Live recordings

While at the Newport High End Audio Show I met with Cookie Marenco, one of our industry's gems. Cookie owns and runs Blue Coast Records and she is a big fan of DSD, high resolution Audio, good recordings and... bless her heart... DirectStream for her final checks. Cookie was holed up in a hotel room with a complete recording studio giving demonstrations between live vs. recorded and I spent a few minutes interviewing her on the process she uses to capture the work. You can access my video interview by clicking here. What fascinated me were the differences between the two. The recording she made of the live event sounded wonderful, I would have been thrilled to play it in Music Room One, but very much unlike sitting in the room listening to the performers. I know the recording equipment she used was flawless. I am less certain of the microphones and speakers, but there's something else. I sat 5 feet from the singer and guitarists in a live room and that is the sound in my head. The microphones are inches from the voices of the singer and guitar, then reproduced through speakers. Had the young lady been singing in my ear it would have sounded quite different than taking in all the room from my listening position. Yet, had Cookie had the group stand back and record from my seating position, the final recording would have been awful - filled with room noise - which our ear/brain mechanisms disguise when it's live, pickup on when it's recorded. So there's no perfect solution. If you'd like to hear and see what the recording looked like go here to watch. The sound is just off a shotgun microphone on the camera, so don't be too judgmental.