The production on this video was fantastic. Loved every minute of it. This video is a must for any audiophile to round off their knowledge and appreciation of the recording arts.
Very cool Harley! I hope now that you have this TH-cam channel you take us for more recording adventures haha! Very nicely put together and informative video as always, thanks
You mention CD and vinyl and I’m so happy you have hi resolution downloads. Due to having spent many years living in different countries my system for many years has been portable so I have a tube HiFiMan headphone amp, Onkyo portable high resolution music player and assorted headphones including the wonderful Austrian Audio HI-X65. So my listening now is either from carefully ripped WAV files from my now long gone CD collection to in the past few years high resolution downloads from various companies and those range from 24/96/192 to DSD. I found it fascinating to hear about the various ways of mastering for the different formats. It does seem from the gentleman’s comments that high resolution downloads seem to offer the least compromise and that vinyl has the most complex formula to go through to get the best sound. This then makes me scratch my head as for the past ten years or so with the resurgence of vinyl and its supporters being very vocal on its sonic superiority I am left wondering why this is so and if it really is so, I am hoping your last installment of your turntable buying experience will help clarify this! Being 59 years of age of course, I grew up with vinyl, I must admit, I was an early adopter of CD as it was so much simpler to use and no constant tweaking of the turntable to make it perform well and to my ears a well produced and mastered CD simply sounded better, especially with classical due to the almost silent background, then came the short lived minidisc which I also liked very much but it was not until I could rip my CD collection did I go to non-physical media. To my ears mp3 was the death of music, it seemed to lose all the energy and life to me. Though now I am finally settled here in Austria I have still yet to sort out a home based system as I am so used to the intimacy of headphones and so satisfied with the Onkyo DAP and the quality of high resolution downloads but I know at some point I will venture back to speakers! I would love to see more videos like this, it was very insightful and brought back happy memories of working for various musicians and accompanying them when they recorded in studios in Vancouver, LA and New York when I lived in North America and in London and Bath in my birth country the U.K. Thanks so much Harley, I wish you and your family a happy Christmas and peaceful New Year. Off to get the download from your site now!
Thank you for your very kind comment Ian. Your back story is so interesting. A very happy Christmas to you and your family too, from all of us at Pearl Acoustics
Thank you, Sir! Really appreciate your video. Not only do you provide great mentorship to us audiophiles, young n old, you also get involve actively with the young musicians, understanding their craft and how it's delivered eventually to remote audience thousands of km away 👑King!
Another great job of teaching us that are not so learned in the production of good quality sound. Thank you Harley for your concise yet easy to understand explanation of what goes in to the recording process.
Thanks Christopher! Very kind. I hope so. The strange thing is that this trio are absolutely magical live, that any recording can never quite capture their brilliance. One can only try.
Bob Ross minus a wonderful afro hairstyle,which I certainly won't hold anything against Harley for that one omission.....lol. I'm assuming it is Bob Ross the well known painter that has taught us so much about that particular bit of the arts.
@@PearlAcoustics if nothing else it would at least give this fan of you and your channel a good chuckle. Nobody should ever think we have enough laughs in our daily lives. Go for it Harley. Hopefully you will be laughing with me as I am laughing with you and not at you. I like people who think they don't have to always be serious. I know that you are a very knowledgeable man when it comes to music and the way that it is produced and reproduced by watching and listening to what you have to say. That will continue whether you have a Bob Ross coiffure or the look that you currently rock. Best of the season to you and yours Harley. 😁✌
wow, and I WANT that lp. Harley i know what you talking about, i do some myself with my Studer's and Otari's and i LOVE your approach. You are a great champion. (Small is beautiful)
Harley this is absolutely fascinating! Thank you for sharing this, and what good sports your musicians were to agree to appear as well! I remember sitting in on a DECCA recording session (Haydn Trumpet Concerto with Friedemann Immer) at Walthamstow in 1986. Being a teenager then the thing that most impressed me was the B&W monitoring speakers! However I remember seeing some of the activities you've depicted here in terms of determining optimal placements.
