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
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.
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