV on to find out what was going on in the world - I simply hadn't heard enough of our actual content to get any handle on what we'd broadcast, though I knew it sounded OK!

Of course it's not perfect, this audio filtering. You can listen to a recording what seems like a thousand times and still find things you've missed. Most typically I'll be listening out for flaws in the upper frequencies - 78rpm swish for example - without realising that I'm also filtering out of my mind a couple of great big low-frequency clunks. Play the passage back again whilst listening more generally and it seems impossible that they were missed, but it happens, and it means you have to go over things several times.

It also means that when I listen back to a recording I've worked on recently I still find it difficult to listen to the music rather than listen out for flaws I've missed, especially if I'm listening here, in the studio.

Sometimes it's the least problematic recordings which cause the most grief. This week's Sammons Piano Trios release involved a huge amount of time and intervention, thanks largely to the incessant swish of the 80rpm 1920s discs. By contrast the Katchen/Boult recordings came from high quality commercially issued quarter-inch tape - no clicks or scratches to worry about, and no disc swish either. But this morning as I checked the sample file I realised I'd missed a momentary treble-end tape drop-out, about 20 seconds into the Rachmaninov, probably because I was by then being carried along by the music when listening for flaws! There was nothing for it but to repair the drop-out, remake all the FLAC and MP3 files, and re-upload the lot to our server, delaying our weekly update by some three hours or so.

All of which goes to show I can rarely afford just to sit back and enjoy the music!



Andrew Rose, January 14th, 2011