I’m not talking about the mid-atlantic accent which has been asked about on this sub. I mean how the actual recordings of voices have a distinct sound quality where you can tell they’re…. old timey. Not the graininess, not background-noisiness, but the actual timbre/character of the voices has some sort of… idk, almost slightly electronicky sound to it. And modern artists use it as an artificial effect. But modern recording technology recreates voices much more true-to-life. What is this?
If this makes no sense feel free to roast me and remove my post >_>
edit: someone suggested to link an example. This was on my mind when watching this clip of the Jordannaires singing at the Grand Ol Opry in the 50s: [https://youtu.be/qkJU8BS-jDU?t=337](https://youtu.be/qkJU8BS-jDU?t=337) I listen to a fair amount of barbershop, and lots of the old recordings have this vocal quality to it, but modern recordings are much more accurate to the person’s real-life voice.
In: Technology
It’s due to the frequency response of the microphones and recording media.
In addition to the much narrower frequency band captured, the performance was also not uniform across that spectrum so some parts are handled better/worse than others, leading to gaps or dips in fidelity at some frequencies.
I’m not sure if this is the particular aspect you’re asking about, but older recording technologies did not reproduce all sound frequencies well. You can hear the same sort of effect when you compare a telephone call to something like a FaceTime audio call.
Basically it’s a loss of bass and improper timing.
In the earliest recordings in both film and audio the machines tended to be hand cranked with no escapement. People get tired and crank very slowly after a long day. A series of slow exposures or recordings, when played back at normal speed, appear and sound sped up.
When you speed up a recording everything gets shifted to a slightly higher pitch and speed. This lends a certain franticness to it.
Next is the fact that the older technologies were much less perfect than current technologies. For instance the oldest recordings were made by physically deforming a media such as a wax cylinder or wax disk. High frequencies contain more energy at a given volume because there are more peaks and troughs in that same time period of the utterance. That means the high frequencies have more impact on the physical media. Their grooves are deeper etc.
When the mechanical linkage recording was replaced with electrical linkage and the first true microphones were born it was still the energy of the voice that caused the electromotive force. So it was still the higher frequencies that were more accurately recorded.
Finally as those mechanical media aged more of the fidelity was lost at the low end. Replay of mechanical media caused where of mechanical media leaving only the deepest impressions fully accurate. And there’s also sort of a weird waveform change as when a needle drops into a notch and then is forced back out that trailing edge can get worn down more than the leading edge where the needle can drop in.
The switch over to magnetic tape solved many of these problems to a good 80% or 90% but most of the amplifier circuits that used tubes had the same high-end spiking problems. They were better at preserving the low end and getting the magnetic image onto the tape, but the high end still peaks.
So when you look at the old sound power level meters you’ll see there’s a green range and a red range. Clicks, pops, and so-called highs could bring the needle well into the red range if you were keeping the base end at the good powerful median.
Now the wear also sort of adds the sad trombone sound from the Charlie Brown comics. That is the wave form I was speaking of where the wear is on the trailing edge adds a wah wah wah tone to the entire translated sound. This at first sounds “warm” and soft.
Another part of the old sounds comes from the fact that the mechanical media such as the vinyl record itself or the original wax cylinder or wax desk recording media might not have been perfectly uniform. Variations in density spot to spot on the media leads to variations of sound. This could lead to a sort of chugga chugga variation in cadence or fidelity.
So the old timey recording is a combination of inequal preservation of the lows and highs, a warmer sound to those preserved highs that speaks of some sort of distance, and then a lot of mechanical noise.
Tapes also can stretch which also warms the sound a little bit and is sort of like counter to the original speeding up effect but That’s stretching is neither linear nor proportional to the original speeding up.
Also the media can get contaminated with dust and hairs and whatnot. This leads to the crackle and more pop in the playback.
And finally there’s a kind of echo effect that can happen because tape is rolled on reels. For instance if you listen to “Whole Lotta Love” using high-quality headphones, right before he sings “way down inside” there’s a quiet space. And if you listen carefully to that quiet space you can hear the word “way”and maybe a little bit of “down” that came from magnetic transport. The very high amplitude recording of that phrase caused the original master tape to transfer that part of the recording to the silent range of tape one revolution sooner on the take-up reel.
EDIT: someone just corrected me regarding “Whole Lotta Love”. Apparently Jimmy Page made a great technical innovation to fake a much clearer version of “print-through” that he called reverse echo. So that reverse echo is on purpose and not actually a tape induced error as I had long thought. (And I also just learned that the name of that noise when it happens by accident is ‘print-through’. Hahaha. Live and learn. 🤘😎)
Basically we have been trained to feel that flaws in the recording are thing of the past. As has every generation before us going back to the advent of recording itself. This is because recording technologies keep getting better, so any flaw must be “old” compared to what we have now.
There is a lot of good information here, but it is important to consider that the singing technique was also different when acoustic recording was the only option. Singers had to project their voices into a huge megaphone, so you end up with that kind of hollering timbre. The crooner music that followed the advent of the electric microphone was partly so popular because it was so novel. Soft, gentle vocals simply couldn’t be properly captured prior to about 1925.
First you want to remove the top end and bottom end so it’s only midrange. Then you want to modulate the pitch up and down slightly to emulate old analog phonographs. Add some crackle if desired.
Wow top guy had quite the novel of an answer. But, as an electrical engineer, I’d chalk it up the terrible audio equipment adding all sorts of noice to the recordings. I always felt like old timy recording were full of static.
So to understand why a lot of old recordings sound the way they do, you need to understand the mediums which were used to record these sounds. These artefacts of the technology were not generally desirable, but were due to the characteristics and limitations of these technologies. Specifically, this is often the sound of tube amplification as well as magnetic tape. Tubes were used in microphone preamps and other recording gear, and added a distinct warmth to the sound, but also made the higher frequencies (t and s sounds especially) very sharp.
Many shows of this time period were recorded onto magnetic tape, which also imparted its own characteristics. Shows were often recorded at 7.5 inches per second to save tape, as opposed to the music recording-quality 15 or 30 IPS. This caused the sound to become a bit darker and slightly more saturated (that is the crunch or crispness you might hear in older recordings).
There are many other reasons for the specific sound of the time, such as dialogue and music being mixed to sound good on the tv speakers etc that the media was being played through, which often lacked good bass or high end.
Ironically, while at the time artefacts like these were avoided as much as possible, we have come to like their sound and actively try to replicate it in our music and such to give it a vintage feel.
I think the dynamic limitations of recording equipment also played a big part in this. In older songs, for example songs by Aretha Franklin, the voice has a “sharp edge” from time to time. This is due to the distortion of the original signal, which in turn is a result of the limitations of the recording equipment of that time. A good artist would use that to their advantage.
A really good example: if you would watch a video recording of the first season of Bob Ross’ “The joy of painting” (they’re all on Youtube), then you’ll notice that his voice seems to sound much harsher/sharper than in later seasons.
techniques were different, because the mainstream style of song/singing was different.
that is a huge part of it. there wasn’t much emphasis on power belting like you see praised now for example. People sung more classically based (raised soft pallet, more head mix, overall healthier tone imho)
PLUS recording quality and lack of the less limited, diverse EQ like we have today. It is a combo of both. Even Frank, if he was recorded back then with the technology we have now, you would still get that vintagey sound a bit, clearer and richer, but it is still a thing.
Source: I am a singer who went to conservatory and won awards. I know my shit lol.
I thought the led zep thing was caused by a guide track bleeding through from the headphones Plant was wearing.
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