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mystery muffled mids

I have a year-old setup I enjoy very much. B&W D3 805s and Hegel H590. Sound is really great. Imagining fantastic. every second with it is pleasure until I try to play classic rock. Anything by Led Zeppelin sounds like someone has smushed the sound and it lost the mid range, imagining disappears. I tried playing louder but live with too many people around to be able to do that constantly. And it did not improve anything noticably. 
I normally stream from Tidal via Audirvana. Anything by Bill Frisell, for instance, sounds phenomenal. You feel you can grab the instrument from the air. I mention this since he uses similar instruments to Zeppelin. Bowie's stuff sounds awful, as does Queen. I know they should sound better. Kind of Blue is fantastic. Gaucho, Sea Change, Elephunk, Wildfloflowers, Know what I mean? -- all great. To a friend, I said that this means bad recordings sound bad. The friend said that's not it. what do you say? How can I improve the sound? thank you in advance.
petar3
wolfie62
354 posts
 

daveman257 posts04-28-2021 12:39am@gmercer - don't know if you're just trolling, but I will explain why I asked in case you are actually just ignorant, and also for the sake of the OP and others in this thread. The OP has a great amp and speakers, truly excellent stuff in fact. He/she does not need to change those, at least for the sake of quality. Changes in his/her price range would mostly be a lateral move, at best. Tidal, although not as good as Qobuz, should not inherently have "bad mids." So, by process of elimination, there are a few variables left that could be causing the OP's issues: speaker cables, power issues (bad power coming into house/room, limiting/missing power filter or conditioner, etc.), or room interactions (no ICs, so not a consideration). For simplicities sake I asked only about the speaker cables.
STOP ALREADY!!

He's getting great sound from other files and sources. So its NOT the damn cables!!!

Sheesh!! 

I guess for you, you change out cables every time a streamed file sounds bad.....
arafiq's avatar
arafiq
1,702 posts
 
Another easy way to isolate the problem is to get a trial version of Qobuz and play the same LZ songs for comparison. While it's not always the case, I've noticed that certain songs sound better on Qobuz.
petar3 OP
67 posts
 
great idea. thanks.

mofojo
2,311 posts
 
The Stereophile speaker measurements show about a 5db dip throughout a lot of the mid range. That could be some of it. 
Also I like the idea of doing a Quobuz trial. 
speakermaster
738 posts
 
It is the b&w speakers holding you back they are volume and dynamic limited because of crossover and driver coil saturation you need to switch to a different speaker and your system will come alive.
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