"What I find ironic is that much of the music used to ascertain the improvements in equipment was recorded fifty years ago. The touchstone recordings by RCA, Mercury, Columbia, Decca and Blue Note were made with equipment that was being retired as obsolete when Brian Jones was the guitar player with the Rolling Stones. We're using newer and newer equipment to find out that old recordings made with "antique" equipment actually sounds really good. Ironic?"
Recording studio gear and playback gear, are 2 completely different applications. They don't do the same thing. Whatever studio gear that was used to capture the event is a fixed variable. Weather the recording is good, bad, old, new) is all you have to work with. The job of an audio system is to play the recording back in the most transparent way possible. It doesn't matter if the recording is old or new, you'll still benefit from modern equipment. For example, consider high frequencies. If you are using low quality playback gear, cymbals don't always sound like cymbals. They can sound like a piece of metal being dropped on a cement floor. As you upgrade your audio system, the more real they sound. You're trying to get the proper timbre of a cymbal and not something else. So, when you are playing an old recording, cymbals still need to sound like cymbals. They still have the potential to sound like metal being dropped, just like in a modern recording. So the better the playback system, the better the sound quality. Even if the recording is old.
Recording studio gear and playback gear, are 2 completely different applications. They don't do the same thing. Whatever studio gear that was used to capture the event is a fixed variable. Weather the recording is good, bad, old, new) is all you have to work with. The job of an audio system is to play the recording back in the most transparent way possible. It doesn't matter if the recording is old or new, you'll still benefit from modern equipment. For example, consider high frequencies. If you are using low quality playback gear, cymbals don't always sound like cymbals. They can sound like a piece of metal being dropped on a cement floor. As you upgrade your audio system, the more real they sound. You're trying to get the proper timbre of a cymbal and not something else. So, when you are playing an old recording, cymbals still need to sound like cymbals. They still have the potential to sound like metal being dropped, just like in a modern recording. So the better the playback system, the better the sound quality. Even if the recording is old.
