B&W 703 - How to tame the highs?

Speakers do not have to be overly warm or inaccurate to play compressed music without ensuing listening fatigue.

I am not sure if I was clear - I don't mean compressed as in iTunes or MP3 - I meant compression of the sound by the mastering engineer to give you a "hot" loud sound...that is they deliberately kill the dynamics using limiters, which also adds all kinds of distortion.

If you are having success with Silverline Bolero then IMHO it is probably related to the enormous hole in the midrange from 1 KHz to 5 KHz. This is a fantatsic audiophile speaker but nobody could be criticized for remarking that this is inaccurate reproduction, of a kind which would definitely help reduce harshness and fatigue (many other audiophile speakers are designed this way too and they sound great - google "BBC Dip"). Thanks for helping to clarify what I really meant to say.

I'm well aware of the loudness wars but since we can't change the recordings, there really aren't a whole lot of options to chose from.

A few options that come to mind are:

1) Re-purchase the bulk of my CD collection in vinyl since vinyl recordings tend to be mastered better. This option would probably be the costliest and would re-add a degree of manual labor back into the listening experience.

2) Change the type of music I listen to. Not likely to happen as I grew up listening to the popular music of the 70's, 80's and 90's which was mainly Rock.

3) Treat the listening environment. This option depending on the degree of treatment necessary and the quality of the job you want to do can vary from something trivial to something that requires great effort, time, research and cost.

4) Change the equipment connected to your speakers and/or change your speakers. This is probably the most commonly explored option when things start sounding bad

Why tubes? Tubes are not a panacea. Do these tubes make sound prettier than in real life, is that what you are in fact saying? High frequency roll off maybe or treble softening? So, if that is the case than it is the coloration of tubes you like. So it appears tubes have an euphonic coloration. So this will upset many tube gurus who say that tubes don't have audible coloration.

Chris

Change the type of music I listen to. Not likely to happen as I grew up listening to the popular music of the 70's, 80's and 90's which was mainly Rock.

Actually most of the 70's and 80's rock music is fairly good - apart from Steve Lillywhite stuff and a few other "headbanger" producer/engineers. It is in the late 90's where is starts to get really bad and unlistenable on audiophile quality gear.

May I suggest a PEQ? You can program a PEQ with several curves...one to suit compressed rock music, for example with a broad 6 db dip around 3 KHz and going from 1 to 5 Khz. Whilst storing a different curve in memory for "Eva Cassidy high quality" type stuff and for when you watch a movie (movies are deliberately mixed to be dynamic as they are targetted at good cinema systems not car radio listeners). That way you can have your cake an eat it too!!

Another alternative would be two sets of speakers...A and B and switch between the two depending on your mood/requirement.

Unfortunately
1) there is no way to fix awful recordings...of course it begs the question why bother with a costly system to listen to awful recordings when anything cheap will generally do better.
2) while you can PEQ down - it is much harder to PEQ UP with good effect - I won't go into detail but it tends to sound better in the down direction which makes a transducers life easy rather than the other way round - so if your speaker has no midrange to start with then it is hard to correct as it may be a transducer limitation due to compression or an inherent odd radiation pattern - whilst a speaker with flat midrange and good dispersion can be easily EQ'd down a bit to get a desired effect.

I have owned B&W 804S speakers and I did not have a problem with highs at all. Those speakers have the best highs I have ever heard. They are there but not harsh even when played loud. The 804S's were a bit mid-rangy though. The bass was quite good. I played one of my Poison CDs which has a heck of a bass note in it and they handled it incredibly well. My preamp and amp are Adcom and my CD player is a Carver. That equipment is around 15 years old.