video of 6 famous violins

[Anders Buen]

Ok, my bad choice of words. I never meant to say I played or heard them in person.

And that's not going to change the fact that recordings will not represent the true character and the sound heard in person.

I would be more interested in reading facts, if you have any, on how the sound files or recording techniques makes listening to these or any other say Youtube videos different from the real experience.

I do know a bit about it, but not the whole story, of course. I think this work is a part in studying what the player hear versus what a listener may hear. Seems to be mics in other positions also, e.g. on the shirt there. I think we may expect an article or something on this, at some time.

I would suppose these videos are for information and media purposes, and are not a part of the study itself, besides being useful documentation.

It is much more interesting to read comments that are documented with measurements or real facts. Opinions are not really much interesting in this respect. To get anywhere on this subject one really has to do the measurements with known settings and equipment.

There will of course be something in such a video sound signal that say something bout the instruments, and for comparisons they are good if the settings are the same, as you may expect here. In AAC sound coding I would believe the amplitude and phase signals are ok up to about 16kHz as in mp3s. But I do not know if its 16 bits or 24 or if there is loss of useful information in the signal in comparison to just a wav recording using the same recording settings. This far in a little search on mp3 and Youtube sound it seems as if it is in the transient parts of the signal the sound becomes unnatural first using low resolution mp3's (AAC is a later standard based on the work done for making the mp3 standard). Applause and drum sounds are such problematic types of sounds, less so with violin music from a single source.

[JimMurphy]

I think this work is a part in studying what the player hear versus what a listener may hear. Seems to be mics in other positions also, e.g. on the shirt there. I think we may expect an article or something on this, at some time.

Yes, it would be good to read an article on the recording and digital encoding techniques used. Even though mp3 is a lossy compression scheme, typically using 16-bits, two channels [stereo] and a sample rate of 44.1 kHz for encoding will faithfully reproduce the live sound quality.

I wonder if they used VBR [Variable Bit Rate] or CBR [Constant Bit Rate] for this recording/compression. That could make a big difference in sound quality.

Jim