by TBR contributor Alex Bunardzic

As a parent of a musician and a part-time musician myself, I am exposed to the sound of musical instruments nearly every day. I own an assortment of various guitars, both acoustic and electric, and I also have a bass guitar, drum kit and various percussion instruments. At one point I even had an upright bass, piano, and alto saxophone. Needless to say, I’ve heard enough instruments played to know how an instrument sounds when played live, and when played live instruments have a naturalness to their sound that is distinct.

Lately I’ve begin to notice that when I listen to a recording of the same instruments played back on my stereo, I don’t always hear that naturalness in their sound, and I’ve begun to wonder why that is.

The mastering process

I’m by no means an expert on sound engineering, although I did try my hand at mixing and mastering some recordings I made with my band, as well as some recordings I made of my own playing. But despite my very limited experience, one thing I do know is that how a recording is mastered will have a major impact on how it will sound when played back.

As an audiphile, I do have experience with critical listening, and based on my experience a mastering engineer will rarely produce a flat capturing of a recording. More often than not, the engineer will make changes to the sound. They might scoop out some frequency ranges while boosting others, or they might add some compression, maybe some reverb, and who knows what else.

Why are they doing that? I expect the idea is to elevate some parts of the recording in an attempt to improve the playback experience for the listener. Perhaps certain vocals are brought up so that the voices don’t clash with each other. Perhaps the idea is to deliver an LP or digital file with which we’re able to hear what each of the musicians is playing as well as possible and avoid a big blaring mess of a sound.

If that is indeed the case, the approach makes sense. However, does that approach have a strong chance of resulting in a sound that we as listeners would necessarily call “natural”?

Characteristics of a natural sound

As I see it, natural sound has two essential attributes: 

Speed and Effortlessness.

Our world operates at unimaginable speeds. The molecules in the air vibrate with impact or motion and those vibrations travel at a blistering 343 meters per second. Since air molecules are microscopic, their weight is negligible and there is no inertia caused by their mass to slow these vibrations down. As a result of this unimpeded speed our perception of the resulting sound will be to hear it as fast and “snappy”.

Furthermore, most molecules in the air are minuscule, and when they get agitated they transfer that agitation to neighboring molecules with tremendous ease. The ease with which air molecules transfer sound accounts for why we perceive a natural sound as being effortless. Natural sound doesn’t struggle to be, it just happens.

If we can agree on these attributes of natural sound, then based on that we might use these same attributes in reverse to describe a sound that isn’t natural. A sound that isn’t or that doesn’t seem natural might be described as one which we perceive as being sluggish and slow, even tedious.

I’d like to add at this point that these ideas and descriptions are based on my subjective experiences and interpretations of them. My intention is not to state any of the above as fact, and I remain curious about and open to the science that might illuminate my understanding.

For now, I’d like to move forward with the viewpoint I’ve presented here, and continue with this exploration of the meaning and experience of natural sound with recorded music, starting with this question:

Is it even possible for recorded signals to faithfully reproduce music?

I’m not sure we can ever answer this question with certainty. We just don’t have a sufficiently reliable memory to be able to compare the reproduced sound played back to a sound we heard at some time in the past, say when the original performance took place.

Notice here how I am discussing the most optimal case scenario. That is, one in which we actually had the opportunity to hear a performance live first, and then hear it played back as a recording later. In actuality, 99.9999% of the time we’re only hearing the performance played back as a recording, a kind of snapshot of the performance that may have happened a very long time in the past, perhaps even before we were born.

So how can we know how the original band or performer sounded when they were playing their music? All we have left is an artifact – a vinyl LP, for instance, with grooves that were etched with a transfer from a magnetic tape. Is it at all possible to ascertain whether the playback of such an LP will faithfully conjure up the original sound?

Furthermore, what if the original sound was in some way deliberately modified, say with some sound engineering trickery? And given the fact that we were not present in the room when the engineer spent hours adjusting the equalizers and so on, how can we know what that “original” sound even was?

The answer is, of course, we can’t, even if somehow we could have a perfect memory of it.

Can recorded signals reproduce sounds that feel natural?

Now that we’ve established how difficult it is to know with certainty if our audio system is faithfully reproducing the sound that was originally captured during the recording, let’s look at another aspect of sound reproduction. Can the sound of our system on playback feel natural to us?

