Plankton... and the ability to resolve properly

Try some older jazz recordings from the mid to late 50s and 60s. Something like Chet Baker Sings or older Bill Evans trio recordings for example are good for picking out plankton. Try to find a good recording of Bill Evans - Easy To Love (album) and try tracks like Waltz For Debbie and Danny Boy. On Chet Baker Sings, try My Funny Valentine.

Listen in a quiet environment with focus on double bass and piano, and Chet Baker's perfectly imperfect's voicing for lack of a better term. These are quiet albums where each instrument/voice really shines. Listen for the quality of the instruments more than the notes. Like @earnmyturns mentioned, hands sliding to the next note on double bass strings, how much decay the piano strings have, etc.

 

In addition to the great explanations regarding plankton and minimalist and / or acoustic performances, There can be plankton on modern stuff that was heavily manipulated in the studio too. Even though reverb and hall effects are added to vocals as well as instruments, sometimes during the final mix, a system that "does plankton" will let you hear the full decay of these effects, even though they aren't technically real. The same goes for synths and microphones. If you're a real recording nerd, (I am not) you can sometimes tell which make and models have been used.

 

That’s not plankton, that’s just micing before modern monitoring. They didn’t have the monitoring and tools to mic stuff up perfectly so you hear stuff you never hear in real life that you won’t hear on modern recordings They just had to do it. Most of the high end and low end detail on those records was obliterated by saturation from overdriven tape to get past the noise floor, shit tons of old tubes, and heavy compression on everything. The mid detail that is there is artificially boosted by compressors and tubes.

Late 60s have multi track machines so there is less dubbing down and saturation and the 70s and 80s finally got decent enough solid state and decent sounding analog paths so the recordings got way cleaner.

Late 60s to mid 90s stuff is generally the top tier before the whole industry started collapsing due to their own shenanigans, rise of adat and Mackie mixers replacing good analog boards and the more expensive Sony DATs, awful digidesign trash converters, look ahead digital limiters, auto tune, melodyne, ableton and fruity loops.

Now the actual recording technology is way better and cheaper than ever (a thousand or two for every 8 channels) but there is no money in it, those studio rooms still cost a lot to build and maintain, and major label artists who have recording budgets will f**k up their recordings anyway. Of course those heavy limiters cause massive aliasing. Their recordings have digital and solid state clipping everywhere anyway. It doesn’t even have to go over or blink red. Retards teach other retards to intentionally clip shit to make it sound perceivably louder and harsher. They’ve been clipping the AD in mastering for 20 years.

 

Maybe I didn't express myself well enough, but you missed the point of my post. Nothing to do with micing.

 

A quick thought. It's possible to get the wrong end of the stick thinking about reverb tails and ambience, because that is closely tied up with soundstage. Eg, you will always be able to hear reverb tails easier on headphones than speakers but that's largely to do with the very different staging rather than plankton retrieval. Similarly, locating very low-level sounds in the mix might be possible due to great imaging (if they have a unique location in the stereo field) rather than plankton retrieval. I think plankton is easiest to observe in inner texture/sustained sounds, eg:

• very low-level wow and flutter from tape masters
• weight of individual notes in chords by a pianist with excellent touch (Bill Evans, Daniel Barenboim, Stephen Osborne)
• tiny changes in balance between the players in block horn chords
• picking out the speed and depths of slow tremolo effects / Hammond boxes
• change in noise levels / feel when an overdubbed track comes in
• shifts in tonal balance or subtle clipping when the vocalist leans in closer to the mic

As Marv has said, gross detail retrieval can work against picking up these things, because if you have lots of details shoved in your face then it crowds out the space you need to let the subtleties come to your attention.

 

Recording errors and being able to pick out gear. You can tell Fairchild splatted drums from 1176 splat. You can pick up guitars and amps and pickups. Some gear can’t. Some gear can pick out that exact marshal amp.

 

On Valhalla 2 and 6xx with modi miltibit was the first time I think I experienced plankton. All on old recordings though. Mostly old Zappa and one song in particular from steely dan. King of the world. If that's not plankton then I don't know what it is. Any of you guys check it out and post back. off the sacd or the first MCA CD. Or a good vinyl chain.

 

I love this in live work by Jason Moran (just recently at YBCA), Kenny Barron (just recently at Herbst, Monk birthday celebration), Chucho Valdés. I should do a marathon of recorded solo piano listening to add a few album recommendations...

 

These lute recording, are among the best ever sound recording cd of lute, contains plenty of "plankton", subtle harmonics of each note, respiration, rope friction, etc...Particularly good sound is "la belle homicide"...One of the best ever...

The perception of these "plankton" is less linked to a trademark headphone, amplifier, or dac, than to the noise level of the audio system embedded itself in the electrical house grid with his own noise level...

Decreasing this noise level is the key.... The key is not to buy a trademark gear of this company or of this other one, but to treat the noise level....

You must buy the 24 bits files or the cd not listen to it on youtube for sure if you want to hear what I means by "plankton"...

 

The resolving power of each link in an audio system resulted from the particular embedding in the electrical grid of the audio room and of the electrical grid of the house, also from the acoustical property of the room, and depend also from the means and methods of controls of resonance and vibrations, then the final resulting combination of all these noise floor will determine the final level of this resolving power... The design of each particular trademark piece of gear plays also an important role for sure but not necessarily the first one...

But more important or at least on par with this resolving power of an audio system is its capacity to integrate organically the sound... This capacity is not directly linked to the resolving power and do not depend directly and only from the level of noise in the audio system...Other factors get into the game...It is in general better to have a more organically natural sound than a microscope for plankton if you had a choice, it is difficult to win on the 2 board, but an audiophile system win with these 2 qualities for sure: the capacity to integrate organically and the resolving power...

 

Nonsense. How many recordings are 24-bit? I'm going to guess very few. What albums/tracks in 24-bit have more plankton than 16-bit recordings?

The 24-bit files I've heard years ago never sounded as good as my 16-bit CD rips. And finding the best (re)masters of those CDs is what matters the most.

But I'll gladly eat crow if you can demonstrate the superiority of 24-bit over 16-bit. I think its a bullshit marketing scam simply because recordings are in 16-bit

 

Oups 16 bit flac will do for sure....My point is not linked to the format files 24 bits I apologize for my error... I wanted to specify a good files, be it flac, or ape files or a 320 bits mp3 etc and not the youtube format...

 

That was some confusing-ass word salad; and I'm not sure I want to understand.

 

The second part of your remark is the truth...