It's pretty simple reasoning. A mono recording, using a cheap microphone recording at 192k MP4, would be laughed at in any discussion of high (or even medium) quality sound. A stereo recording with a decent mic preamp, a pair of Schoeps, Neumann or DPA mics using a binaural head (since headphone listening is the only way to take the listener's own room out of the way), and at least 16/44.1 PCM could be worth consideration; can you give me a link to one of these?
Who said anything about mono recordings? I use a $150 Shure MV88 small stereo condensor mic that plugs right into my iPhone. Though I will say that the tiny built-in mics ain't half bad - just not very consistent and not stereo. So it sounds like if in-room recordings met your criteria, there could be some value?
Interesting. Ok, so you’ve got high uncompromising standards regarding what you’ll expose your ears for playback music. That sounds really good and I’m sure many appreciate that. But let’s take a peek at your uncompromising high standards.
It’s a given that in-room recordings are an inferior audio format. But what isn't for that matter? Do you really think you're listening to an uncompromising SOTA-level playback system? Has it occurred to you that if (and it is so) there's even one playback system more accurate and more musical than yours, you're already listening to or enjoying a significantly compromised playback presentation?
As for your presentation on your "inferior" playback system? For sake of argument, let's assume you prefer listening to Redbook PCM formatted recordings and you're listening to a track that consumes 50MB of storage on the recording. PCM is already a bit compromising, right?
Listening to playback music in your room implies all 50MB of the music info embedded in and read from a given recording must pass thru a minimum of two discriminating noise floors. One is your playback system’s electrically-induced noise floor and the other is the acoustic noise floor established by your speaker / room interaction. Noise floors with any raised threshold of any sort will guarantee that some-to-much of that 50MB of music info read from the recording will remain inaudible by the time it reaches/doesn’t reach your speaker drivers (electrical) and then from the speaker drivers to your ears from your listening spot (acoustic). Not to mention the corruption of percentages of the music that remains audible to you. All said and done, some-to-much of that 50MB read, your ears just might be hearing significant percentages less than the 50MB. Depending on how fastidious you are with addressing these two rather significant noise floors.
Of course, you’re only able to hear that significantly less percentage of the entire 50MB of music info available for your listening pleasure assuming …
1. Your hearing is perfect.
2. Your ability to discern / interpret what you’re able to hear is infallible.
3. Your system is already receiving perfectly clean, superior AC from the street including exactly 120v or 240v at the outlets.
4. Your recordings are all perfectly-engineered recordings without any flaw.
Then again, if there’s even a single shortcoming in any of the above, I’d venture we’re able to establish that, just like the rest of us, you and others like you already have to use your imagination a bit when you listen to the compromised presentation from your playback system. But that’s also assuming you know exactly what that 50MB ought to sound like if you could hear all 50MB at your ear. And of course we also could probably agree that no recording captures the entirety of the live performance, right?
Given the above, it seems to me your high standard of listening has already been significantly compromised and at perhaps every turn. IOW, we all face these same compromises to one good degree or another and we all have to use our imaginations when listening to any playback system. So what's wrong with using your imagination a bit more than you already are?
Nobody's saying in-room recordings are competing with in-room experiences. So why would you take that position as if that's what you're up against?
Some say in-room recordings deserve no credence but I can think of a number of reasons why one might think this way. And none of them are positive.
But I will say in-room recordings are potentially quite valuable. Yes, in-room recordings fall way short in some areas like only able to produce little more than a remnant of the entire gestalt experienced in the listening room. And there's much to be said for hearing music outside the head filling the room rather than inside filling the head. But there are many characteristics that are well preserved including but not limited to sibilance vs negative sibilance, how pristine or detailed the original recording might be, tonality, warmth, timbre, etc, and if you pretend you’re a bug sitting on your pituitary gland, you just might hear some fairly reasonable soundstaging.
And depending on the quality of an in-room recording in-room videos also can be quite educational. That's why we're here, right? To improve our knowledge or game, whatever that might be? There are some downright nasty in-room recordings I've heard in the forums but there are also some fairly outstanding recordings too. Hmmmmmm, just like our playback systems maybe? But educational in that we’re able to get a glimpse of where somebody’s coming from. Do their words and system aesthetics measure even remotely close to their in-room video? Then there’s those who provide feedback on in-room videos, and those who choose to remain mum too. It’s really just more information to potentially better round out where we and others are coming from. That’s all potentially educational.
In-room videos may not be the best way to learn but then neither are many of our playback systems. And they may not be the best way to separate the wheat from the chaff but it's a start and it continues to improve much like other technologies.
And the best part of in-room recordings is that you don’t even have to believe in them to listen to a few of them or even produce a few of your own. And maybe learn a thing or two in the process.
