A Cellphone Comparison

garylkoh

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Jan 14, 2015
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Location
Woodinville, WA
One of the things I do that may cost me my audiophile cred is that I use my cell phone for design. While "Absolute Fidelity" it is not, the fidelity on my phone is good enough for "relative fidelity". Sufficient to hear the difference between two brands of capacitors of the same value in a crossover. It may take 3 days for a new component to run-in in the crossover, so the only way I can really objectively evaluate that utility in a crossover design is to record some music playing, change the component, run the new component in for 3 days, make another recording, and listen to the two components and compare.

Obviously, I'm not going to do that in public here.... but this here illustrates what I do.

When we recorded the Paul Sawtelle Big Band at the Pacific Audio Fest, we didn't intend to publish the music. But the recording turned out to be so good that we had to share.

Here's Bethany Wilson singing Blue Skys with the band.

This first video is what you might have heard if you were sitting in the best seat in the house. The audio was recorded using a camera hot-shoe mounted X/Y stereo condenser microphone.



This second video takes the 24/96 digital recording from the Nagra VI. This would be what the mixing and recording engineers (Mr Ki Choi and Dr Phillip Chance) would have heard monitoring through their headphones. The microphone was the Neumann TLM50 - a transformerless version of the legendary M50.



And finally, the video with a digital transfer from the audio that Bernie Grundman mastered off the direct-to-2track tape recording.

 
Gary, I've just now finished listening to the entire album and have to say congratulations on a job well done! The clarity and dynamics of the music is as good as any other one step in my collection, while the surface noise is as low as I've (not) heard!
 
Gary, I've just now finished listening to the entire album and have to say congratulations on a job well done! The clarity and dynamics of the music is as good as any other one step in my collection, while the surface noise is as low as I've (not) heard!

I hope that you liked the music as much as the lack of surface noise. I learned a lesson on this album - that the stamper/mother/father could contribute to the surface noise, and it's not necessarily the fault of the vinyl formulation.

On the first go-round of test pressing, I was using a new (to me) formulation of vinyl pellets from Japan. One of the criteria that I failed that test press on was surface noise. What I thought was vinyl noise turned out to be noise in the mother.
 
I hope that you liked the music as much as the lack of surface noise. I learned a lesson on this album - that the stamper/mother/father could contribute to the surface noise, and it's not necessarily the fault of the vinyl formulation.

On the first go-round of test pressing, I was using a new (to me) formulation of vinyl pellets from Japan. One of the criteria that I failed that test press on was surface noise. What I thought was vinyl noise turned out to be noise in the mother.
I thought the band was great!
 
Amazing - the vocals were buried in the first version, opened up in the second and really came alive in the third. (As did the musicians!)

Good stuff, indeed!
 
The thing about a direct-to-2track recording is how close it gets to the musicians. In the case of a 17-piece big band, you either have 17 individual microphones.... or a really excellent band with great balance and 2 microphones. In this case, an additional microphone was used for the vocals and gain-riding to mix in real time!

"You get an explicit reproduction of the space and the activity, the crowd noises, and all the verbal communications and physical adjustments between the takes, and that adds to the casual sense of fun in the room. Bethany Wilson’s voice, for example, is so present and pure since it hasn’t been overly processed into something it isn’t. She’s standing right there, between the band and the crowd, a human being with an utterly lovely voice. It’s almost like meeting a singer in person and asking them to belt out a line from a song right then, right there." Almost like you are right there....

For the rest of it, the balance was down to the band leader, when a soloist stands up for a trumpet solo, or a saxophone solo, the band must be able to allow the soloist to shine - without the help of the recording engineer raising the gain on a single microphone. At the same time, when the whole of the band hits a crescendo, or goes quiet no one instrument should be too quiet or too obtrusive.

Marc Phillips gets it in his review:
https://pt.audio/2025/08/20/the-pau...e-at-pacific-audiofest-the-vinyl-anachronist/
 
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