A musician on stage hears the music from inside the band. The rest of us hear it from out in the audience. The two perspectives sound nothing alike, and our systems were built to reproduce only one of them.
When a musician at Octave Records sits in front of our reference system, what he hears isn't familiar in any of the same ways.
It's a completely different viewpoint.
When we position microphones and control the final mix, everything we do strives to capture the ensemble as a listener would experience it from the best seat in the room, then mixed for a coherent picture between two speakers placed in front of that listener. That choice is so deeply baked into the conventions of recorded music that as listeners we barely notice it.
Stereo is the audience's view, not the performer's.
Even the most extraordinary two-channel systems, in the most carefully tuned rooms, don't sound like being in a room with live musicians.
We never intended it to.
The sound is that of an extraordinary seat at a concert hall or club.
The audience seat is the one we built our passion around. There's no excuse in not chasing the best one in the house.
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