Can we use live music to design speakers?
Is it possible or even desirable to compare the sound of live music to a pair of 2-channel loudspeakers in the design phase of a product?
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Is it possible or even desirable to compare the sound of live music to a pair of 2-channel loudspeakers in the design phase of a product?
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As a musician myself, primarily saxophone, I think it’s important to recognize bone conduction as a factor in this discussion. This is a little bit reduced when talking about flute, but bone conduction is still happening, even with the flute. When playing a saxophone or clarinet, the bone conduction issue reaches new heights, simply because your teeth are actually connected to the resonating surface of the instrument. Obviously, flute has the lips as a cushion to reduce that phenomenon.
Bruce Leek, the recording engineer who records (or at the very least used to record) the University of North Texas Wind Symphony, conducted by Eugene Corporon, mic’d the ensemble very closely. He didn’t record from out in the auditorium, his mics were on stage, set up within the ensemble. As a long time musician and bandsmen, I love his recordings because they capture the sound from within the ensemble, rather than simply what an audience hears in the auditorium. (Usually those mics hang high above the seating area capturing the composite sound bouncing around open space) But you get an incredible energy from those recordings and being a bandsmen, it’s the sound I’m used to hearing (or more closely resembling what I’m used to hearing). As a band director, I used UNT Wind Symphony recordings as my primary reference recordings, because I was so close to the energy of the ensemble, I wanted to hear that sound when I was simply listening to a recording.
I would recommend Leto (Lito?) consider using closely mic’d recordings such as UNT Wind Symphony as a reference recording for tweaking his loudspeakers if he wants to use that methodology of hopig to capture the live sound. It eliminates the the issue of bone conduction, with which he is dealing, when playing his flute.
All that said, with recordings, you’re still dealing with some level of compression, so that is always going to affect the resultant sound being sent from the recording to the amplifier and speaker.