Confounding the Circle of Confusion

In last month's As We See It, I offered some reminiscences of my almost half-century of being involved in audio magazine publishing, as well as some thoughts on the Law of Diminishing Returns as it applied to the prices of hi-fi products. As I was compiling this issue's Records 2 Live 4, it struck me that my interest not just in audio but in recording live music started 10 years earlier, when my parents bought me a mono Grundig tape recorder for my birthday. I first used the Grundig to record the high school rock group in which I played bass guitar, then replaced it with a stereo Sony tape recorder as my opportunities to make live recordings expanded.

Although I excelled in the sciences at school and university, music was my first love. I played in bands, first semiprofessionally, then professionally, and I ended up in the mid-1970s as the house bass guitarist at a recording studio in Cornwall, England. Working at that studio with producer Tony Cox and legendary engineer Jerry Boys, I became familiar with the studio environment and how recordings are created.

I continued my recording activities throughout the rest of my life, at least until the pandemic brought them to a close. These days my only recording activities involve producing recordings, where I don't have to schlep a truckload of equipment to the venue, just the scores, a notepad, and multicolored pens. (The most recent of these projects was an album of works for singers and a jazz orchestra composed by Sasha Matson, where I was privileged to work with renowned engineers James Farber and Chris Allen at Sear Sound Studio in Manhattan. Fillmore Street/Little Woodstar will be released on 180gm LP, CD, and as a hi-rez download in February on Parma Recordings' Albany/Troy label.)

Over the decades I engineered, produced, or played various instruments on more than 40 commercially released albums. I recorded pianists Anna Maria Stanczyk, Robert Silverman, Marc Copland, and Hyperion Knight, violinists Ida Levin and Pinchas Zukerman, clarinetist Anthony Michaelson, guitarist John Abercrombie, bass player and band leader Jerome Harris (footnote 1), drummers Billy Hart and Billy Drummond, Minnesotan male voice choir Cantus (footnote 2), the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, the Portland State University Chamber Choir, and the late Bob Reina's free-jazz ensemble Attention Screen. A highlight was being invited by Quad's founder, the late Peter Walker, to record a performance of Edward Elgar's massively scored oratorio The Dream of Gerontius in England's Ely Cathedral in 1984. (An excerpt from Gerontius was included on Stereophile's Test CD 2, but as all the test CDs are sold out, readers are welcome to download the complete recording here.)

At first, I took it for granted that microphones and recorders were neutral observers. However, after recording a band in the early 1970s with a pair of Shure SM57 cardioid microphones, I tried a pair of Reslo figure-8 ribbon mikes. I was astonished at the difference made by the different mikes at capturing the realism of live sound.

In 1981, I contributed an article on stereo microphone techniques to the English magazine Hi-Fi News, since reprinted on the Stereophile website. But my attitude to recordings has changed since I wrote that article. Up to the early 1980s, I believed that the recordist's role was simply to document the live performance, to take a photograph as it were. The musicians or singers perform together in the same space, and the role of the engineer is simply to capture their performance and sound in as honest a manner as possible.

However, the recording process itself both interferes with and changes the act of making music. Rather than the recording session being a documentary of a live performance, it instead becomes a voyage of discovery toward the performance.

Importantly, in most performing venues it was almost impossible to place a single pair of microphones in the perfect spot to capture a truthful document of the sound. Instead, I would end up using up to 10 different microphones, and even direct feeds from electronic instruments, recording each on a separate track of my recorder. Only when I was back in the tranquility of my listening room could I mix all those individual recordings, balancing their levels and selectively using equalization, compression, and artificial reverberation, to recreate a stereo impression of the live event.

This creative process is therefore nothing like a snapshot, nor even the equivalent of an Ansel Adams photograph. It is more akin to a painting! With literal honesty an unattainable goal, engineering thus becomes art, with artifice used to create a recorded sound that can convince listeners that they are present at the live event. Recording engineer Jim Watson expressed this best on a pro-audio mailing list: "All recordings are lies. The best recording/mix engineers are the best liars."

How, then, can such recordings be used to judge the performance of an audio component? This problem is the basis for what Floyd Toole called the "Circle of Confusion," which was discussed at a Stereophile Writers Conference in the summer of 1991: when you insert a new component into your system and listen to a specific recording, you have no way of knowing whether what you hear is a characteristic of the recording or of the product.

One way to step around the Circle is to use recordings of known provenance. If you play a dual-mono pink noise track, for example, you can hear departures from perfect stereo imaging, and you will be aware of colorations. If you play a series of half-step–spaced tonebursts, you can detect the presence or absence of distortion and resonances. If you play 1/3-octave warble tones, you can determine a speaker's low-frequency extension. I created these signals for the magazine's Editor's Choice CD, but I am now offering them to readers free of charge (footnote 3).

