ABSTRACT
The recording chain under discussion here begins with the musicians and ends in the rooms in which the people who buy the recordings choose to place their music systems. Domestically, we must really limit this discussion to reasonably high fidelity systems, because once we introduce in-car listening and ghetto-blasters on the kitchen table, or portable radios in the bathroom, we begin to enter a realm of variability which, firstly, become unable to be qualified and secondly, in the majority of cases, cannot really be considered capable of truly representing the music producers’ wishes. Manufacturers of such equipment may go to great lengths to produce pleasant-sounding equipment, and record producers may go to equally great lengths to ensure the compatibility of their mixes with such systems because they represent the majority of the market for recorded music, but this book is essentially dealing with the concept of high fidelity reproduction. This is not to say that many in-car systems are not capable of remarkably high fidelity in many aspects of their performance, but their reproduction quality is still idiosyncratic in a way that generally sets it apart from what we expect to hear from a ‘high-end’ system in the home. The loudspeakers used in the recording chain can be separated into five
basic groups:
1) loudspeakers for musical instrument amplification 2) recording monitors 3) mixing monitors 4) mastering monitors 5) domestic high fidelity loudspeakers
There are many people who will argue against this concept, citing that a good, professional, well conceived, well-engineered loudspeaker should be suitable for all of the above purposes. However, the recording chain is a very varied chain, and what will be discussed in this chapter are the specific requirements at each stage of the process which tilt certain designs or concepts towards being advantageous for the different needs of those specific requirements. In fact, the reality of the current situation is that different loudspeakers do tend to be used in different stages of the recording/mixing/ mastering process where financial restraints do not limit the choice of equipment, and there are many good reasons why this state of affairs exists.
