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Is it me or new audio gear is too perfect and give ear fatigue?

Since getting back into the hobby during covid I’ve really enjoyed listening to music vs. bluetooth low quality speakers.  Since listening to my Nautilus 803 speakers with old Yamaha Amps (MX1, MX1000) they’ve been sweet sounding and warm.

A lot of people have said the new equipment is near perfect chasing specs, sounding bright and causing ear fatigue.

Curious if people feel the same?

webking185
soma70
153 posts
 

....and clean the speaker cable contacts! 

clearthinker's avatar
clearthinker
1,582 posts
 

"in my experience, harsh or bright systems are the result of:

1. noisy power supply

2. noisy networks (for digital)"

? Cut out digital and half your problems.

 

atmasphere's avatar
atmasphere
12,110 posts
 

Again, not trying to offend anyone on new gear, I just feel the specs are near perfect in the tonality.

@webking185 

They aren't. Please reread my initial posts on this thread.

None of all amplifier designs made prior to about 1995 had enough gain bandwidth product to avoid being bright if those amps used feedback, and most of them did. This is simply because the semiconductors needed to get the required gain bandwidth product didn't exist.

During that period we made zero feedback tube amps to get around that problem of listener fatigue because doing so allowed us to control the higher ordered harmonics in such a way that they were inaudible and so our amps were not bright and harsh. We tried using feedback of course but ran into that pesky gain bandwidth product problem which cannot be overcome by any tube design.

I can point you to some well written papers on the topic if you are interested, but its helpful to have some technical understanding to really appreciate what they are saying.

 

secretguy
1,812 posts
 

I have 3 systems, all of which couldn’t be more different from the others. Yet I’ve never experienced fatigue.

p05129
528 posts
 

Talk about noise, vinyl has more noise than digital, and with every vinyl play, it gets worse. I want it dead quiet, no pops, no scratchiness that vinyl produces. I got rid of all my vinyl for these and other reasons.

If digital is producing noise, then you either have a bad network or cheap digital equipment.

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