Recording Studios: RECORDING QUALITY

2009-01-31T18:12:00.000-05:00

RECORDING QUALITY

2008-04-30T11:03:00.000-04:00

Recording Quality - All those of you who care about music have heard this term before ... yet how many of you really know what this means? Honestly, I bet that less than 5% of you do. Most people have NEVER heard a well-recorded song played back through a quality sound system good enough to produce the fidelity that a properly recorded CD can reproduce. An mp3 wont come even close to cutting it, and listened to over typical headphones or an Ipod - fuggedaboutit!

And if you think that a CD played over your stereo is giving you good sound quality, think again. You would've had to have spent a MINIMUM of $1,000 on your stereo to BEGIN to hear all of the information contained on a well-recorded CD. Oh - and you would've had to have picked your system very carefully - most $1000 systems wont cut it either.

Nope ... most of you are listening to what equates to watching a movie on VHS tape on an old 25" TV set as opposed to watching a DVD on a hi-definition 50" plasma monitor.

Get it?

I hope so, because my parents still can't see the quality difference between videotape and DVD.

And it's not just the fault of bad headphones, bad stereos, or the detrimental effects of converting a song into the very bad mp3 format. No, the record companies are to blame as well - because fully THREE QUARTERS of commercial music released by the major labels (and independents too) is poorly recorded. I'm being too nice here. It's CRAP sound quality-wise. But unless you have an audiophile-grade stereo system to play your CDs back on, you will never hear the difference between the crappy sounding quality CDs and the amazing ones.

It's like watching a Blu Ray DVD on an old, small, TV with a fuzzy screen. Under those conditions you would not be able to tell if your source was a DVD or a videotape - because the quality on the disc is being masked by the TV.

This unfortunately is the way it is for 95% of people listening to music. If they had a good system to hear their CDs back on, they would hear that MOST of them are "VHS Videotape quality", and only very few of them are audiophile quality.

Why are most CDs of poor quality? Well that's a topic that I will address in another blog, but anyone who has visited my recording studio or my home has heard the difference - and usually for the first time in their life.