Dear Adam. Thank you for your kind words. What a fascinating picture your shared of you sitting in on a classic recording of the Haydn concerto. I still use (and many other sound engineers too) the Decca tree system of recording. And through the Time machine we know as HiFi, I am enjoying listening to exactly what you observed, right now on Spotify, while I write this reply.
@@PearlAcoustics Wonderful! I was afforded the very rare privilege of sitting in the hall with the musicians during that recording. So long as I was dead quiet! So I was present during the cadenza :)
This is just fantastic. A whole new world opens for me, I like processes like this, eventhough I could be one of the IT-engineers coming in on monday (ie. it's something very different to what I do on a daily basis) Very interesting insights.
I do have a question though, if you excuse my ignorance. The credits show both a Post Production person and Erik as Mastering Engineer. What is the difference between both roles in this process?
@@martensytema6981 when I have finished a recording, the post production engineer, edits it. For example, if the musicians made a mistake and re recorded an ending to a piece, the PP engineer cuts in the correct ending. Then he will pan the instruments left and right and he and I will agree on the basic mix. + we agree on how much space we put between tracks and get them all into the correct order for the LP and the CD. Once that’s done it goes to the Mastering engineer, who takes our recording and gets it ready for CD or LP. Compression, adding meta-data for the CD etc. So you see the name of the track when it is playing etc. I hope that makes sense? Sometimes I use the same person for everything but vinyl is special and I wanted to use Erik because of his massive experience
Interesting. I always hear people talk about the type of mic but rarely about the mic placement. Another great video. I want to do what you do! And, if I may be candid, the singer is a cuty.
Merry Christmas @Pearl Acoustics ! This video is very interesting and a nice Christmas present for us. I have a question regarding the mics placement and selection. How you take care about a microphone captures the sound to different instrument that it has been placed for? For example, the mucrophone for th esinger is near to the arp, how you adjust or avoid the arp sound is captured by the singer microphone? I am not sure about how I have redacted the questoins, I hope you can understand them ;) Regards
Hi Vincente, thank you for your kind comments. To answer your question. The singers mic was not as close as it seemed. However, you will always have some bleed through. Mostly, it’s not a problem because the level is do much less than the source in front of it, and we choose mics with the right amount of side noise rejection. Hope this helps? There some great books on the topic.
Hi, yes, only the high res is uncompressed. The CD is compressed to industry standards for most uses. I think Erik was making a point. I try to encourage mastering engineers not to go too crazy. So this is why I enclose all the masters in the download package, so people can compare.
Yeah yeah yeah, but where is Part 3? Still, love your work here. I'm a big fan of classical music as well as rock and roll. Do you have recordings of your work out in stores throughout Europe? I also love Opera, especially French and Italian.
@@rabarebra Hi, yes, as shown at the end of the video 😉 the recording was for vinyl, CD and you can pay for a set of downloads, including high resolution, uncompressed version
Not sure. The CD is published by Etcetera Records, so should be available. The vinyl, however is not Bly available via the Pearl Acoustics webshop, for the moment.
Thanks for your comment. I have put a link in the description, right at the bottom that goes into the topic of dynamics and bandwidth from the legendary Bob Katz. That’s a good place to start. But people’s love for vinyl is not strictly logical, like so many pleasant things in life.
What makes green vinyl quieter than, is it green in colour I've heard black vinyl can cause magnetic field problems and add noise floor. It's PTE that was what he said but why does it have to be black? Black contains magnetic fragments clear vinyl supposed to be the best or acrylic
Hi, I believe it is quieter because of the manufacturing process. You can get ‘Green vinyl’ in any colour you like, including transparent. We ordered it in black, so it looked conventional. Didn’t know about the magnetic fragments, pretty sure this is not the case here.
@@PearlAcoustics something about black vinyl colouring they have iron fragments, You can demagnetize the record supposed to reduce the background noise, Michael Framer did a piece on it. Merry Christmas happy New year
Harley! Great to see you again!! The last of 2022!!
