Bad recordings and high end audio

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.

@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/

All new Led Zeppelin remastered LPs made from digital sources.
As result, even regular LZ CDs sound better.
If you want a real analogue Led Zeppelin LP you should buy 70x or 80x reissue.
German reissues for 80x are affordable and good. It is not "audiophile" sound but it is musical sound.
https://www.discogs.com/release/5738759-Led-Zeppelin-Led-Zeppelin-I
https://www.discogs.com/release/772380-Led-Zeppelin-Led-Zeppelin-II
https://www.discogs.com/release/7240450-Led-Zeppelin-Led-Zeppelin-III

Playing Led Zeppelin on a pair of Infinity Kappa 8 speakers I had many years ago was great ( vinyl of course ). The speakers filled my room with the biggest soundstage I have ever had. On the opening bass line of dazed and confused ( Led Zeppelin 1 ), friends would come over to listen to music and I would play that song. They would say to me, "There's something wrong with your right speaker" . My response was, " No, that's John Paul Jones bass amp speaker rattling. It sounded as if the amp was in the room, right in front of me.. Those speakers were also great playing classical music, because they could reproduce the big scale of the orchestra. Eventually, I switched to monitor sized speakers with quicker bass and more transparency which sounded better on other types of music. Playing Zep And classical music was never the same. Now I'm back to tower speakers which is the middle ground between the two. Different systems do different things well. It's a tradeoff. None that I have heard does everything perfectly. Of course, I have not listened to everything out there, and a lot of the newer designs.

alexberger-

Hi @millercarbon ,

A great post!
I’m agreed with you 100%.

Thanks. But I’m at 11k. Could you narrow it down a little? ;)
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.

8 track is the worst format ever. Even so, if you "recently bought a new vinyl version and it sounds terrible" don’t blame the recording. Don’t blame the vinyl. Blame the recent version pressing.

Vinyl records are incredibly individual items. No two ever exactly the same. Even among the first original pressing run there are better and worse examples. There even is a whole business devoted to finding the very best sounding copies and selling them at seemingly insanely jacked up prices. They would never be able to do this if the records didn’t sound equally insanely good. So there is that much difference copy to copy.

But you didn’t buy one of those original vintage pressings. You bought a "recent version". Nobody even knows what that means! It could be you got something remastered. More likely you got one of the crap junk pressings knocked off to fill the growing demand of newbies seeking vinyl. Being new they think they are all the same, because you know CD are all the same. Nothing could be further from the truth.

So it is entirely possible you got something where they grabbed whatever generation worn out tape they could find cheap, knocked off a few plates and pressed some dreck. Don’t feel bad, I bought one like this myself one time years ago. Entirely possible what you got really does sound worse than 8 track.