Skyscraper:
Thus far some records or CD’s sound very different form what I’ve been used to listening to over the years. ...
Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon on Mobile Fidelity sounded like a muddy mess and super crackly to boot, although an almost brand new pressing. ...
Paul Desmond’s alto sax practically jumped out of the speakers on the Brubeck’s Take Five album, which had previously left me non-plussed, but now was quite enjoyable. ...
Okay so here's the thing, or my view on it anyway: what you are shooting for is not a system that sounds any way in particular, but a system that sounds like nothing at all. The perfect system has no sound of its own. It disappears. If perfect it would literally disappear. But we will settle for when you turn the lights off and the music on then all you have is the music.
When that is the case then yes sorry to say but you will sometimes find yourself playing recordings that used to sound great and ought to sound great but instead sound like crap. There's a lot that goes into this and its not an easy thing to understand so let me try and explain.
DSOTM, I have four or five copies (just of the LP). One original issue from about 1972, two MoFi reissues, one remastered reissue. I pulled the virtually brand new and supposedly audiophile reissue out recently. Even though I hadn't played DSOTM in years it was immediately obvious this version was crap. Absolute crap. Congealed, smothered, obnoxiously hard edged flat yet grainy crap. Could only stand a few minutes. Pulled out the others to compare. The original was much more open, detailed and dynamic. The MoFi (both of them) were close to the original, with just a hair of presence smoothed off, enough that a lot would probably prefer it as more quiet if they never heard them side by side.
In this case it would seem the crap reissue was ruined in mastering, while MoFi probably just did better mastering and took more care in the pressing, yet even with all of that still didn't quite match the original.
Listen to all of these however and then put on the Brubeck. Which is a whole different story. Both have some pretty fine sax, but the Brubeck is far more viscerally present and there in the room. In fact the difference is much more than that. Its more like when playing that recording the whole room is different. Your room is the same. But the room you hear is different. As your system gets better you will better appreciate what I'm talking about. But listen, you should be able to get some sense of it even now.
This is the goal and the better your system gets the bigger the difference you will hear between recordings, and even between different pressings of the same recording.
A friend listening to Terry Evans Putting it Down one time said he thought one track sounded better than another. We looked and sure enough, that one track had been recorded live to two-track. The others were mixdowns. So even that small a difference can be heard- when your system is good enough to reveal that small a difference.
The usual metaphor is one of looking through a lot of panes of glass. The amp is one pane of glass, speakers another, and it turns out there's a lot of em, everything from the power cords right down to the individual diodes and caps is a pane of glass. Some panes are thick, some thin, some clear, some colored, some flat, some curved and distorted, some cracked, chipped, smoked, etched, clean, dirty, on and on.
The goal with upgrades is pull out the etched glass replace it with clear. Only thing, turns out there is no clear glass. Even if it is, guess what? Its still glass! What you want is no glass, not even air- no such thing.
Right now you got a much cleaner window than you had before. Looking out, some scenes look dramatically better. Others, like your DSOTM, you can't understand why they look worse. Because they were ugly to begin with. You just didn't know it, looking at it through your beer goggles, as it were. Now though when you do find a really good pressing- magic. Gonna sound better than you ever imagined.
That's the way it is. Sometimes your system getting better will make some recordings sound worse. Oh well. Other recordings though.... buried treasure.
