High End and Classical Music

My wife and I listen to classical of all periods, Heavy Metal, Middle Eastern (My wife also belly dances)and Art Techno. I agree with the general drift of the comments above. You're lucky if your favorite music is Baroque and early music since it is less costly to approach realism with an audiophile system. I listen to a lot of early music but my wife and my greatest love is late romantic music(which is psychologically fairly close to a fair amount of Metal). We've been to over 1000 professional performances and trying to reproduce the Mahler 8th,Turandot or Bruckner in your living room when you know what it sounds like live is a VERY expensive proposition. But a system that can is also jaw dropping on Metallica, Judas Priest etc. My one suggestion if you like your system is to spend some money on room treatment. Some ASC tube traps will really bring out the nuances of Baroque intonation that are probably being obscured by your listening room interactions.

I grew up listening to what is now referred to as "classic rock" courtesy of my Father and ended up getting into Punk during the first wave in 77. This turned into hardcore and then metal with all of its variations, etc... Getting back into "hi-end" audio has DRASTICALLY opened up my musical horizons and i'm quite glad of it. I am now a supporting member of a local classical station that sounds AMAZINGLY good for radio broadcasts and have purchased appr. 200 classical CD's and albums within the last year or so. While the purchase of a few blues based discs and quite a few female vocalists have been worked in, i have yet to find any modern jazz that strikes my fancy. One thing that i have noticed is that many of the "hi-fi" type recordings that are not classical based do sound good in terms of quality, but completely lack "soul" or "feeling" to the music. It's as if they are "sterile" by nature. On the other hand, classical only gets better and better with better recordings. Anyone else notice this too ? Sean >

To give you also my 5 cents worth: Mes and Rcprince have said it all. Enjoy!

Thanks a lot for all reactions! Very valuable!

Xyzdim - I'm in your flock. Depending on the time and mood, I enjoy Ben Webster or Albert Collins, but generally I listen to rock / pop in all it's sub-genres. There's been a lot of articles lately about "guilty pleasures" - music that you know you "shouldn't enjoy" but do. At nine o'clock at night after a 12 hour workday, I find that I enjoy a lot of this guilty pleasure music and, to boot, don't feel particularly guilty about it :-)