On 7/15/2013 9:49 AM, Carl Pultz wrote:
> Last week, I spent a morning with a client reviewing a season of
> performances of her early-music ensemble, selecting some excerpts for
> broadcast. I'd done some mild eq and a little compression here and there,
> and wanted to get her impression of my tweaks vs. the straight mix. What
> surprised me was that she hardly noticed the aspects that were so obvious to
> me, like more or less room and greater clarity in inner-voices vs. more
> ensemble blend. She could hear the changes when I pointed them out, but was
> much more concerned with the purely musical aspects, and had a small
> preference for the greater subtlety of the straight versions.
That's been my repeated experience too: musicians' ears usually are
attuned only to their performance, not to the sound characteristics --
sometimes to the extent of listening happily to cassette dubs of dubs of
dubs and proposing to remaster a CD from them, and becoming incredulous
when I say that I want to go back and work from the original tapes --
they literally don't hear the difference, but only hear vocal and
instrumental nuances. Which is why they're on that end of the microphone
and I'm on this end.

Peace,
Paul