Posted by Jay Bertolet on January 19, 2000 at 17:10:23:
In Reply to: Re: Re: Does Size Matter, Some Observations posted by steve dedman on January 19, 2000 at 16:43:58:
I think where our orchestra's problems are concerned, you've hit the nail right on the head. Many of the players in the FPO have become rather concerned with our public image. We try to police all broadcasts, CD's, etc. to see that what is put in front of the public is representative of who we are and how we do things. We even established what we call a Music Advisory Committee that meets regularly and relays artistic concerns to the management and music directory (for what its worth). The very first issue that was addressed after the inception of that committee was the quality of our broadcasts on the local classical station. First, we spoke with the recording engineer, a board member who runs his own high end stereo business. He assured us that what he was giving the station was a first generation copy. Even more than that, he does all of our concerts on a very expensive and nifty portable DAT machine so everything is digital and spotless. From what I understand about digital recording, that means the first generation copies are like masters from a quality standpoint. He assured us that the station's playback equipment was the problem and after some investigating on our part, we found that to be exactly right. And it is just like you said, they are woefully underfunded and the only classical station in town. With no competition, there hasn't been any drive for improvement. We even enlisted the help of the music director, who has a weekly show on that station and carps as loudly as anyone about the playback quality, to try and put the bug in the right person's ear to get some better equipment but nothing ever came of it. And we later found out about the signal compression technique, described in other posts, as something that was affecting our broadcasts as well.
So I guess if someone wants to hear how we REALLY sound, they're just going to have to come hear us live. Of course, choosing which hall to hear us in is just another long, sad discussion...