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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.
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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.
mrtennis
3,295 posts
 
i believe in the law of the golden mean, namely, leveling life's experiences whenever possible to an average of pleasantness.

this means, as far as audio is concerned, that i want to achieve plesantness to the sound of all of my recordings, even if it means missing "greatness".

i select cables and other accessories to achive this objective.
jaybo
4,478 posts
 
the recordings are what they are. the tunes and performances are always the real draw. if the goal is to amass a huge collection of music and enjoy it all, we've really gotta make 'audiophile concerns' less important.
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shadorne
7,477 posts
 
I don't compensate.

I find big budget movies are generally very reliable.

I find music is all over the map (depending on mix/master).

Correcting is too much work and I listen to so much music...I can't imagine playing each track once...then making EQ adjustments and then playing it again. I just have to live with it. I suppose this may be a possibility one day with a hard drive system and pro tools.....much like photo software you could store the original raw data and also an "enhanced" version...may be we should patent the idea and call iSound or Soundshop (as opposed to iPhoto or Photoshop)

Note that hypercompressed music is beyond repair there is nothing one can do when the source data has been clipped, compressed and squashed into "noise with a beat."
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