2. music
  3. 168966-162547

Bad recordings and high end audio

Hello. Have decided that the kids are out of the house and I can dedicate some space and money to my long ignored hobby. What is different now is there are so few audio stores. I firmly believe in listening to products so thus I start this great new chapter of my life. The first 2 stores I went to the people were very patient with me and I listened to a ton of combinations. They asked me did I want to hear anything else and I said  yes, ummm,.. how about Led Zeppelin? I received the same response from both stores which was “all Led Zeppelin recordings are horrible” except for this one version of Led Zeppelin 2…blah blah. So I said what happens if I am at home and i have a desire to play Led Zeppelin or another perceived poor recording? They did not have an answer for me nor did they play Led Zeppelin lol . I ended up ordering a pair of Magnepan 3.7i’s from a different store. 13 weeks until I get them, ouch. I am going to guess that people do listen to poor recordings on great systems because you just want to hear a particular album, right? Or am I missing something? Just looking for a bit of insight. Yes, I know they want it to sound the best so I will buy it but is that the only motivation. Or maybe they hate Led Zeppelin, lol.
daydream816
stuartk
3,011 posts
 
@daydream816:

There are those who will only play music that sounds optimal on their systems. Perhaps those salespeople you encountered were of this persuasion-- preferring to let the tail wag the dog?

I say, if you can't play the music you like and enjoy it, what's the point of the system? 

The best thing is for you to take CDs/vinyl you like and try it on different systems. If you are spontaneously moved, physically and emotionally-- go with that. Forget about whether it meets person X's or person Y's definition of high fidelity. 


blue-magoo's avatar
blue-magoo
144 posts
 
Led Zeppelin sounded best on my 8 track player in my car when I was 20. I recently bought a new vinyl version and it sounds  terrible.
blue-magoo's avatar
blue-magoo
144 posts
 
Led Zeppelin sounded best on my 8 track player in my car when I was 20. I recently bought a new vinyl version and it sounds  terrible.
alexberger
935 posts
 
Hi @millercarbon ,

A great post!
I'm agreed with you 100%.
I lot of records that sounded bad become much more listenable and musical with my system upgrades and tweaks.

Beside stereo records and CDs, I have a number of CDs with 78RPM remastering of old classical musicians. When remastering is done well and remastering engineers didn't cleaned all surface noise (than kills dynamics) this CDs are very good indication of real system musical resolution. In good system the noise is separated from music, you can listen all musical details and dynamics and great interpretation catches your attention. In a bad system the same CD sounds like noisy and muddy record.

Regards,
Alex.
cd318
2,636 posts
 
@blue-magoo,
"Led Zeppelin sounded best on my 8 track player in my car when I was 20. I recently bought a new vinyl version and it sounds terrible."



That’s unfortunate as vinyl is usually spared the bane of our times, compression.
But not always.

You might want to check out the variations between different masterings before shelling out in future to avoid disappointment.

The Steve Hoffman music forum is one, and Super Deluxe Edition is another.
https://superdeluxeedition.com/


As luck would have it the first record I bought was the Beatles Blue album in the mid 1970s.

For decades I wondered why it was that even as my system improved, that some subsequent Beatles LPs didn’t sound as good as that one did.

Then one day I stumbled upon a brilliant site where they hosted short snippets of different masterings and pressings.

Sure enough the 1970s UK Beatles 1967-70 was held up to be amongst the very best.

Sadly that site (Beatlesdrops) was taken down a few years ago, but it can still be found via the Wayback Machine / Internet Archive.

http://web.archive.org/
More to discover