I just stumbled over this collection of recordings I engineered in the early 1990s and thought I'd share them for download here. Tracks 1-4 are classical and are played on a large pipe organ in Los Angeles; tracks 5-12 are the same pipe organ playing mostly show tunes; tracks 13-15 are of a live chamber orchestra playing Mozart's Divertimento in D Major. All the musicians were local professionals. I used three spaced omni-directional AKG C-451 mics which fed a mixing console designed by an audiophile/engineer friend, and finally fed into a Sony DTC-1000es DAT recorder. This mixing console has really good sonics and always portrayed strings particularly well. I'd really like to know how these recordings sound on the varied systems people here have - I've only heard them on either my own system and perhaps a couple others, so I lost any frame of reference long ago. They are FLAC files compressed to an archive with 7Zip (PC and MAC). Download Link
The real question is...did you plug all your equipment into Furutech outlets to lift the veils before you started recording?? Always Furutech before you Ampex...
Good thing. I have one Ampex DAT. It's completely unplayable today, whereas my TDK DATs are all still working fine. I can't help but suspect that the AMPEX DATs might have suffered from sticky-shed syndrome much like Ampex 456 did.
brief comments: overall definition is pretty good. orchestra timbre and balance sounds in line with any of the major-label chamber music recorded in the past 50 years I've been listening to recently. for either organ or orchestra, I would prefer a somewhat more direct somewhat less spacious somewhat less reverberant sound. and if that would come with a bit more top end, it would be welcome. but this is just my opinion. played through speakers noted in profile.
They sound fine. Thank you for introducing me to the world of show tunes played on pipe organ, a genre I have hitherto instinctively avoided. I really enjoyed those tracks & listened to them straight through.
was the organ in a church and was the orchestra recorded there as well? if so I can imagine a good number of veils had already been lifted there, thus paving the way for sound-capturing excellence.
The organ was in a very large church in Los Angeles. The orchestra was recorded at a university concert hall. Both were very reverberant.
cool. I'll try to do this via the main system. It may take me some time- how long will the link be good- I guess I should download now?
The organ recording has a lot of sub-bass information. The organist was something of a bass freak and turning him loose on a huge pipe organ with 32' ranks of pipes was too good to pass up. The omni-directional microphones with essentially unlimited low frequency response serves this music well. If you have subwoofers, there are delights in the nether regions below 30Hz. Trust me on that one, please. Trust me. The thing is, I have recordings with this organist with even more extreme low frequency information, if you can believe that.
It is ultimately limited to how long Google allows large downloads from the drive. I have no other way of sharing this file, so I would download it if you are interested at all.
I would think it's as long as Google Drive is in operation. afaik Google doesn't care about the size of files if you're within your account's storage capacity. wetransfer.com is another option.
I've had Google do a time-out on large files I've shared before. I'm not invested enough to investigate alternatives, so I'd say download the file if interested.
I'm listening to your recordings right now. On the plus side these did come-out pretty clear, and the overall balance is also quite good. That's not the easiest thing to do with live recordings, so not bad at all! On the minus side, the perspective of the recording didn't sound quite right on my system. With my head in my normal listening position, the soundstage was much narrower than I prefer. Although I found that if I moved my head about 18 inches closer to my speakers than my system is setup for, that the image focused into position very nicely. But since I never listen this way, I would have to say that the stereo focus was less than optimal from my perspective. I would have enjoyed these recordings a lot more if the soundstage was wider and if they had managed to capture more of the ambience from the hall. But overall, I really can't fault these as I've done substantially worse with some of my own attempts at live recording.
Funny, if anything, they're too wide and too ambient on my system. The organ in particular is swimming in ambience because I was limited on how close I could get. The mics were on wires up in the air and the nearest rigging point was too far away in my opinion, but I couldn't do anything about it. An important point is that this was recorded to a first generation DAT recorder. The type with a big brick-wall filter on the PCB. To be sure it was a top-of-the-line machine, but it was also so scarce that I had to get it grey market from Japan, and it only ran on 100VAC. I'm sure this had some impact on the sound. Fortunately this recording never saw playback through this machine - tapes were always transferred digitally into ProTools.
I was guessing from the sound that the mics were too far back. Whenever I have recorded too far back my recording have been awful. This is far from an awful recording though. But I understand what you mean about too much ambience. I guess what I'm trying to express is not that there isn't enough ambience. It's just that for whatever reason, the ambience that is in your recording is only really serving to muddy-up the sound a bit without conveying that really deep-hall sort of presentation that I have come to love from really good organ recordings. Did you use omnis or cartiods?
It was 3 spaced omnis (AKG C-451s with omni capsules). Certainly if I had this to do again, I'd have done things differently. This was recorded during a rehearsal for a concert the next day, so It was kind of what I was able to get is what it is. Still, the organ sound is frigg'in massive, which I think serves the music and performance well. The organist was a bass freak and was a 'pull all the stops out' kind of performer, which I like, although it can be a bit over the top and muddy. Still, lots of fun.
Finally dug out the cables to get this from the Lexicon Lambda connected to my computer to the office system, which is very near-field (if I was seven feet tall, I would almost be able to touch the grilles on my speakers from the sweet spot), using a Luxman L-450 integrated to drive first generation Snell Type E's. Not particularly a low bass heavy system, though I can tell that information is there when I use a pair of headphones. Overall on this system, I think the organ recordings sound excellent - the organ has fairly good definition, and I can distinguish between divisions L-R. The hall is captured quite well and gives a sense of the space without swallowing the instrument - a tricky balance to strike, in my very limited experience of trying to do recordings of organs at college half a lifetime ago. I suspect your inclination to move the mics closer would have given a bit more definition, but if that would have come at the expense of the hall that may have been a tradeoff rather than a straightforward improvement. Interestingly, the instrument sounds a bit under-winded in a few places on the classical repertoire - the organist was certainly running it wide open. (I'd be interested in knowing a bit more about this particular instrument - this strikes me as being a very American organ from the theater organ era, particularly in light of the registrations and toys on the show pieces - and that would explain the thickness of the attacks on the Bach [track 1] in particular. I understand if you don't want to reveal specifics for one reason or another, however.) The strings are a bit more complicated - overall, the ensemble and the hall both sound good and there is certainly a sense of space L-R and back to front, but to my ears the 2nd violins and violas sound somewhat recessed compared to the 1sts (which get just a bit strident at a couple points) and 'cellos. How were the mics placed for this piece - in front of the ensemble? Thank you for sharing these with us - I enjoyed them a great deal!
If memory serves me, this recording was done at the Founder's Church in Los Angeles. The building is round, which would explain the unusual sound field capture. Looking at the pictures on their website today, it looks totally different from what I remember from over 30 years ago. The organ is absolutely a theater organ type, and the organist specializes in theater organ music. It's not obvious from their website whether the organ is even there anymore. Back then I was hanging in the orbit of the L.A.T.O.S. (Los Angeles Theater Organ Society) and did a lot of organ recording. On the Mozart piece, if I remember correctly, the orchestra was lean in 2nd violins and especially violas. The three spaced omnis were at the front of the stage on the auditorium floor, so I didn't have a lot of latitude as to placement. It just was what it was, but I got paid to do the recording. At least I can take comfort that I hear a heck of a lot of much, much worse recordings today of classical music, even from the big record companies. The most often shortcoming I hear from classical orchestra is too-distant and muddy pickup, which just sounds dull and uninvolving.
