From concert to home, can we reproduce what we hear at the concert at home?

Image from the concert presentation booklet

One of the great pleasures for music reproduction enthusiasts or audiophiles is to reproduce at home the sound perceived at concerts.
But it’s not always easy to compare what you hear at a concert with what you hear at home. Is it possible to hear exactly the same thing at home as at a concert?
This is the experience I’m proposing with the New Year’s concert, broadcast live on video on ARTE Concert and in audio on Radio France Musique. The video and music are also available in replay (for a limited time, see links below).

The concert took place in the superb auditorium of the Maison de la Radio with the Orchestre Nationale de France conducted by Stéphane Denève and with Lise de la Salle at the piano for Rhapsody in Blue.

The Radio France auditorium was inaugurated in September 2014, Designed as an arena with the audience surrounding the orchestra. It has 1461 seats installed in balconies and distributed all around the orchestra. Whatever the position, the spectator is never more than 17 meters from the stage (Find out more about Maison de La radio Et De La Musique).

The pieces performed were as follows:
LEONARD BERNSTEIN
Ouverture de « Candide »

GEORGES BIZET
L’Arlésienne
1 – Carillon, extrait de la Suite n°1
2 – Adagietto, extrait de la Suite n°1
3 – Minuetto, extrait de la Suite n°1
4 – Menuet, extrait de la Suite n°2
5 – Farandole, extrait de la Suite n°2

JACQUES OFFENBACH/ MANUEL ROSENTHAL
La Gaîté parisienne (extraits)
Ouverture
1 – Allegro brillante
2 – Polka
13 – Allegro vivace – Misterioso duel
14 – Valse
23 – Barcarolle (dans l’orchestration d’Offenbach)
16 Allegro – Prelude au Cancan
16 – Cancan
21 – Entrée du Brésilien
22 – Cancan

GEORGE GERSHWIN
Rhapsody in Blue
Un Américain à Paris

But before talking about listening at home, let’s start with listening in the concert hall.
It’s easy to imagine that you’ll be placed in front of the orchestra, in the center, but as the photo below shows, there are few seats of this type, as in all concert halls.In fact, there are as many perceptions of the concert as there are seats available.

I’ve been listening to several concerts in this superb hall, and for this one, I was positioned on the right-hand side, not very high up.

What always stands out when listening to a concert in this hall is the homogeneous and coherent rendering, while retaining the finesse and detail of each instrument.
The perceived soundstage is consistent with what we’re looking at.
The depth and distance of the different instruments are perfectly perceived.
The energy released by the orchestra allows all the instruments to be perceived with great dynamics, without any masking effect.
On the track Rapsodie In Blue, my position meant that the piano was on the left at the same distance as the rest of the orchestra, resulting in a rendering with a lower or similar level to the orchestra.

These sensations will serve as a reference for comparison with listening at home.

The day after the concert, two versions were available:
The video on ARTE Concert, which has the advantage of retaining the visual, but with numerous zooms on the musicians, giving a better view of their playing. The general view, showing the position of each musician.
Sound quality is in AAC LC at variable bit rate.
The audio version of the concert is available as part of the music program on France Music in AAC quality at variable bit rate.
The graphs below show that the dynamic range is well respected, specificaly for ARTE Concert, with a difference of over 60 dB on some tracks, such as Rapsodie In Blue.

AAC encoding has an impact on bandwidth, with a limitation to 18.6 kHz (yellow arrow) for the audio version Radio France and 15.8kHz (yellow arrow) for the video version ARTE Music.

For listening at home, two systems will be used: a system based on Genelec speakers, and a horn system in a larger room.
The first thing you notice when listening to the recorded version is the difference in positioning. You can hear the orchestra in front of you from a central position.

The soundstage is very wide, but even if there is a notion of depth, it’s hard to find the much greater notion of volume and space that we perceived at the concert (we mustn’t exclude the fact that seeing the orchestra can also influence the perception of sound distances and the distinction of instruments).

This is due to a number of factors in relation to the concert:

• the size of the concert room with its large volume is not comparable to the size of the system listening room.
• The concert was recorded with several microphones and mixed to retain the energy of all the instruments, which differs from listening directly to the orchestra.

On Rapsodie In Blue, the difference is even more marked, mainly due to the piano and its position at the front of the orchestra.
We find it in a dominant central position and with a higher sound level, but also with a different tonal balance, highlighting its presence at a short distance in front of us.
If you listen to both versions (links are available), you’ll be able to appreciate the quality of the concert, but as I don’t have a recording from my seat at the concert, it won’t be possible to get a sense of what I heard during the concert to make the comparison.

What can we conclude from this musical experience?
There isn’t just one concert sound, but many, depending on where you are in the concert hall.
Recording a concert is like taking a photo or painting a picture. In a painting, you choose the colors, the types of paint and pigments, the brushes used, but in a recording, it’s the same thing: depending on the choices you make – types, number and position of microphones, mixing… We obtain one of the possible representations of music, which will be more or less close to what you hear in concert which also depends on the position.
The recording of the concert is simply a representation of it, in the context of listening to a large orchestra.
Home playback therefore reproduces a representation of the concert which may be different from what we heard live, and it is therefore difficult to base our judgment of realism on a reference, even one heard in concert, as there is no single reproduction reality. Rather, it’s on the feeling of realism that we base our judgment of whether a system is capable of reproducing the reality of concert sound.

If you have the opportunity, go to concerts (I recommend “The Radio France auditorium” if you are in France), and if this one is recorded, you can have the same experience, which is very interesting.