Do you trust your system?
I was constantly upgrading gear, demoing songs, reading reviews, trying to find out why I had the feeling that the song I was playing shouldn’t sound the way it does. Something off or lacking, I luckily found a set of equipment and a room setup that if a song is off, it’s likely recorded that way. I trust my system to do a decent job. I wonder do others get to a point where they are more critical of mastering techniques than something wrong with their equipment? Admittedly, it’s easier to say how a piece of gear or cable made some significant difference, but in what exactly since the music sources are so wildly manipulated by engineers?
50/50… for me. Other times the recording is just more obviously bad. |
@steakster - As somebody who has worked in the record business for a number of years, one thing I can tell you is that with very few exceptions, the last people who care about how anything sounds are record label executives! That being said, there are a lot of recordings, vinyl and digital, that sound OK on the music systems or earbuds that most people listen to music on; they are not making these records to sound great on audiophile gear; they're making them to sound good on most any generic music gear, and if it also sounds good on top quality gear, that's just a bonus... . |
Over the last twenty years of my fifty year audiophile career I have gone out of my way to listen to live acoustic music… a single piano, small unamplified jazz ensemble, and I have had season tickets to a great symphony orchestra in a good acoustic space for over ten years. This experience has redirected the direction of my purchase and profoundly changed the character of my system. It used to be one music type would benefit from my system improvements… now all do with each upgrade. Unless you listen only to, say, Rock… then buy JBL… and the kind of electronics used in mastering. Otherwise, correctly correlating your system to reproduce real acoustic music is what you want to do… as it will generally improve rock, and other all amplified stuff. I can’t begin to tell you how rewarding this has been. My system went from overly detail forward ( same amount of detail, only not stuck in your face) to incredibly musical. It changed the emphasis to the music from putting the mastering techniques and microphones used in your face. I now listen to music about three hours a day now and have to be torn away from it. As opposed to one hour.
You can see my system under my userID. True high end companies like Audio Research and Sonus Fabre have dedicated themselves to reproduce music… naturally and wholisticly as opposed to just adding forward detail and slam just to sound impressive. They have taken music reproduction to truly amazing levels. |
