In Classical music the effect of SQ on appreciation

SQ is huge. I never was able to enjoy classical much at all until my system got there. In the last year between Tekton, Townshend, and Soundsmith, now all of a sudden classical is compelling. Then in terms of records, put on a White Hot Stamper, Tchaikovsky 1812, holy cow now you're talking! 

Completely agree with Newbee!

How much does it affect my “judgment” of the music? Not that much. Good sonics is always a great thing, but my system and I would say, the vast majority of systems owned by Audiogon members, even the systems that I would never put together myself, don’t do so much damage to the sound on the vast majority of recordings that the musical content would not rise above the damage. In fact, I would say that, for me, a good metric of sorts is that the better the music is the more tolerant I am of less than perfect sonics and the worse the music the more that I need ear candy from the sonics to bother listening.  All within (audiophillic) reason.

Consider a fantastic performance by a great orchestra in a crappy hall. One’s ears (can) adjust to the available sonics and the focus (can) become the musical content; sonic limitations and all. It’s a mind set of sorts. Obviously, this is not always the same set of priorities held by every listener, or to the same degree, and is not a matter of judgment. I’m always a little baffled by just how quick some are to deem a recording “unlistenable”.

Start out with the focus truly on the music and I think a lot of the angst goes away.

For the most part, I want as high a quality of recording as possible.

But, the fact remains that there are many artists that have unique interpretations that, due to the lousy mike placement/recording tech, have low quality recordings. In these cases, I can make allowances for poor audio quality as their interpretations/technique are so good.

B

I got deeply involved in high end audio in 1979. I expanded my musical interest from rock to include classical in the early 80’s. I found that the quality of the recording typically was more important than the conductor / orchestra in most cases… there were some conductors I simply did not like, for instance Michael Tilson Thomas. Switch forward to 2010…I got season tickets to the symphony, and have attended religiously until the pandemic, I found live… really good fidelity performances make or break it. So, in general, for me sound quality trumps performance… much of the time. Poor performances, are poor and just don’t rate. Symphonic music is hard to produce on a system… but well done, is really compelling to me. 

It matters quite a bit but I'm not averse to historical recordings.  I recently bought a HD with all of Pristine Audio's offerings on it and it's fascinating to explore.  In general these artists hailed from a time when the origins of the music weren't so remote and so there is much to be appreciated.  It helps that Pristine has made most of these antique recordings very listenable