Talk but not walk?

michaelgreenaudio

Ever read someone talk about a recording on here calling it terrible, and you've played that same recording on your setup and it sounds great? ... Someone somewhere is listening to "that" recording and it sounds fantastic. So the question is "why doesn't it sound great on every system"

There many explanations, the most obvious being a matter of personal taste, but the variables are countless. Some people have poor systems, or improperly setup systems, or malfunctioning systems, or an unidentified failed component in the system. They may have extremely bad electric service, or an acoustically bad room, or they may be half-deaf. They may have a prejudice against the artist, or the artist's genre, or the record cover.

Maybe they were listening to a different pressing, or a defective pressing, or, or, or ....

@michaelgreenaudio thank you for initiating this thread.

You raise the very same issue I often wonder when reading so many the threads these days. People with no actual experience with something, and even blatantly say they will not try, spend inordinate amounts of time writing posts about how something works or sounds. Or, more usually, how something CANNOT work or sound.

One of my earliest and best lessons I learned in audio was that drinking by the label absolutely presents a losing recipe.

In all honesty, I have never understood the rancor some have towards folks who found something they enjoy. Some here evidently have a god / hero / policeman complex where they try to save the world, and spend more time writing parking tickets than something that would actually benefit the rest of the community, or even their own existences. But they obviously feel gallant in their own minds as they labor to save the world from spending money on something they don’t like, disagree with, or doesn’t make any logical sense to them. The irony lies in that the more these folks rail against these things, the more the other side wins the air time to tout what the antagonists despise so deeply.

Though I’ll also put out that if the protagonists simply refrained from answering their foes, they’d also be a lot happier as it’s patently obvious so many who carry on these arguments do it for the attention it brings them. Ignore them, and they’ll go away from your discussion threads. By that I mean, if you want to talk about the happiness X brought to you, instead of going tit for tat day after day, week after week, month after month with these other people, just overlook their posts, and focus on your conversations. They’ll stamp their feet a bit, and go a bit more extreme in trying to get a reaction, but watch how they die off, and find some other bowl of corn flakes to try to urinate in.

As for me, I’m in this hobby for my own personal enjoyment. And I’ve made some great friends along the way. If I don’t like or want a [piece of music / component / person / wire / tweak / fuse / whatever], going on a crusade tilting against windmilss seems like a colossal waste of my time and my life. Live and let live

@michaelgreenaudio 

I like your use of "bad" recordings to tune a system. It's only been through trial and error, system tweaking, speaker placement, etc. that I take out some of those old, unlistenable CDs that we all have lying around and now find them better, if not great sounding. It's always been that little test I do for myself. Some of those older, bad sounding CDs can be some real gems.

All the best,
Nonoise