In a world of increasing digitization and electronic origination of everything from voice mail prompts to virtual customer support, the pro audio industry has also migrated towards less “natural” sources.

Of course, there remains the world of orchestral, operatic and folk music performances (for example) as unrepentantly “live” acoustic events, but even these supposedly sacred spaces have been quietly infiltrated by electronic sources, synthesized music support and all kinds of “augmentation.”

What this “less human involvement” trend has created is a lack of true awareness of what things actually sound like, and how acoustic sources create a “space” or congregate to become a performance as perceived by the listener.

Without exposure to un-reinforced natural acoustic sources, it is extremely difficult to have any kind of mental image of what people, instruments – and most importantly, multiple sources or groups of anything – sound like.

Devoid of this mental “file,” the tendency is to assume that every source needs to be processed or helped in some way in order to sound right.

Most certainly a portion of this predicament has been created by the world of sampling and the stunning capability growth for digital keyboards/ synthesizers. Literally anything that produces sound waves can be sampled and then re-used whenever and wherever it is desired.

No need to find someone who knows how to play, use or operate that device; no need to deal with people and their numerous “issues;” and most importantly, no need to pay them.

Punching up that cembalo dulcimer sample on a digital keyboard is way faster and easier than actually getting a person to play one.

Frozen Moment
The problem is that however accurate the sample may be (and this varies drastically depending upon the sampling device/method and from prerecorded loop to pre-recorded loop), it’s still just a sample – a minuscule, frozen moment of some portion of the acoustic output of the particular source.

It is most certainly not a high-definition picture of the whole of the source, especially not of that source as heard by a live listener with all of complex harmonics and ear/brain/room interactions.

I frankly don’t care how high the sample rate, or what kHz it was archived at, or how slick the microphones were – or any of that. It’s all irrelevant.

The sample library size needed to truly re-create any natural source beyond the ability of the ear to discern the difference is so huge as to be outside the realm of feasibility for all practical purposes.

Yes, I’m sure enough storage devices could be “stacked up” to accomplish the task (terabytes at least) but this would be for just one specific guitar and player (for example). But change one string and it’s necessary to start over.

Think about the legendary Hammond B3/Leslie combination. Move just one tone bar a fraction of an inch and there is a wholly different set of parameters – and there are lots of tone bars and lots of possibilities. Pardon me while I fire up the Cray supercomputer to calculate the possibilities; I’ll get back to you with an answer in a couple of months.

This doesn’t mean the ear can’t be fooled into thinking it heard the real thing (at least sort of), just as multichannel time differences can be used to create localization effects or perceptive positioning of a source. But it’s not the real thing, just close enough to be gotten away with. Sometimes.

There’s a remark supposedly attributed to George Martin: “If you want real strings, hire string players.” Another phrase, more familiar, is that close only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades and nuclear weapons.

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