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How Many Of Us Are Compensating

No matter how elaborate, expensive or tweaked our systems get we are ultimately at the mercy of the sound quality of the music we purchase. The record producer, recording/mastering/duplicating engineers have set a hard limit on what can be retrieved from the recording media. Fortunately, the best recordings have a very high threshold as repeated equipment/set-up upgrades continue to discover additional levels of high fidelity sound. On the other hand, the average commercial recording can be quite pedestrian as far as sound quality goes. Over compressed, heavily EQ'd, non-existent soundstaging, etc... To what degree have you assembled your system and/or set it up in a way to compensate for the less than stellar sound quality of typical recordings? If you have "compensated", do you think what you did compromised the sound of the better made recordings?

As an example I have adjusted the toe-in of my speakers slightly more outward to avoid some objectionable upper midrange/lower treble hardness present on many modern recordings. Secondly, within the last year I've switched to a preamp with 7-band tone controls to deal with the really bad recordings.

BTW, I don't see compensating as a good or bad thing. I think it's far preferable to limiting what we listening to because it might not sound that good on our expensive toys.
128x128onhwy61
gregm
3,405 posts
 
I do this rarely -- and the end of the chain: my current spkrs have some control features on them.

I've found two difficulties with equalisers: the losses (distortion) and the lack of ultimate precision (the freq bands seem to shift).
I do remember an equaliser by FM acoustics that was impressive ; curiously enough it was connected before the pre -- if I remember correctly.
This worked extremely well for the purpose: i believe the idea was to slightly attenuate unwanted/unnatural freq peaks... could be wrong, though.
rcprince
3,073 posts
 
I am fortunate in that, by and large, classical recordings, which constitute the bulk of my listening, are far better recorded than pop material. As a result, I have not had to make the compensation that you describe. However, I do agree with you that compensation is not a bad thing--music matters more than sound. In the cases where I listen to poorly recorded material, I guess I do most of my compensation in my mind, perhaps turn the volume down and concentrate on the music, not the sound.
eweedhome
227 posts
 
Your comment about making compromises in our systems rather than limiting what we listen to is one that resonates very much with me. A year ago, I had a very analytical sounding system. On a select number of recordings, it sounded terrific. On a lot of recordings that mattered to me a great deal, it sounded painfully shrill (to my ear, anyway...to which many systems sound painfully shrill).

Today, there is nothing left of the system I had a year ago, although there sure were a lot of experiments and difficult choices in between (which others may have read about in some of my posts). I'm now sacrificing some air and detail in the highs, but I have a really nice mid-range to make up for it...I'm using Harbeth M30 speakers now, and all tube gear...and I can say that I'm getting more sensual pleasure now out of my system than any other time in the last roughly 7 years.
muzcal
66 posts
 
I have a second (and even a third) system to deal with bad recordings of good performances. These are set up to deal with specific types of recordings.
chadnliz
3,736 posts
 
I gave up and tolerate bad recordings understanding that you cant fight a ghost...I think my system is pretty nuetral and will shine as bright as its material allows it.
My goals of last year where many more recordings, did that, a Record Cleaing Machine, check....and a dedicated room that looks like I will have by years end (house hunting as we speak).
I used to worry about tubes, wires and various tweaks that were really just tone controls and its silly to me now so I just go with the flow and am a pretty happy man.
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