Is Recording quality the real culprit?

BINGO! Blaring Sirens going off. DING DING DING! You win the big prize. Bigtwin is correct and so are you. I have had media in different formats. CD, Vinyl and tape recordings, BUT the most glaring and obvious quality differences has been heard in the recordings themselves. The artist, the sound engineer, the label and many other factors play a role. In fact, some music artists have really spent more time in the studio, think Steely Dan, Boston, Diana Krall, Pink Floyd and many, many others. Think of some great audio masters like Rudy Van Gelder, Lee Herschberg, Elliot Scheiner, Bruce Swedien, Geoff Emerick, Don Landee, Alan Parsons, Ken Scott, Todd Rundgren, George Martin, Quincy Jones, Tom Dowd, Phil Spector, Bob Clearmountain, Bernie Grundman, Brian Wilson, Eddy Kramer, Tom Scholz, Trevor Horn.

Consider yourself lucky when you mention many artists do things well when it comes to recording quality. In my experience it is unfortunately the other way around. I venture that less than 20% of music recorded between the sixties and today are what I consider well recorded. And I'm very generous. But that still makes for thousands of great albums, it's just a huge undertaking to find them.

In fact, just now I discovered a Jazzraush Bigband album named Bangers only! A German big band mixing jazz with electronics from Germany. Take a listen, very well recorded and good fun upbeat music.

Jazzrausch

The sonic presentation of systems are vastly different given the same source material. If the system is tuned to maximize detail, with a lean midrange to become a microscope on details, then the resolution of the source material becomes really critical, and unless perfect can sound bad. Systems like this tend to lose the music… the gestalt because of the missing dominance of the midrange and as a consequence the rhythm and pace.

A system that appropriately reproduces the audio spectrum and gets the gestalt of the music will not be very sensitive to the recording… the focus on the music not on details and micro imaging. Also, importantly, there are systems at most levels of in investment the can achieve this gestalt (generally tubed) and greater levels of investment do lead to greater detail and imaging… etc, but they are carefully crafted to keep the overall balance so not to lose the music.

This makes me think of using sharpening in digital imaging. Beautiful and emotional images are created using a small amount of sharpening, but more and the image get sharper but attenuates the emotional connection, more and it creates fatigue just looking at it. More and it looks terrible.

I’ve owned systems with spectacular detail, transparency, and speed. Great scientific instruments that completely missed the point of musical reproduction. I would listen to the system and recording instead of being drawn into the music. My systems are now musical first and typically I don’t notice the recording quality unless really bad.