"Bridge Over Trouble Water" sounds artificial

This is the best, perhaps only reason to have more than one music system setup.  For example my old car cassette mix tapes sound pretty good in my workshop on Spectrum 208As and Minimus 7's through a 1971 vintage KA-4002 integrated.
The office room has a multibit to a Vali 2 for monitoring and a Nobsound 3116 powering Pioneer S-H453F-K's and a JBL car sub for rocking out. In that room the cheap Chinese amp sounds much better than the Dynaco stuff it replaced.
None of these sources sound "good" on the "A" system.

Furthermore much of the old stuff was recorded and mixed for AM radio and cheap stereos, which we all had then.
Still, a lot of it sounds pretty good on "Wow I Haven’t Heard This Song in Years"
which streams at 128 kbps.
Alas, some of the troglodytes around here will NEVER hear those songs again

Glad I'm not the only one who noticed that about Simon and Garfunkel recordings. And I agree with Glupson about AM radio and some of those songs, and classical for that matter. As much as I love high fidelity stereo there are times when simple mono with limited frequency response from a simple radio just creates the magic somehow. I think it lets my imagination take over more, romanticize more. It's like 24 frame per second film compared to 60 frame per second. Too much information destroys something fancy going on in my head. 

I’m on the side of the fence that says I enjoy hearing what old radio tunes really sound like on a good quality modern hifi rig.. It’s often nothing like what you remember....so many things happening that were obscured prior.

If it’s relative lo-fi like from a car radio 50 years ago one pines for, lots of inexpensive options still for that.

The internet is actually quite useful for researching information about the actual recording of this album.  If you're truly interested, there's even a documentary movie where the songwriter, vocalists, instrumentalists and engineer/producer describe making the album.  They really weren't thinking about car and portable fm radios.  BOTW was a high dollar prestige product from the largest record label at that time.  I wonder what the SQ matrix quad mix sounds like?

I read BOTW was produced using Phil Spector “Wall of Sound” production techniques. Read up on that and explains a lot.

The first part with just vocal and piano is a much simpler production. It sounds like the piano was closely stereo miked which spreads the keys across the soundstage.


I used an original CD release of BOTW album streamed at CD resolution using flac format to listen to and assess BOTW the song/track. 

For the hit pop release that it was intended to be the recording is pretty good actually overall. Just don’t compare it to a good quality classical recording. Apples/oranges. Though the piano/vocal only first part is not radically different from many.