The Story of Nimbus. FoC

[shane]

I picked this up from the National Trust 2nd hand book stall at Saltram a while ago. It tells the story of the creation of the Nimbus record label in the mid 70s, and the dedicated and slightly odd people behind it. I’d never realised how much they contributed to the development of CD before.


Fascinating stuff. If anyone wants a read, happy to send it off for the cost of postage. First one to PM me gets it.

[Vince]

Pm sent

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[Lawrence001]

I remember them from a sampler I got in the late 80s it was called the Nimbus Sound or something. They used a special technique to capture the ambience of a hall but I wasn't keen on it at the time as I preferred close mic'd recordings. I'd probably be more open to it now.

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[hornucopia]

Ambisonics! The full set-up included a speaker above you.
Akin to Betamax as an idea crushed.
I recall that the recording technique involved using a dummy head with microphones in it.
The recordings (pre-digital,remember) had to be embedded with a frequency separator.
Nimbus pressings of LPs were good. A Hifi mag commissioned limited edition reissue of some music,using Nimbus pressings including Sgt Pepper,Eagles,Barbirolli.......which are rare and now v.expensive.

[Lawrence001]

Thank you, well remembered.

I looked it up and there's a good essay on here about producing a more realistic concert style sound than the more common close mic technique.

https://www.nimbusrecords.co.uk/inde...ng-description



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[hornucopia]

Now try the Hafler version of surround sound….






Apologies for sidetracking the post!

[shane]

No problem! The book’s found a new home, and a discussion of Ambisonics can only be a good thing. It always had the potential to be the best surround-sound system, but only now with DSP is it becoming viable.

[Lawrence001]

Inspired by this thread I've been looking out for a Nimbus CD to try and found this box set in Oxfam for £2.50 today.

https://www.prestomusic.com/classica...rit-of-england

As I don't have a CDP in my main system I'm currently ripping them to my Zen mini.

Interestingly the discs say "Stereo Ambisonic, UHJ encoded" on them. What does the latter mean?

[dave2010]

Inspired by this thread I've been looking out for a Nimbus CD to try and found this box set in Oxfam for £2.50 today.

https://www.prestomusic.com/classica...rit-of-england

As I don't have a CDP in my main system I'm currently ripping them to my Zen mini.

Interestingly the discs say "Stereo Ambisonic, UHJ encoded" on them. What does the latter mean?

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambisonic_UHJ_format

A few years ago I met some of the video recording staff in my last place of work, and some of them seemed to reckon that UHJ was a good way to make recordings for video, because of the post processing capabilities. However video is often a different ball game from high quality audio, as in video work much of the audio is subservient to the video. Modern digital software can be really rather good at faking sound - so the purist view of trying to capture the sound of an orchestra or band accurately, together with the ambient sounds - which was certainly an aim in some considerably earlier attempts of high quality audio production - has perhaps faded - also due to commercial pressures. Getting a large band together costs money and takes time, and if something goes wrong - a player comes in at the wrong time, or doesn't play at all for an important solo - then getting everyone back again to do a repeat is considered too expensive. One modern "solution" is to close mic everything, so that there's little spill over, and then if a part needs to be patched back in later, that is possible. Just get a few players back to record the parts which didn't work. Of course it's also possible to simultaneously record the sessions with more distant mics, to get what many might consider a more natural balance - capturing the ambience of the venue, and with modern digital storage that way different versions can be mixed together - hopefully carefully - to get the optimum sound quality for the most economic final outcome. Although equipment and data storage costs may still be fairly high, presumably these are now considered relatively low compared with the costs of getting groups of musicians and the technicians to record them all together in the same place at the same time. So then the sessions may try to get 90% (or 95%, or 99%) of "perfection", with the near certainty that some tweaks can be done afterwards to correct minor problems, or make some "subtle" "improvements" to the overall SQ.

Not everyone agrees with all the sonic tweaks done in this way.

Some of the earlier UHJ experiments and developments were I think done using analogue kit, and probably tape storage.