I am convinced that the answer is yes. Any time we put on a record and get drawn into the delivered audio presentation, we consciously or unconsciously feel that we are listening to a natural sound. I would argue that it is that “naturalness” that impresses us, and that “naturalness” is what allows us to be drawn into the recording. 

Even if we are playing back electronic music where all the recorded sounds have been artificially generated by synthesizers, we can still discern the quality of the sound reproduction. It all boils down to whether the sound we are hearing from our system has those two essential qualities of speed and effortlessness. If our stereo system can play back a recording with the speed and the effortlessness that we experience in the natural world, then we feel that that system is reaching a satisfactory level of fidelity.

Of course, as many of us know, attaining such levels of speed and effortlessness when playing back a record is a tall order. Many of us have tried (and continue trying) to assemble and tweak the audio reproduction chain to achieve as near to “real” speed and effortlessness in that reproduction as we can. And as those of us who have taken on this endeavor know, achieving fast and effortless audio playback is easier said than done.

Let me offer an example. When The Beatles were recording Revolver they engaged in a great deal of experimentation with sound. Some sources claim that there isn’t a single instrument on that record that wasn’t in some way altered using some electronic gimmickry. Therefore how could anyone expect to be able to reproduce Revolver and have it sound natural when everything in the recording has been significantly altered?

My experience has been that listening to Revolver on a lesser system can be cringe-worthy, but when hearing it on a really good system I marvel at the naturalness of its sound. To me this example illustrates that it is possible to reproduce a record, even one with artificial sounds on it, and have it sound natural.

The role of the “audiophile” system

Over the years I’ve had the opportunity to listen to a number of “top shelf” audiophile systems set up by various vendors, and not even once was I impressed by the sound. Which, when you consider that the cost of some of these audio systems total in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, is pretty bizarre. What gives? To be honest, I really don’t know, but I do have a theory. 

On some of the audio systems I’ve heard over the years, the sound I hear makes me cringe. It is glaring, blaring, shouting, flat, and annoying. Recently I attended a Saturday morning workshop that was hosted by a local dealer. The workshop was great and some of us in attendance stayed after the show to chat and make some purchases. After a while, the store owner invited us to join him in his personal listening room where he seemed to want to brag about his super-duper pricey system.

We gladly joined him and I was prepared to be duly impressed with his listening room and his amazing system. As he began to play one of his go-to LPs, I remember sitting at the edge of my seat, waiting with baited breath to be blown away by the amazing sound…Suddenly… a shockingly hard, glassy sound started pouring out of the speakers! To say that I was taken aback would be an understatement.

Other top-end audio systems I’ve listened to in showrooms tended to err in the opposite direction. They were soft, gentle, non-intrusive sounding and felt more like pleasant wallpaper than audio systems. I’d say this sound is more typical for the kind of high-end audio systems that require second mortgages. The moral of the story being that pricey components put together, even by an industry professional, do not guarantee even good sound, let alone natural sound.

I often feel like the manufacturers of some high end audio components have invented ways to “sugarcoat” the sound. That is, they’ve found ways to remove the hardness, or the glare, or the glassiness. It’s easy for a listener to perceive the sound on such a system as pleasant. But is it natural?

From my perspective, “sugarcoated” sound is not natural because it lacks that which is essential for natural sound, speed and effortlessness. Then it tries to compensate for that by smothering the signal in some form of soft-knee distortion. Any time I hear a system like this it seems the dealer always plays a Diana Krall album. And sure, I’m able to hear its sultry softness, the hushed band behind Diana’s piano, but it doesn’t impress me as sounding natural.

The questions in the back of my mind while listening to these mediocre “sugar coated” demos is: where is the slam? Where is the visceral feeling that draws us into the performance? Where is the speed? Where is the effortlessness? That slam doesn’t have to be harsh, but the body has to feel it. It can be soft and warm, but it has to deliver some palpable force.

Is there a way forward to natural sound in audio? I honestly believe there is, but it requires taking small, patient steps and experimentation. If we keep in mind that simpler is better, we stand a better chance of assembling an audio system that will be fast and one that can effortlessly reproduce whatever signals are embedded in the grooves of our best LP’s.