I'd take it from a different angle - those worried about "fidelity" that don't play instruments and have never worked on a studio recording simply have no idea what they're talking about. They latch on to numbers because numbers are easy to understand, and bigger == better, right?
After engineering/producing a bunch of albums, one thing I can say for sure is that a good-sounding album is totally fake relative to the actual, natural sounds of the instruments involved. That's fine, because it sounds good. An accurate recording doesn't sound good. It's too loud or too quiet (often in the same passage), lacks a sense of space, and lacks impact.
Here's an example of what I'm talking about. When mixing guitar/bass/drums, I'll often high-pass guitars around 200hz - basically, throwing out any signal below that with an equalizer. And if you listen to the guitar by itself, it sounds like it's been gutted. But in the context of a mix, the change to the guitar is inaudible - but the drums and bass sound better! The heart of the guitar's sound is in the midrange, not the bass range. You can lose the bass range and as long as other instruments are there, your ears fill in the missing information for you. Meanwhile, the heart of the kick drum and bass guitar are in that lower range, so getting other instruments out of their way makes them easier to hear.
Let's go even one step further: anything that's being amplified on a microphone for live performance is already "artificial". I do sound engineering for a band and I tweak
the hell out of the EQ for live performance, also adding compressors and reverbs, and the difference night and day compared to bands that don't care about that, or don't have a sound guy who knows what they should like.
Yeah, but that line of reasoning opens up the "You think it's good because it's just warm distortion" line from the head over heart crowd, and it's often not at all true. You can spot these people because they'll use THD (total harmonic distortion) like a meaningful number. THD specs are generated by 1khz sine waves. It deliberately ignores both dynamics and harmonic content - the fundamental building blocks of music. It's like measuring how well a car drives 50mph.
Exert from: Audio Technology Magazine's Issue 1, March/ April 1998
GS : Geoff Emerick, the famous British Producer ?
RN : Yes, he started me off on this trail. A 48 input console had been delivered to George Martin's Air Studios, and Geoff Emerick was very unhappy about it. It was a new console, made not long after I had sold the Neve company in 1977. George Martin called me and said, "please come and make Geoff happy, while he's unhappy we can't do any work".
They'd had engineers from the company there, and so on. The danger is that if you are not sensitive to people like Geoff Emerick, and you don't respect them for what they have done, then you are not going to listen to them. Unfortunately, there was a breed of young engineers in the company ( I hasten to say this was after I sold it !) who couldn't understand what he was bitching about. So they went back to the company and just made a report saying the customer was mad and there wasn't really a problem. Leave it alone, forget it, the problem will go away. They were acting like used car salesmen. I was very angry with it. So I went and spent time there, at George Martin's request, and Geoff finally managed to show me what it was that he could hear, and then I began to hear it, too.
Now Geoff was The Golden Ears - and he still is - and he was perceiving something that I wasn't looking for. And it wasn't until I had spent some time with him, as it were, being lead by him through the sounds, that I began to pick up what he was listening to. And once I'd heard it, oh yes, then I knew what he was talking about. We measured it and found that in three out of the full 48 channels, the output transformers had not been correctly terminated and were producing a 3dB rise at 54kHz. And so people said, "oh no, he can't possible hear that". But when we corrected that problem, and it was only one capacitor that had to be added to each of those three channels, I mean, Geoff's face just lit up ! Here you have the happiness/ unhappiness mood thing the Japanese were talking about.
GS : So they had left the same capacitor off each of the three offending channels, leaving their output transformers unterminated ?
RN : Oh yes. All of the principal parts in my designs are transformer outputs. There is a huge advantage in the total isolation, which we'll talk about later. But a transformer has leakage inductance. In a good transformer it's a very small leakage inductance, but it is there. You have to make sure that it is damped out, so that when you are adding long lines or any other load to it, it isn't going to obtrude. So we put an RC network across the transformer output, which neutralizes the leakage inductance. The RC network, which is only a resistor and capacitor, was incomplete on three of these transformers for some reason. We fixed the network, and then there were no problems.
GS : So someone could hear the effect of a 3dB boost at 50kHz. I would imagine that gave you some food for thought.
RN : That was what Geoff was not happy about, it was upsetting him. So I went back, sort of scratching my head and thinking, "well, I'm not going to try at this stage and find out why that's happening, but I know it does happen. So let's make sure it will never happen again". If Geoff and others could hear things going on as high as 50kHz, how high could they actually hear ? I did a bit of development work, and found that I could do new circuitry, with a much wider bandwidth, relatively easily. So I redesigned all my transformers and output circuitry, and the general electronics.
GS : Sounds like an important lesson for technicians and equipment designers !
RN : The danger here is that the more qualified you are, the more you 'know' that something can't be true, so you don't believe it. Or you 'know' a design can't be done, so you don't try it. Ignorant idiots like me don't know it can't be done, so we have a go and it works. {Laughs}
After engineering/producing a bunch of albums, one thing I can say for sure is that a good-sounding album is totally fake relative to the actual, natural sounds of the instruments involved. That's fine, because it sounds good. An accurate recording doesn't sound good. It's too loud or too quiet (often in the same passage), lacks a sense of space, and lacks impact.