Thanks!
Wow, this is one of the most amazing videos on YT, for me, as a music and art lover. The music is also divine! Simply amazing!!!
Wow, thank you!
The production on this video was fantastic. Loved every minute of it. This video is a must for any audiophile to round off their knowledge and appreciation of the recording arts.
Thank you Michael, you’re very kind
I think this is the best 'audiophile' related topic video I have watched this year.
Thank you Thomas, you’re very kind. So pleased you enjoyed it. Best wishes for the holiday season
Fascinating. And brilliant of course. Thank you. 😊
Thanks Paul!
This is fascinating, great video!
Thanks!
I watch a lot of YT videos. This one was one of the best for me this year. Eye-opening. Thanks Harley.
You’re very welcome!
A really great glimpse into the process! Thanks for the video as always.
You’re very welcome. Thanks!
Just watched and thoroughly enjoyed.
Thanks
I ordered the green vinyl copy. I was so moved by your efforts and supporting the musicians which made it such an easy decision. Order number 76 :-)
Great! Thanks 😀👍
@@PearlAcoustics I guess it will arrive in the new year?
@@gdwlaw5549 we ship with FEDEX 🤞
Very cool Harley! I hope now that you have this TH-cam channel you take us for more recording adventures haha! Very nicely put together and informative video as always, thanks
Thank you! Very kind.
Harley, what a wonderful project that I’m happy to support. CD ordered, thank you.
Wishing you a safe and happy Christmas.
Kindest regards,
Brian
Thanks Brian, you’re very kind
You mention CD and vinyl and I’m so happy you have hi resolution downloads. Due to having spent many years living in different countries my system for many years has been portable so I have a tube HiFiMan headphone amp, Onkyo portable high resolution music player and assorted headphones including the wonderful Austrian Audio HI-X65.
So my listening now is either from carefully ripped WAV files from my now long gone CD collection to in the past few years high resolution downloads from various companies and those range from 24/96/192 to DSD.
I found it fascinating to hear about the various ways of mastering for the different formats. It does seem from the gentleman’s comments that high resolution downloads seem to offer the least compromise and that vinyl has the most complex formula to go through to get the best sound.
This then makes me scratch my head as for the past ten years or so with the resurgence of vinyl and its supporters being very vocal on its sonic superiority I am left wondering why this is so and if it really is so, I am hoping your last installment of your turntable buying experience will help clarify this!
Being 59 years of age of course, I grew up with vinyl, I must admit, I was an early adopter of CD as it was so much simpler to use and no constant tweaking of the turntable to make it perform well and to my ears a well produced and mastered CD simply sounded better, especially with classical due to the almost silent background, then came the short lived minidisc which I also liked very much but it was not until I could rip my CD collection did I go to non-physical media.
To my ears mp3 was the death of music, it seemed to lose all the energy and life to me.
Though now I am finally settled here in Austria I have still yet to sort out a home based system as I am so used to the intimacy of headphones and so satisfied with the Onkyo DAP and the quality of high resolution downloads but I know at some point I will venture back to speakers!
I would love to see more videos like this, it was very insightful and brought back happy memories of working for various musicians and accompanying them when they recorded in studios in Vancouver, LA and New York when I lived in North America and in London and Bath in my birth country the U.K.
Thanks so much Harley, I wish you and your family a happy Christmas and peaceful New Year. Off to get the download from your site now!
Thank you for your very kind comment Ian. Your back story is so interesting. A very happy Christmas to you and your family too, from all of us at Pearl Acoustics
Thank you, Sir! Really appreciate your video. Not only do you provide great mentorship to us audiophiles, young n old, you also get involve actively with the young musicians, understanding their craft and how it's delivered eventually to remote audience thousands of km away
👑King!
Thank you 🙏
Another great job of teaching us that are not so learned in the production of good quality sound. Thank you Harley for your concise yet easy to understand explanation of what goes in to the recording process.
