better gear, worse recordings

All of the systems are different. What is noticed with the latest system (and best to date) was staying on par with the recording. The bad recordings still sound bad but better than before and the good recordings are much noticeably better to just being astoninglisly good. Maybe should feel fortunate. I do hear some friend's systems that make cetain good recordings sound even better, but not so good with some of the bad recordings. This is very hard and almost seems impossible to get perfect. There is no perfect for all areas. Maybe this is why many of us make changes. It is a hobby.

Audiotomb; good thread but difficult to grapple with. I found Scott's (Sns) assessment above particularily astute and interesting, or said another way, I agree with much of what he says. I recently made a major speaker up-grade, ie from warm/forgiving to much more revealing-- but not analytical and lo and behold I had a whole new CD collection. I've got a feeling that has happened to everyone on this thread-- or reading this thread.

I found the "double edged sword" aspect that others have alluded to regarding recording quality and system quality to be true too. But I also found that it's not easy to predict what recordings are going to "survive" being played through a more revealing system, eg I have some remastered Jerry Lee Lewis CDs that sound very "musical" even though there are still some problems with the recording-- but PRT was retained. And the newly re-mastered CCR CDs are great-- they use JVCs K2 20Bit Super Coding system. I have purposely built my system to be musical, and don't equate either "high resolution" or "analytical" with high end audio. I'm too damned old to mindlessly pursue "resolution"-- I want musical.

Most audiophiles don't seem to like C/W music-- I do like some of it, but interestingly, I've found so many C/W recordings that have come out of Nashville that it can't be a coincidence. Nashville recording engineers know how to consistently produce good recordings, and I mean recordings that sound excellent on my pretty revealing system. Recent examples are Allison Moorer's "Alabama Song" CD, and Alison Krauss' "Forget About It"-- I don't actually know if these are Nashville recordings, but they are C/W and Bluegrass. How about Dolly Parton's "Sparrow"? And Emmylou Harris' "Cowgirls Prayer" is so good that it has survived several major upgrades. Enuf, and Cheers. Craig

in my experience it's tempting, when getting towards the top of the ladder, to take one or two steps too far. my system is becoming more comforting and listenable as i add or replace just a single component at a time. if i try to put several new pieces into it simultaneously, my "base" or "control" gets lost. i know i've gone a bridge too far when lp's or cd's i've learned to love begin to sound less comforting, musical or "real." recently, i've been experimenting with power "conditioners" and "regenerators." many of these products provide blacker backgrounds and a lower noise floor, but all are flawed in my current setup, since they cause a degradation of PRaT or a slight flabbiness in the mid to lower bass spectrum. i've spent years trying to reach that fine balance between "detail" and "musicality." i, thus, take great care not to let a single new bit act as gravity, forcing me to fall from the thin high wire. -cfb

Well put Kelly. I keep trying to "push" things sometimes and swap multiple components at a time. This is basically a BIG no-no from my experience, but i still do it. I have been hurt ( sometimes drastically ) by doing this too. At one point, i was extremely happy with one of my systems ( it sounded GREAT in terms of both musicality and detail ). I decided to "make it better" and move this cable here, that one there, take that amp out and put this one in, etc... As such, i lost the "synergy" that i had and was never able to get back to that point. While i can remember what preamp, amp, etc... i was using, i don't know what cables i had where. After learning that lesson, i'm now keeping a log book to keep track of what goes where, etc... This way i can experiment and still find my way back while trying to go forward : ) Sean
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Hmmmmm... So we think a system should play back exactly what is on the recording. Tell me; how do we know when we have reached that point?? Unless we were present at the recording session, and we have a perfect memory of what we heard at that session, there is no way for us to tell what we are hearing now is exactly what was recorded then.

There have been cases where instruments were a little out of tune at recording sessions. If we choose one of these recordings as our reference, and we tweek our systems so it now sounds in tune, because we assume it was in tune then, we are in trouble.