Plosives - is that what I’m hearing?

First time poster but been lurking and learning for a while. I’m wondering if it is a relatively common thing to hear a kind of thump in the speakers that sounds like the mouth or instrument was to close to the microphone when recorded - I believe “plosives” may be the term for this. I was listening to “Moanin” by Art Blakey last night and could hear this kind of pressure thump during the loud parts of the trumpet solo (streaming through qobuz). I’ve heard similar on other, typically older, recordings - just wondering if this is a thing or something in my system. Cheers.

1 Like

It can indeed be a thing, including in live concerts if things aren’t set up properly or the musician performs much closer to the mike than planned and, yes, plosive would be a perfectly adequate term for the sound.

2 Likes

Interesting thought … I notice this sort of thing most when listening to sport commentaries when the speaker gets too close to the microphone.

1 Like

Thing is it’s kinda spoiling a great track for me. Now, Moanin is a classic album which many people would have listened to on great systems, but I can’t find any comments about this anywhere, it leaves me wondering if it’s the track or is there something else going on.

Just had a listen to it (Moanin’, title track) and there are a few deep thumps which aren’t in time with the music, and my best guess is, it’s just extraneous noises (bumping the mic, something being kicked or moved etc) picked up by the mic’s which the engineers either chose to leave in, or simply missed. It doesn’t spoil the music for me though.

1 Like

Noise floor. I’m guessing that most others whilst listening to something with a noisy floor will subconsciously listen through all sorts of artefacts, filtering out clutter.
With a recording and system with a lower noise floor, these things should homogenise to an overall gestalt.

2 Likes

Thanks for that Graeme, if it’s on the track and not a system problem then pretty sure I’ll adjust and accept it. If anyone else wants to have a listen to the track and let me know what you hear, that would also be great. Many thanks.

Which version are you listening to? The early stereo version seems to be less compressed/have a greater dynamic range than the remastered version and there are a couple of moments of distortion. The Alt TK early stereo one captures the life of the recording better in my opinion, but the remastered is slightly better on instrumental textures. The other early stereo one seems the worst for plosives, but I didn’t find them too intrusive and overall I may prefer it as slightly less processed and bit more live and fun. But I could live with any of them. If you are finding the plosives extremely irritating, it might be worth having a quick visual inspection of your tweeters. A tiny split would accentuate it.

Thanks Michael - I’m listening to the Blue Note remastered through Qobuz. Just tried a couple of different versions and perhaps it is slightly lower on one or two. Can’t see the tweeters especially well on my speakers, but I changed the cables over as an experiment and I get the same effect out of the other speaker as well, so I think I can rule that out. Thanks again.

This topic was automatically closed 60 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.