David Harbin wrote: >Another good comparison is the old Polish EMI Matrix recordng of >Szymanowski's violin concerto no. 1. There the engineers miked the >poor violinist so far forward it is ridiculous. It almost makes you >wonder why Szymanowski bothered delicately judging the orchestral balances >in the first place. It did not surprise me when we issued our disc of Nissman playing Liszt that some critics didn't like the sound. We used no post recording processing and the microphones were placed to produce a sound that was like being in the recording studio with a concert grand, the pianist and the listener sitting nearby. To appreciate the sound one would have to listen at the level of the actual sound of the piano...too loud for most living rooms. It was of interest to me that so few critics listened at such an amplitude... This brings up, at least to me, the whole notion of how we listen and how recordings are engineered to suit what one might consider to be the preference of the average listener. Karl