Most agreed upon best speaker?

Lrsky, would you come over and sign my abdomen?

Newbee, the idea that a certain age of music recordings is designed to sound right on a certain vintage of speaker and amplification is a red herring. Often recording engineers, just like today, are recording on location and using headphones. Mic placement theory has not changed in the last 40 years.

Any engineer worth his salt knows that the monitors in the studio are not telling the truth, and that the recording will have to be heard on several different systems, and that it will have to sound right on all of them. That has also been universally acknowledged since the 1950s.

Your descriptions of the Telarc are spot on though. And a lot of the re-issues. I think you are hearing things right.

I recall the dynamics are what made the early Telarc digital recordings, like the well known Shaw/Firebird recording, special at the time, but in hindsight today, many other aspects, like detail, were lacking. Things have improved greatly with digital mostly since then.

Atmosphere, I find your comments interesting. You may be right.

You certainly are right about the 'golden age' of recording techniques 50 years ago that survived the initial introduction of stereo (ping pong anyone) and ultimately, and unfortunatly I think, grew into excessive multi-miking, spot miking/mixing, etc. There were/are some great recording engineers, just not enuf I think. In this case I'm not sure that the exception proves the rule. At least when I started listening to the RCA's and Merc's I had modest stuff and didn't start to appreciate their sonic 'greatness' until Harry Pearson started pointing it out and I had started to assumble some stuff that let me hear what was actually in the groves.

I was listening to a couple of those original RCA LS's last night on my modest analog system (SP10 II, Oracle TT, Benz Glider, and MMT arm) and the results were excellent. Every bit as good, or better, than quality, contemporaneously recorded, digital over a system addmittedly tuned to flatter digital. BUT, and you knew there was a BUT (or butt, as the case may be) remasters on the RCA .5 series, the Chesky series, the Classic reissues, and some CD's, just didn't rise to that level.

Perhaps wrongly, I assumed that the folks resonsible for re-issues were using equipment to assess the reissues that flattered the reissues and it was equipment contemporaneous to the re-issue process - equipment that was/is not in my possession. Hell it must have sounded good on someone's stuff, I've seen it get many accolades. This suggested to me that, as with my Telarc experience, my supposition had some merit. But I'm often wrong, especially when I extrapolate from personal experience some thing more universal. :-)

The Yamaha NS10's were a great little speaker because it forced engineers to concentrate on ensuring the midrange sounded good. These were a big advance from the Urei and Westlake, Lansing horns used in the 60's.

So I agree with Newbee that there is certainly an effect on the sound based on the monitors used. But given the variety of systems out there it is hard to identify a specific trend.

An NS10 used to get the midrange right followed by bass checks on main monitors and then a final check in the car on the way home has been a pretty succesful approach since the early 80's.

The problem with sloppy bass and recessed mids on many "pleasing" sounding speakers is that far too many errors get through due to masking effects. Elliot Scheiner still uses the NS10 or the latest version (MSP10) as far as I know. (If you think the Eagles and Steely Dan stuff sounds good then you know why)

Lately there has been a move towards more accurate monitors driven by the research by the likes of Dr Floyd Toole - monitors with wide even dispersion that load the room evenly and work in a variety of condition and not just close nearfield. This has eliminated the need for checks on multiple systems and resultyed in speakers that perfrom much more uniformly across different brands.

Part of the problem in the past was one of uneven dispersion meaning that the same speaker could sound completely different depending on the setup/surrounding (especially true with older farfield main monitors horns).

Today some people can even mix on main monitors (often in architecturally acoustically designed spaces) but most people still use nearfield monitors that are less affected by location/surroundings...so things have changed since the old massive Urei horn days when the likes of Led Zeppelin and The Who were blowing up speakers twice a week.

Here is a nice recap.