Why are recordings from the late 60s and 70s so pleasant?
- Thread starter Aquaman
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The Ultra as a streamer is with me for almost a year now and I love it from the first moment. For curiosity, a good offer and because I am an easy victim for hypes I picked up an Amp Ultra on Saturday in Germany. Back home it lasted half an hour and I was already missing my hybrid integrated amp desperately. The pre amp section is with tubes. I do not care if it is distortion, noise or even the shimmering valves. I love it. So curtains up and down the Ultra is back in place.
The Amp Ultra is a stunning piece of audio for the price, but for me it sounds and feels to cold. Even when touching it
. The little guy will now find another home as a Christmas gift.
The Amp Ultra is a stunning piece of audio for the price, but for me it sounds and feels to cold. Even when touching it
. The little guy will now find another home as a Christmas gift.
You might be right, but what is the „correct“ sound then, given that you hear it in your room, with your individual room setup and equipment, not to mention your ears ?
I came to the conclusion that, I simply want it to sound good in way that pleases my ear and my attitude and that is totally individual.
cooky560
Major Contributor
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Don't forget that 60s and 70s was an exciting time for hifi development, new techniques were being discovered in recording studios etc, so there was far more an interest in making impressive sounding recordings, to justify the cost of these things, than today.
HansD-NL
Senior Member
That's why the word correct is between quotes. If you really want to hear how the music was intended you have to listen in the studio where it was created. Again, it's totally fine to enjoy something that pleases you but just understand that you are adding artifacts (noise, harmonics and so forth) to the signal that are not originally there.
Even this isn’t an universal truth as a lot of people would argue that mixing and mastering make the music sound as it was intended. One could argue for days about this and about measurements as well.
This may just be an urban legend but I think Barry Gordy wanted Motown recordings to sound good on the radio and not on expensive reference systems. One can only guess what Lee Perry intended.
HansD-NL
Senior Member
Offcourse that is what I meant, the finished product of the music. And yes, there are lots of music (post)productions made with a specific goal in mind (radio play, danceclub use, vinyl releases etc) there are a lot of interesting (long) reads about that topic.
I'm not arguing.
I work full time as a studio engineer (predominantly mixing but quite a lot of tracking too)…
- There were very few tools in the 60s and early/mid 70s to really modify the performances/sound musicians made, so musicians had to make the right sound right from the beginning if they were going to stand any chance of success. Nowadays, there’s a lot more ‘fixing’ going on (I often describe myself as a fix engineer, fixing people’s sh1tty recordings)
- While the tools of the 60s and 70s didn’t offer any flexibility, a lot of that gear did contribute a lot of tone/vibe, especially the valve stuff. Valve mics have always been considered the pinnacle of microphone engineering by most engineers for many (but not all) applications. The solid state U87 replaced the valve U67 at the very end of the 60s and by the mid/late 70s, U87s were far more common to find than their earlier valve brethren, largely due to convenience. This same ‘downgrade’ in sonics happened in many other areas, valve > solid state preamps, valve > solid state tape machines. More complex consoles which offered far more channels and greater features, but maybe didn’t offer up as much when it comes to straightforward ‘sound’. Of course, I’m not saying that valve is always better than solid state, there are many situations where we’d choose to go for a solid state preamp, but at the end of the day, a Neve 1081 just doesn’t sound as good on vocals or say, a sax, as a Telefunken V72.
- The loudness wars has always been there, but in the 90s it got really silly with the introduction of brick wall limiters. I love a lot of albums of that era but wish they sounded less… flat. Radiohead… amazing, shame it sounds like the music has been crushed into a sandwich tin. Now we have much better tools to achieve loudness, but with the added complexity of bass heavy music (which makes achieving loudness much harder without also hearing pumping/distortion).
- Democratisation of music production - this is a complex topic and there are many upsides to this, but there are also disadvantages. It used to be that you wouldn’t be allowed to touch the console until you had 5-10 years of experience in a studio, starting out making tea and running cables, learning from more experienced people around you. Nowadays, here in London a lot of engineers come straight out of music college and land straight into jobs as head engineers in commercial studios. This has been a constant gentle movement since the end of the 1960s. Now we’re in the position where a lot of studios are pointless in the eyes of musicians as they don’t bring any value to the table… pay many hundreds of pounds a day for a studio where you don’t know if your recording is going to be any better than what you can achieve at home…
There are many other factors too, I won’t go into what’s wrong with the way the industry is structured/hands out money/who it invests in, but that’s a part of it too. The golden era was the 60s and 70s, and although there have been other eras with success, it’s never quite been the same since.
- There were very few tools in the 60s and early/mid 70s to really modify the performances/sound musicians made, so musicians had to make the right sound right from the beginning if they were going to stand any chance of success. Nowadays, there’s a lot more ‘fixing’ going on (I often describe myself as a fix engineer, fixing people’s sh1tty recordings)
- While the tools of the 60s and 70s didn’t offer any flexibility, a lot of that gear did contribute a lot of tone/vibe, especially the valve stuff. Valve mics have always been considered the pinnacle of microphone engineering by most engineers for many (but not all) applications. The solid state U87 replaced the valve U67 at the very end of the 60s and by the mid/late 70s, U87s were far more common to find than their earlier valve brethren, largely due to convenience. This same ‘downgrade’ in sonics happened in many other areas, valve > solid state preamps, valve > solid state tape machines. More complex consoles which offered far more channels and greater features, but maybe didn’t offer up as much when it comes to straightforward ‘sound’. Of course, I’m not saying that valve is always better than solid state, there are many situations where we’d choose to go for a solid state preamp, but at the end of the day, a Neve 1081 just doesn’t sound as good on vocals or say, a sax, as a Telefunken V72.
- The loudness wars has always been there, but in the 90s it got really silly with the introduction of brick wall limiters. I love a lot of albums of that era but wish they sounded less… flat. Radiohead… amazing, shame it sounds like the music has been crushed into a sandwich tin. Now we have much better tools to achieve loudness, but with the added complexity of bass heavy music (which makes achieving loudness much harder without also hearing pumping/distortion).
- Democratisation of music production - this is a complex topic and there are many upsides to this, but there are also disadvantages. It used to be that you wouldn’t be allowed to touch the console until you had 5-10 years of experience in a studio, starting out making tea and running cables, learning from more experienced people around you. Nowadays, here in London a lot of engineers come straight out of music college and land straight into jobs as head engineers in commercial studios. This has been a constant gentle movement since the end of the 1960s. Now we’re in the position where a lot of studios are pointless in the eyes of musicians as they don’t bring any value to the table… pay many hundreds of pounds a day for a studio where you don’t know if your recording is going to be any better than what you can achieve at home…
There are many other factors too, I won’t go into what’s wrong with the way the industry is structured/hands out money/who it invests in, but that’s a part of it too. The golden era was the 60s and 70s, and although there have been other eras with success, it’s never quite been the same since.
HansD-NL
Senior Member
Thanks for the insights, a great explanation.
guy48065
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I wish I could award this 100 "likes".