Dear Richard, you’re very welcome. Happy to share what I know. Best wishes, H.
Thank you, Harley. A wonderful look behind the scenes. It really captures your passion for music and the performing arts.
Thank you 🙏 you’re very kind
Very interesting. The quality of your videos are always so high and so instructive. Thanks a lot.
Thanks, you’re very kind
Harley thank you so much. As someone who is still learning the very difficult art of recording a violin, there was invaluable insight.
You’re very welcome Adrian.
Congratulations That looks like a great album. Great music played beautifully and produced to keep the performance alive.
Thanks Christopher! Very kind. I hope so. The strange thing is that this trio are absolutely magical live, that any recording can never quite capture their brilliance. One can only try.
Mesmerizing!
Thanks!
Very much liked it, both the music and the "making of" video ! Happy holidays and greetings from the Netherlands !
Thanks! Happy Christmas from Belgium!
Love the videos. I find the content interesting and intriguing, but curiously relaxing and satisfying. He is the Bob Ross of sound manipulation.
😉👍
Bob Ross minus a wonderful afro hairstyle,which I certainly won't hold anything against Harley for that one omission.....lol. I'm assuming it is Bob Ross the well known painter that has taught us so much about that particular bit of the arts.
@@richardwestmoreland4796 now Bobs hair would be an interesting addition! 😂
Bob Ross hair. Oh my😳
@@PearlAcoustics if nothing else it would at least give this fan of you and your channel a good chuckle. Nobody should ever think we have enough laughs in our daily lives. Go for it Harley. Hopefully you will be laughing with me as I am laughing with you and not at you. I like people who think they don't have to always be serious. I know that you are a very knowledgeable man when it comes to music and the way that it is produced and reproduced by watching and listening to what you have to say. That will continue whether you have a Bob Ross coiffure or the look that you currently rock. Best of the season to you and yours Harley. 😁✌
wow, and I WANT that lp. Harley i know what you talking about, i do some myself with my Studer's and Otari's and i LOVE your approach. You are a great champion. (Small is beautiful)
Thank you! Enjoy
Very nice video! Thank you very much!😉
You’re very welcome Carlos!
Hi Harley.
Very nice too see how you and your team make a recording.
Gr André de vries.
Thanks André, glad you enjoyed it.
Harley
Harley this is absolutely fascinating! Thank you for sharing this, and what good sports your musicians were to agree to appear as well!
I remember sitting in on a DECCA recording session (Haydn Trumpet Concerto with Friedemann Immer) at Walthamstow in 1986. Being a teenager then the thing that most impressed me was the B&W monitoring speakers! However I remember seeing some of the activities you've depicted here in terms of determining optimal placements.
Dear Adam. Thank you for your kind words. What a fascinating picture your shared of you sitting in on a classic recording of the Haydn concerto. I still use (and many other sound engineers too) the Decca tree system of recording. And through the Time machine we know as HiFi, I am enjoying listening to exactly what you observed, right now on Spotify, while I write this reply.
@@PearlAcoustics Wonderful! I was afforded the very rare privilege of sitting in the hall with the musicians during that recording. So long as I was dead quiet! So I was present during the cadenza :)
This is just fantastic.
A whole new world opens for me, I like processes like this, eventhough I could be one of the IT-engineers coming in on monday (ie. it's something very different to what I do on a daily basis)
Very interesting insights.
Thank you. So pleased you appreciated it
I do have a question though, if you excuse my ignorance.
The credits show both a Post Production person and Erik as Mastering Engineer. What is the difference between both roles in this process?
@@martensytema6981 when I have finished a recording, the post production engineer, edits it. For example, if the musicians made a mistake and re recorded an ending to a piece, the PP engineer cuts in the correct ending. Then he will pan the instruments left and right and he and I will agree on the basic mix. + we agree on how much space we put between tracks and get them all into the correct order for the LP and the CD.
Once that’s done it goes to the Mastering engineer, who takes our recording and gets it ready for CD or LP. Compression, adding meta-data for the CD etc. So you see the name of the track when it is playing etc.
