Alright hear me out, I’ll be as brief as the topic allows.
Warm tone in regard to sound engineering and recording is often defined with fairly unquantifiable terms. For the layman, terms like soft, pillowy, blanketed, full, classic, “not sharp”, natural, tube, analog, etc. are all mostly reaching for something which evades a technical understanding of the building blocks that compose sound. Those words don’t necessarily match a sound designer’s description of what makes up the space which is considered sonically “warm” but is somehow universally understood enough to be debated ad infinite.
A lot of what we reference for this impression of warm, is the music, television, and film we grew up with. For those who grew up in the 70’s / 80’s / 90’s, much of what we sonically experienced first or secondhand in regard to the recording technology of the 50’s / 60’s / 70’s / 80’s was created on gear that is now mostly considered “warm” sounding, with some having been collectively elected as “better” sounding than others.
So, the stage is set, we think of these older forms of media as sounding warm, not digital, but the sound engineers in the 1940’s / 1950’s weren’t thinking warm, they were thinking about getting the “best” recording possible, which to them meant a clear and as lifelike as possible reproduction of the sound being recorded. The 1960’s saw expanded use of recording as a sound medium, but still their model was influenced by their direct predecessors, in that even with sounds that are intentionally saturated or distorted, “a professional, good recording, sounds clear, lifelike and nuanced.”
So, things continue to develop and then here we are in a digital era where warmth has become a very specific let’s call it “pocket” of sound design, and the perception of that pocket, involves something of a hierarchal system of identifying how warm it is. If you said “neve console” someone thinks warm, if you said “digital recorder” mostly that same person does not think warm, and yes, there’s a lot of ground in between.
Our perception of warmth is then based on sounds created on or emulating gear and recording techniques used by engineers who were limited by the technology, and were often more concerned with getting a good recording, so why is our perception of it warm? Does warm really mean slightly muffled, or exponential tube harmonics, or sonically limited or whatever some classic recordings actually are when compared against a modern digital wave?
Isn’t it possible that we define this psychological effect of nostalgia as something “warm” therefore this entire perception of warm tone is sort of an unintentional cultural brainwashing? Classic recordings of the past are always going to be classic, but is our attachment to them and therefore the “warm” sound, purely psychological with no other merit? I guess warm tone exists if we understand it to exist, and can define it enough to intentionally create it, but what makes people use the term warm in regard to sound engineering and recording as opposed to some other adjective?
When I googled looking for information to support this discussion, rather than finding firsthand accountings of prior generation recording engineers talking about what they were trying to accomplish in this regard (you often find description of technical details but without any mention of sensory words), mostly you’ll find modern online conjecture and people talking about what “the masters” were going for, or speculating on how they got their tones. So attached to that, if anyone can cite any reference to “analog engineers of the past” looking for a “warm” tone and disprove any of this, that would also be interesting, but mostly I am somewhat convinced that the association of the word warm with an unlike sensation of hearing, almost certainly has a psychological connotation in the same way that some people say seeing a baby duck, or nostalgia, makes them feel “warm”.
Anyways, that’s all I got. I hope someone made it through all of this and is still awake enough to have an opinion!