It's one thing to talk about the Circle of Confusion when using recordings to judge audio components, but when people sit down to listen to their recorded music, like the albums listed in this issue's Records 2 Live 4, they are not judging, they're enjoying. That's what this hobby is all about!

Finally, because Editor Jim Austin has been on medical leave following a procedure last October, both this issue and the January issue were put together by AVTech Editorial Director Paul Miller, Stereophile Managing Editor Mark Henninger, and myself. I welcome Jim Austin back to the captain's chair for the March issue onward.


Footnote 1: The Jerome Harris Quintet's Rendezvous album, which I recorded in 1998 at Chad Kassem's Blue Heaven Studio in Salina, Kansas, is out-of-print, but the tracks can be downloaded or streamed from jeromeharris.bandcamp.com/album/rendezvous.

Footnote 2: The 8 albums I recorded with Cantus between 2001 and 2008 are still available from cantussings.org/albums/.

Footnote 3: Stereophile's on-line store for CDs and LPs was closed in August 2022. I donated the remaining stock of CDs to the featured musicians, to audio societies, and to local Little Free Libraries.

COMMENTS
cognoscente's picture

The other day I watched a movie where a very old woman in a nursing home said to her iPhone "Siri... play that song". Then this woman is overcome with emotion, bursts into tears of joy. It is not because of the "realistic" quality of the Spotify mp3 file or the 'realistic' quality of the built-in iPhone speakers. No, only because of the memory that this music evokes in her. And yes, that is all that listening to music should do, evoke emotion.

In Japan music has 2 characters, one of "sound" and the other of "joy". I say this because I explain to non-audiophiles what an audiophile is, someone who listens to the quality of music AND also listens to the quality of sound at the same time. However, I think that most audiophiles are mainly concerned with the latter and indeed, that is at the expense of what it should be about, enjoying the music, letting yourself be carried away by the emotion.

That's why I've said here before that audiophiles, including me, are (older white male) autistics. People who take everything too literally. So also (the quality of) the sound. Not being able to listen to the quality of the music alone and just enjoy the thought / emotion that the music is about. No, they take the (quality of the sound literally. Most (and to a much lesser extent) autistics (, everyone is autistic from 0 to 100%,) listen purely to the music and the emotion it evokes. Often enough I sat at a table, or with a glass, where music was played through the built-in speakers of the iPhone, and everyone, except me, had the greatest pleasure from the music.

I wrote here recently:

I concluded years ago no matter how good and expensive your hifi stereo set is (and that is certainly not always the same thing, good and expensive, actually they have nothing to do with each other) your hifi stereo set remains artificial (reproduced music). And no matter how good your set is, if you (in your head) take a step back and listen again (as a just born baby) then you hear it that it is artificial,.

Two centuries ago, somewhere in the world(, I know where but that does not matter,) they took a person (someone who had not grown up with "images" - at the time in some culture that was the case, images where forbidden) to a museum and to a painting of a life-size and very lifelike image of a horse, as if it were a photo. They asked that person "what do you see"? "What do I see, what do you mean?" "Well, there on the wall, on the paiting". "Nothing, yes, spots of colored paint". "Don't you see a horse?" they asked. The person started laughing "A horse? Where, in here? Where then? Point me". In other words, already as babies we all grow up with images, pictures that our brains translate. If we hear a voice singing via a hi-fi stereo set, we only "think" we hear a voice because we have learned that. Our brains make a voice out of it. The same with a violin, piano or double bass, my favorite or punk-like loose rolling electric bass guitar but that is off topic. So in case of a hifi stereo set or whatever amplified reproduction of music, we think it. We think the music. We translate what we hear. We fill it in. We "make" it real. But it isn't.

In other words, a voice, a violin, piano or double bass (or whatever) electronically reproduced via a hi-fi stereo set is artificial. Not real. Not natural. Never. No matter how good your set is. It is and remains artificial.

That is why a "natural" sounding device or set is nonsense, it is fooling ourselves. Fooling yourself. There is no thing as a natural sounding hifi stereo device or set. Natural sounding music is only an unamplified live concert. That's real. And deep down we know, feel and hear that (if we listen to amplified reproducted music). But we refuse to admit it and keep striving for "less artificial sounding music reproduction". Because that's just what it is: only "more less". Never the full real thing

The same with artificial intelligence....

But well, isn't music, communicating of emotions, also only learned? Is music "culture", in other words is music artificial, or is it "natural"? Is a singing bird culture?

