- Joined
- 27 Jan 2008
- Messages
- 24,313
- Reaction score
- 2,777
- Location
- Llanfair Caereinion, Nr Welshpool
- Country
My dad years ago bought a Ferguson audio unit, radio, spool to spool stereo tape recorder, massive speakers etc. I was claimed to be top of range. I recorded myself playing the organ and on play back it did not sound anything like what I thought it should sound like. Then I realised I could play it back through the organs own speakers. It was a different world, it actually sounded like I thought it should sound, so I tried playing the record I had of Liverpool Cathedral, and again different world. Was mono but still far better.
Since that time I have realised you can have a really cheap turntable, what matters is the speakers, those in the organ were clearly very good, and clearly price has very little to do with quality. The Ferguson speakers were not cheap, they were the best Ferguson made at the time.
Today we have a further problem, most of the music is digital, and clearly a computer CD player is perfect in it does not loose a single bit of information, however to turn it into analogue, then likely we will lose something, however then we add the compression, if we have a record at the volume of original then we will loose some bits, same with CD or any other storage, so the amplifier needs a system to return the volume of low and high frequencies to the original levels, we don't want a linear amplifier, we want one which matches the recording medium, and CD, tape, and records are all different.
So we want an automatic graphic equaliser which auto sets it's self according to source. The whole idea of manually setting only works if you know what the music should sound like, as I did with my organ. Now if we look at Liverpool Cathedral that organ is big enough to get lost inside it. So where your standing in the Cathedral will change what it sounds like, to record they clearly must mix the sounds, so from the record it will never sound like the Cathedral, and most music is the same, no one including the artists involved knows exactly what it should sound like.
So we will always have some change in the music, it may make it better it may make it worse, I have Elton John Yellow brick road on cassette and CD, we could never get tape to sound like CD because the volume varied so much, and to be frank in order to hear anything at start even in a detached house we would annoy neighbours if we didn't turn it down so maybe better on tape where this was done for us?
Yes I have three record players, but in the main I use hard drives for my music, it may have been tape, record or CD, but still it has all been digitised and is now on a hard drive, yes I keep the records, CD however not tape it degrades in time. But only for back up, I use hard drive for day to day use.
