Glossary of recording attributes

Describing aspects of audio with words can be quite tricky, but here goes:

Focus Image stability and concentration in one place. If you shut your eyes, can you locate the instrument very precisely, more generally but in a particular direction, or not at all?

Bloom The important sense of the depth and size of the real space the player is in. The early reflections and the reverb time will convey information about the nature of the room or hall and the space around the player. This translates into a sense of the instrument not being a pinpoint location in the recorded image but having some size and feeling of ‘air’ around it.

Depth This is the perception of distance from the front to the back of the ensemble. Performers at the rear will tend to sound more reverberant, with some loss of high frequency, and produce less ‘close’ instrumental noise such as key noise, bow noise, and breathing. They will also have a narrower image width if they are an instrument with any sort of size or a section taken as a whole.

Detail Details of the instrument’s sound/noises, such as you get from placing a microphone closer. There needs to be an appropriate amount of detail for the distance from the listener: the instrument should not be pulled out of its context in an ensemble by picking up too much in the way of close noises.

Width The amount of space between the loudspeakers that is filled by the recorded image. This works very differently on headphones, and loudspeaker monitoring is needed to judge this well.