I believe a bad recording is a bad recording, garbage in garbage out.
What recordings do you use when you are making changes (improvements) to your system? Do you use only the best recordings or do you use average recordings? The really exceptional recordings sound good on any system and when we compare the best recordings to average recordings it can be disappointing.
I believe everyone has experienced what you have mentioned here.
If we make an improvement and a group of recordings sound worse, did we really make an improvement?
I know a speaker manufacturer that would only use vinyl when designing his speakers. He said it was because vinyl sounded better. You can imagine how bad CDs sounded on those speakers. He finally realized he had to use both formats.
The same is true for evaluating our systems. We need to use a wide variety of recordings otherwise our music collection will shrink to a tiny handful of recordings.
What recordings do you use when you are making changes (improvements) to your system? Do you use only the best recordings or do you use average recordings? The really exceptional recordings sound good on any system and when we compare the best recordings to average recordings it can be disappointing.
I believe everyone has experienced what you have mentioned here.
If we make an improvement and a group of recordings sound worse, did we really make an improvement?
I know a speaker manufacturer that would only use vinyl when designing his speakers. He said it was because vinyl sounded better. You can imagine how bad CDs sounded on those speakers. He finally realized he had to use both formats.
The same is true for evaluating our systems. We need to use a wide variety of recordings otherwise our music collection will shrink to a tiny handful of recordings.