Does it have to sound good for you to like it?

Post results, much like a cable post. Will you or won’t you listen, can you or can’t you hear…lol

Cheers 

It’s interesting to note that some value the music and some value their system more.

It’s interesting to note who values the music and who values their system more.

Agreed! What’s more interesting to me is that the ones who value music more tend to make generalizing statements such as, "It’s all about the music" as if this was one of the 10 Commandments rather than personal preference. So many people call this hobby "subjective" and then make universal, objective claims about its overall purpose. Kinda wild.

It is the rhetorical force of those objective claims that makes people feel guilty or shy to admit that the sound quality matters to them, and maybe more than the music. There's a worry that someone will come back with a playground taunt in the form of, "Oh, so you don't even care about the music? That's sad."

I’m a big fan of historical recordings, both jazz and classical, so sound quality has always been a secondary consideration for me. That said, even I have my limits, which stop somewhere well short of Edison cylinders. ;-) But my musical life would be considerably poorer if I’d never heard Furtwangler’s 1949 Brahms 4th from Wiesbaden, or Walter Gieseking and Guido Cantelli in one of the greatest Mozart concerto performances I’ve ever heard. Ditto with some marvelous Charlie Parker broadcasts, Lester Young, Artie Shaw, etc. I’d certainly rather listen to a tinny Stan Hasselgard aircheck than the clumsy playing on "Jazz at the Pawnshop". I suppose a lot depends on your musical tastes, and I don’t necessarily blame people who have a low tolerance for poor recordings. And I suppose that, in some respects, my system choices are somewhat geared toward making historical recordings sound tolerable. For me the performance comes first. Good sound is a bonus, and can be enjoyable in its own right.

@snilf 

Please take the statements I made one by one and point out the ignorance of each.

"But then, there's this (from rok2kid above): "Classical is unique in that it's the same music played over and over by different ensembles.  You should not have to put up with bad recordings because there is always a better one available.  Fortunately, the recording technology seems to have peaked at the same time as the great conductors and orchestras." This is just ignorant. All three of those sentences show a failure to understand anything about so-called "classical" music."

Thanks