As long as we keep striving for the impossible, realistic sound, we will never be able to enjoy (the music and the moment). I started to enjoy (the music again knowing it is just artificial, but it is what it is). You have to ask yourself: is it about the sound or the music? Is it about how (more) beautiful this moment could have been or about how beautiful this moment is?

I like to add: all artificial things is poverty, cost saving such as the use of chips (in computers and dacs). A hifi stereo set is that too, it is a cost saving replacement of a (unamplified) live concert. But it can (often) not be otherwise, let we all just be honest and admit it.

So yes: "All recordings are lies. The best recording/mix engineers are the best liars." because it is artificial, not real.

Glotz's picture

We all know stereos produce artifice. Most audiophile systems are actually often very good at producing a 'natural' reproduction of the original event, hence the word 'natural' used as a definition.
If it wasn't, most wouldn't have the transcendental experiences they write. They also wouldn't spend their time in the sweet spot but rather roam from their listening chair, pining for something more elsewhere. Perhaps you're trying to pretend that it's only memories that drive those emotions music creates. I disagree.

John Atkinson's picture
cognoscente wrote:
In other words, a voice, a violin, piano or double bass (or whatever) electronically reproduced via a hi-fi stereo set is artificial. Not real. Not natural. Never. No matter how good your set is. It is and remains artificial.

I gave a series of talks to audiophile societies on this subject in 1987. The title of the talk was "There is No Absolute Sound" - double meaning intentional!

John Atkinson
Technical Editor, Stereophile

MatthewT's picture

I disagree with everything you said. Sorry for your loss....

JohnnyThunder2.0's picture

are a negative nutcase. We know what is real and what is fake. You are a joyless crank.

MatthewT's picture

I'd love to hear his thoughts on paintings and photography.

barfle's picture

I recall an AM radio station in Los Angeles (KRTH-AM, at one time KHJ) that started playing oldies as they had been played when they were hits - records over the air on AM. And the sound was perfect, even though it certainly didn’t hold a candle to the FM stereo that their higher-fi FM brother station had been using. The highest fidelity isn’t always what mekes us happiest.

When it comes to artificiality, I can’t think of a musical instrument I would ever call “natural.” They are all man-made, unless perhaps you count digeridoos, which are branches hollowed out by termites. Even then, I believe there are man-made modifications to the branch. Maybe a hollow-log drum. And not only are recording and playback systems full of nuances, every instrument is as well. Along with the environments they are being played in. It’s all very fleeting.

My cat doesn’t even recognize mirror reflections as being worthy of notice. Of course, I don’t know just what she sees, but it doesn’t seem to be even another cat. I’ve read that infants don’t begin to recognize visual objects for several months.

My own system has the goal of being “pretty good.” I suppose I’m getting it to the point that, if I were to spend more money on components, I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. No reason to go beyond that.

Glotz's picture

Thank you for the test tones via DropBox. This essay was great!

John Atkinson's picture
Glotz wrote:
Thank you for the test tones via DropBox. This essay was great!

You're welcome, Glotz.

John Atkinson
Technical Editor, Stereophile

Jewbacca's picture

Thank you for so eloquently stating a concept that has been bouncing around in my head for a while.

I think this is related to the “fight” between listeners who argue that a “straight wire” no imperfection playback is better or worse that a system that may not test as well but has a sound. (Thinking of a recent argument I watched between KEF adherents and B&W adherents, both of which speaker I own and enjoy). Or tubes cs solid state (also both of which I enjoy.)

I posit “it depends”.

Due to the nature of recording and mixing, technically perfect playback may not be desired. In particular, tubes (or whatever) may be the better choice.

But then again, maybe not.

Of course, these days it seems it’s all the rage to not let people have their own preferences.

MatthewT's picture

Thanks very much!

Laphr's picture

There are superb-sounding recordings all over, recordings that bring enormous enjoyment. That enjoyment needs no justification whatsoever.

Try as I might, I fail to see how Toole's output has, beyond the rhetorical and suggestive, a bearing on better-sounding audio. I think that kind of audio pedantry is generally a detriment, bringing little benefit.

RobertSlavin's picture

Why was the Stereophile online store to buy CDs and LPs closed in August 2022?

John Atkinson's picture
RobertSlavin wrote:
Why was the Stereophile online store to buy CDs and LPs closed in August 2022?

The fulfillment company that had been operating the store since 1998 closed down in early 2022, and the replacement company we found didn't work out. As the best-selling Test CDs were all out of print and CD sales of the music CDs had slowed to a trickle, the decision was made to close the on-line store.

John Atkinson
Technical Editor, Stereophile

Poor Audiophile's picture

While I went to a school where I learned much(like how to eq the hell out of a drum kit) I'm not a pro. These days I tend to agree with Barry Diament of Soundkeeper records. But hey,that's me!

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