Bad recordings and high end audio

There is an awful lot going on here that people are missing. Allow me to enlighten you.  

Recording: this is the master tape. People are saying a recording sounds this or that when all they know is how their copy of a record sounds on whatever they heard it on. This is the point of the Mike Lavigne story. That tape was right off the master. That Led Zep recording is a monster. Anyone saying otherwise should be clear what they are talking about.   

Bass: Led Zep does indeed have some low bass. It is just that back in the day the focus was recording the music. The music wasn't low frequency driven. The recording techniques were however perfectly capable of capturing what really low bass there was. So it is there, but the way they recorded it is not the way you remember from hearing it blasted over and over again on crap stereo.  

Tone controls: These are antithetical to high end audio. See above. It is tone controls more than anything else that created this false belief in how recordings sound. Tone controls don't work the way people think. They don't correct frequency response or make up for hearing. Every singer, every musical instrument has it's own characteristic fundamental tone. This fundamental tone is accompanied by a whole spectrum of upper harmonics called timbre. Tone controls wreak havoc on this relationship, destroying realism and the uniqueness of each instrument in the process. Tone controls are an abomination.  

Tone controls are however great for people with no real aspirations to achieve high fidelity sound quality. 

I never was able to do much with tone controls. Although when I was a youngster I had a graphic equalizer and then a parametric equalizer I will now admit at 61 years old I had no idea what I was doing with them lol. I understood what you were saying with the master tape story. Thank you again Miller.

This thread has gone on long enough, but I'm nevertheless inclined to make a couple of comments.

First: the notion that good recordings sound great, bad recordings bad, on a fine system. These undefined terms ("great," "bad," etc.) are a problem. A fine system is exciting almost regardless of the content it's reproducing. There's a presence to the presentation, a depth to the bass, a sparkle to the highs, that's a visceral thrill regardless of what's being played. But, that said, a fine system of course reveals the limitations of poor recordings. It doesn't necessarily make them sound "bad"; on the contrary, it often makes them sound better than they deserve to sound, IMO. But: it brings out subtleties and detail and soundstage specificity in good recordings that a lesser system just can't reproduce at all.

The lesson: the quality of the original recording is probably the second most important element in audiophiliac satisfaction (the audio system itself being first). There are many great recordings, especially in the "classical" realm in digital formats (including SACD). Recordings that not only reproduce the timbre of instruments as they actually sound, but that manage to create an illusion of spatial precision that can far exceed that of a live performance. Those recordings, played on superlative systems, is what this "hobby" is all about.

Led Zeppelin? Yeah, even relatively poorly remastered versions are viscerally exciting played loud on a good system (hell, admit it: they're exciting played loud in one's car). That's not to deny that there are better and worse versions; I own a clean copy of the Robert Ludwig pressing of LZII, and it is something. But, hey; they're all Led Zeppelin, and as such, they have their limitations AS MUSIC. There are many, many things to be appreciated in music that a Zep fan has no idea of. Sorry, but the exquisite chamber music moments in Haydn symphonies, or in the inner movements of Mozart symphonies, or, or, or...no Zeppelin track can compare to.

Now, as to Millercarbon's rant against tone controls. No room is perfect. No mastering is exactly like a different one of the same performance (there are even differences between CD and SACD masterings of the same original tape). Tone controls are no panacea, and passing a signal through a potentiometer does, of course, degrade it to some small extent. But tone controls, used judiciously and with skill, can partially compensate for problematic room acoustics, for a speaker's tendency to be overly bright, for a recording's intrinsic flaws, and for many other problems. Why would one not want to have that sort of control over the general acoustic profile of recorded music? Even if you don't know what you're doing, tone controls can be a plus; you can partially tailor the music to your tastes, even if those tastes are contrary to what the recording engineer or original performer wanted.

Protection copy of what master ? in the case of early Zep most likely the mastering for cutting a lacquer with the goal of being able to play on the average turntable of the day and maybe on a Delco AM/FM car radio of the day, low low bar for bass reproduction indeed. Anybody remember a Delco tweeter in the 70’s ? ah hem…. no.
Not really practical to build much of a music collection w legit or bootleg copies of protection tapes, i have two half track machines, ask me how i know. 

…and part of my patronage to a particular artist and recording studio is near yearly sponsorship of the LP version of the album they put out. As a consequence, I am quite familiar w the high rez file, the half track 15 ips master and what comes off the LP ( from a super experienced LA based mastering engineer )…. they are night and day different…

fun