I hope that makes sense?
Sometimes I use the same person for everything but vinyl is special and I wanted to use Erik because of his massive experience
@@PearlAcoustics Thanks for replying! That makes sense
Interesting. I always hear people talk about the type of mic but rarely about the mic placement. Another great video. I want to do what you do! And, if I may be candid, the singer is a cuty.
Hi Alex, thanks for your kind words. I am sure Maria will not mind your comment either. 😉
Merry Christmas @Pearl Acoustics !
This video is very interesting and a nice Christmas present for us.
I have a question regarding the mics placement and selection.
How you take care about a microphone captures the sound to different instrument that it has been placed for?
For example, the mucrophone for th esinger is near to the arp, how you adjust or avoid the arp sound is captured by the singer microphone?
I am not sure about how I have redacted the questoins, I hope you can understand them ;)
Regards
Hi Vincente, thank you for your kind comments. To answer your question. The singers mic was not as close as it seemed. However, you will always have some bleed through. Mostly, it’s not a problem because the level is do much less than the source in front of it, and we choose mics with the right amount of side noise rejection.
Hope this helps? There some great books on the topic.
Wow just a few cm can make a huge difference
👍!
12:58 So only the Hi-Res version is uncompressed.
13:50 The CD is compressed for in car listening in a car or a system with limited bass?
Hi, yes, only the high res is uncompressed. The CD is compressed to industry standards for most uses. I think Erik was making a point. I try to encourage mastering engineers not to go too crazy. So this is why I enclose all the masters in the download package, so people can compare.
Very well descriped the difference in CD and Vinyl - I just ordred both….😂
Fantastic! Thanks 👍
Harley, is that green percussion thing timing the echo or are you just using it to generate a staccato sound you can judge by ear?
Hi, I am just using it to produce a staccato sound and judging by ear. (The Green thing is a modern ‘Chinese block’ percussion instrument)
Yeah yeah yeah, but where is Part 3? Still, love your work here. I'm a big fan of classical music as well as rock and roll. Do you have recordings of your work out in stores throughout Europe? I also love Opera, especially French and Italian.
Part 3 is on its way. (Mid to late January). Some of my recordings are available in stores but not many stores hold CD’s these days.
@@PearlAcoustics CDs? But wasn't this vinyl records, as there is a guy in this video that you hired for his skills to master for vinyl?
@@rabarebra Hi, yes, as shown at the end of the video 😉 the recording was for vinyl, CD and you can pay for a set of downloads, including high resolution, uncompressed version
do you have any audio stores selling in the U.S?
Not sure. The CD is published by Etcetera Records, so should be available. The vinyl, however is not Bly available via the Pearl Acoustics webshop, for the moment.
Wonderful. I take it that the only LP on your site for that album is the green vinyl?
Thanks Nick. Yes it is. It sounds great (or the lack of sound, should I say).
Was hoping you’d put something together like this. Very difficult in practise.
Thanks Jonathan. I know it's a bit niche, but I hope people will appreciate it.
Would be interesting to understand the limitations of vinyl better
Thanks for your comment. I have put a link in the description, right at the bottom that goes into the topic of dynamics and bandwidth from the legendary Bob Katz. That’s a good place to start. But people’s love for vinyl is not strictly logical, like so many pleasant things in life.
What makes green vinyl quieter than, is it green in colour I've heard black vinyl can cause magnetic field problems and add noise floor.
It's PTE that was what he said but why does it have to be black? Black contains magnetic fragments clear vinyl supposed to be the best or acrylic
Hi, I believe it is quieter because of the manufacturing process. You can get ‘Green vinyl’ in any colour you like, including transparent. We ordered it in black, so it looked conventional. Didn’t know about the magnetic fragments, pretty sure this is not the case here.
@@PearlAcoustics something about black vinyl colouring they have iron fragments, You can demagnetize the record supposed to reduce the background noise, Michael Framer did a piece on it.
Merry Christmas happy New year