Sonic Hedgehogs

I'm beginning to wonder, though it is early days, if the Radio 3 Proms broadcasts are not as good as they used to be. Of course, it may be that with age my 'sonic memory' is fading, but I don't think so.

I mentioned briefly, writing about the interlopers among the flying saucers, that the BBC's microphone setup seems to have been noticeably expanding over the last few seasons. The main rig over the Arena below the dome seems to have grown markedly even compared to last year.

I  have never been fond of 'multi-miking'. The most extreme example of which—to demonstrate—I saw a recording company which I won't name using in St John's some years back. Every instrument had a microphone; and not only that, but every bass and cello had what is called a 'boundary mic' at its foot.

There were as many microphones in, among, above and over the orchestra as a hedgehog has prickles, or so it seemed. I didn't care for the result. A plethora of mics such as that required an awful lot of jiggery-pokery before it became listenable to people with only one pair of ears.

 It's been some time since I recognised anything similar to the simplest form of miking an orchestra at a Prom: what is known as a 'Decca Tree'. Anyone who collects classical music recordings will know that in the late fifties and through the sixties Decca produced some of the finest and most realistic orchestral recordings ever made.

Now, there are all sorts of reasons why a simple arrangement like that is not practicable in the Albert Hall. But I'm wondering if it's going too far the other way. An important element of recorded music is the ambience of the venue; listening to the last couple of Proms on Radio 3, I don't seem to hear that any more. Last night particularly, it sounded almost as though the orchestra was playing in a dead space, not one filled with a lot of breathing human beings.

And something, I think, is happening to what, technically, we call the 'sound stage.' Anyone who has been to a Prom at the RAH knows the orchestra is spread over quite a distance not only from side to side, but fore and aft. Yet, what I seem to be hearing is, as it were, two or three layers rather than any impression of the real distance between, say, the first violins at the front and the brass well behind.

There isn't the depth that I'm pretty sure used once to be there. Nor, I feel, is there quite the range of the upper strings that you hear in the hall, or the distinctness of the string sections you actually do hear there.

Perhaps, and I'm being tentative about this, the sound balance is being engineered for its suitability for digital broadcast; these are all common artefacts of digital compression and limiting, however good it is. Or, perhaps, a consequence of the sound being mixed primarily for surround and only secondarily for common-or-garden 'true' high fidelity strereo.

If that is the case, it's a sad retrograde step. But one, I fear, no-one will be able to do much about, since it became a commonplace quite early on in the development of digital audio that, as has come about, the majority of radio listeners would soon have forgotten, and some would never know, what 'high fidelity' actually sounded like.

As someone—I won't say where from—told me then, when I wanted to know why no-one was proposing to broadcast digital audio at anywhere near the equivalent standard of what the recording industry was already using, when there was no technical reason whatever for not doing it, "Give it five years and nobody will be able to tell anyway."

Apologies for the diversion; now, I really must concentrate on writing about Brahms.