Why Lots of Current Music Sounds Miserable...

Try hearing that crap on stats, all the flaws are exposed and multipied...OUCH

Yes but what "crap" are we talking about?

The current popular crap (notice that word is really "rap" with a c added), hard metal bands, and your adolescent divas to name a few are engineered to be played on a 3" car speaker or through mp3 player earbuds or through the club PA system- none of which has much to do with fidelity. Compression doesn't matter as long as you can feel the bass in your chest and the treble zings in your ears, I mean after all the music is only background to getting drunk and laid.

It is not a new trend though if you look at the music of the past 3 decades (rock/top 40) tipped up in the treble to "sizzle" and the midbass to "thump". Recording values designed to make cheap speakers and electronics sound at least marginal but who cares - I'm drunk.

Entrope which of these recordings you refer to have you heard in your system?

Hmm, let me play the devils' advocate here. Maybe we're being myopic, not seeing the bigger picture. We at Audiogon are concerned with sound quality issues whereas I think the general music consuming public is caring less and less about such things. I work with lots of people in their 20's & 30's that are very well educated & are obsessed with popular music of all genres. As a rule, they couldn't care less about high fi issues. They do care about HOW they get their music delivered to them and vastly prefer their Ipods and computer hard drive storage/Itunes because of convenience. All they care about is maximazing file storage space and choose MP3 as a rule because it uses less storage space. This phenomena isn't limited to my friends, it's world wide. Loud bass and zippy treble with compressed sound cuts through the ambient noise that's the backround for most music consumers. People tend to use music as an sound track to daily life now, and they don't approach music listening as a passive activity requiring concentration. Even many older people I know have given up their component stereos for the convenience of the Ipod/Itunes music delivery systems. The audiophiles world is one of increasingly less less relevance I'm afraid.