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Quality of recording while evaluating speakers

Melody Gardot, Diana Krall, and others.

The above recordings are done so well they sound absolutely Great in most systems. And then there are recordings that are not as open and have trouble filling the room enjoyably and yet the melodies are very good and it's unfortunate they didn't do a better good job in the recording studio.

So how do you evaluate a speaker other than to be familiar with a recording on how it sounds in your system versus how it sounds in another system.  Basically we are at the mercy of Recording quality when we listen to our systems.

Even more painful is home theater streaming when the music is wonderful but the quality sucks and once in a while it sounds really good but this can be rare which is sad.

So speaker manufacturers have to deal with these issues and we put up with poor recordings and how does this factor into your decisions when evaluating new speakers?

So we end up buying really nice speakers knowing that so much of what we will eventually listen to Will not have been recorded very well making things a bit frustrating at times.  There's only so much that can be done to make things sound better given these limitations. So how does one cope with all this?

 

emergingsoul
bdp24's avatar
bdp24
9,697 posts
 

 

J Gordon Holt (founder of Stereophile) recommended his readers do as he did: make your own recordings. I did so, recording my son’s speaking voice (a brutal test of loudspeaker coloration), my drumset, and my band playing live in a club. A pair of small capsule omni mics plugged directly into a Revox A77 Mk.3. That recording captured an inebriated patron bellowing out "How’s your boogaloo? Git it on RIGHT now!" Priceless.

Gordon also proclaimed this timeless truth about recordings: "Often the better the performance, the worse the sound quality. And visa-versa." An unfortunate truth. Lots of my favorite music suffers from mediocre or worse sound quality. I’d much rather listen to, say, Hank Williams, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Walter, and Big Joe Turner than I would to, for instance, Steely Dan and Joni Mitchell. But that’s just me.

Fortunately, lots of Baroque-era Classical and Bluegrass recordings feature excellent sound quality. My number one priority in reproduced sound quality is how real singing voices sound. Get that right, and you're at least halfway there. 

 

heretobuy
127 posts
 

The last time I auditioned speakers two particular albums I used tracks from were “Sam Cooke Sings Hits of the 50s” and “Ring a Ding Ding” by Frank Sinatra, and one thing the speakers brought out is how much better recorded the former was than the latter.

noromance's avatar
noromance
9,705 posts
 

Move on from Diana Krall & Co. and you'll be fine.

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The Universe is more complex than that!

If only God worked on that final seventh day think of all the problems this would have solved.

audioman58's avatar
audioman58
4,082 posts
 

I brand a assortment  of about 10  different variations of music types and male ,female voices.to judge a speaker and electronics ,cables.

yoyoyaya's avatar
yoyoyaya
703 posts
 

Another emergingsoul thread that's a series of statements purporting to be a question.

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