High Performance Audio - The End?


Steve Guttenberg recently posted on his audiophiliac channel what might be an iconoclastic video.

Steve attempts to crystallise the somewhat nebulous feeling that climbing the ladder to the high-end might be a counter productive endeavour. 

This will be seen in many high- end quarters as heretical talk, possibly even blasphemous.
Steve might even risk bring excommunicated. However, there can be no denying that the vast quantity of popular music that we listen to is not particularly well recorded.

Steve's point, and it's one I've seen mentioned many times previously at shows and demos, is that better more revealing systems will often only serve to make most recordings sound worse. 

There is no doubt that this does happen, but the exact point will depend upon the listeners preference. Let's say for example that it might happen a lot earlier for fans of punk, rap, techno and pop.

Does this call into question almost everything we are trying to ultimately attain?

Could this be audio's equivalent of Martin Luther's 1517 posting of The Ninety-Five theses at Wittenberg?

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Can your Audio System be too Transparent?

Steve Guttenberg 19.08.20

https://youtu.be/6-V5Z6vHEbA

cd318
 Steve the Woody Allen DUDE knows next to nothing about real high end audio.
Maybe, just maybe, Magnepans, Quads and the like for all their high reputation, are not well balanced, but tweaked to achieve a certain end.

Any speakers will sound marvellous in a rightfully treated acoustical room and sound atrocious otherwise.... Be it  my Tannoy  dual gold or the magnepan... I know these 2 in bad acoustical room....This is fact...

Then chose what you want, magnepan are different from Tannoy  dual gold, but the 2 are marvellous in a controlled and treated room....Especially if the three embeddings are controlled and not only the acoustical one which is the most impactful tough...

:)
And, by corollary, a system which does sound good with good and bad recordings is similarly not balanced properly.