Excellent post! I agree entirely.
Bad recordings and high end audio
Hello. Have decided that the kids are out of the house and I can dedicate some space and money to my long ignored hobby. What is different now is there are so few audio stores. I firmly believe in listening to products so thus I start this great new chapter of my life. The first 2 stores I went to the people were very patient with me and I listened to a ton of combinations. They asked me did I want to hear anything else and I said yes, ummm,.. how about Led Zeppelin? I received the same response from both stores which was “all Led Zeppelin recordings are horrible” except for this one version of Led Zeppelin 2…blah blah. So I said what happens if I am at home and i have a desire to play Led Zeppelin or another perceived poor recording? They did not have an answer for me nor did they play Led Zeppelin lol . I ended up ordering a pair of Magnepan 3.7i’s from a different store. 13 weeks until I get them, ouch. I am going to guess that people do listen to poor recordings on great systems because you just want to hear a particular album, right? Or am I missing something? Just looking for a bit of insight. Yes, I know they want it to sound the best so I will buy it but is that the only motivation. Or maybe they hate Led Zeppelin, lol.
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@daydream816: There are those who will only play music that sounds optimal on their systems. Perhaps those salespeople you encountered were of this persuasion-- preferring to let the tail wag the dog? I say, if you can't play the music you like and enjoy it, what's the point of the system? The best thing is for you to take CDs/vinyl you like and try it on different systems. If you are spontaneously moved, physically and emotionally-- go with that. Forget about whether it meets person X's or person Y's definition of high fidelity. |
Hi @millercarbon , A great post! I'm agreed with you 100%. I lot of records that sounded bad become much more listenable and musical with my system upgrades and tweaks. Beside stereo records and CDs, I have a number of CDs with 78RPM remastering of old classical musicians. When remastering is done well and remastering engineers didn't cleaned all surface noise (than kills dynamics) this CDs are very good indication of real system musical resolution. In good system the noise is separated from music, you can listen all musical details and dynamics and great interpretation catches your attention. In a bad system the same CD sounds like noisy and muddy record. Regards, Alex. |
@blue-magoo, "Led Zeppelin sounded best on my 8 track player in my car when I was 20. I recently bought a new vinyl version and it sounds terrible." That’s unfortunate as vinyl is usually spared the bane of our times, compression. But not always. You might want to check out the variations between different masterings before shelling out in future to avoid disappointment. The Steve Hoffman music forum is one, and Super Deluxe Edition is another. https://superdeluxeedition.com/ As luck would have it the first record I bought was the Beatles Blue album in the mid 1970s. For decades I wondered why it was that even as my system improved, that some subsequent Beatles LPs didn’t sound as good as that one did. Then one day I stumbled upon a brilliant site where they hosted short snippets of different masterings and pressings. Sure enough the 1970s UK Beatles 1967-70 was held up to be amongst the very best. Sadly that site (Beatlesdrops) was taken down a few years ago, but it can still be found via the Wayback Machine / Internet Archive. http://web.archive.org/ |
All new Led Zeppelin remastered LPs made from digital sources. As result, even regular LZ CDs sound better. If you want a real analogue Led Zeppelin LP you should buy 70x or 80x reissue. German reissues for 80x are affordable and good. It is not "audiophile" sound but it is musical sound. https://www.discogs.com/release/5738759-Led-Zeppelin-Led-Zeppelin-I https://www.discogs.com/release/772380-Led-Zeppelin-Led-Zeppelin-II https://www.discogs.com/release/7240450-Led-Zeppelin-Led-Zeppelin-III |
Playing Led Zeppelin on a pair of Infinity Kappa 8 speakers I had many years ago was great ( vinyl of course ). The speakers filled my room with the biggest soundstage I have ever had. On the opening bass line of dazed and confused ( Led Zeppelin 1 ), friends would come over to listen to music and I would play that song. They would say to me, "There's something wrong with your right speaker" . My response was, " No, that's John Paul Jones bass amp speaker rattling. It sounded as if the amp was in the room, right in front of me.. Those speakers were also great playing classical music, because they could reproduce the big scale of the orchestra. Eventually, I switched to monitor sized speakers with quicker bass and more transparency which sounded better on other types of music. Playing Zep And classical music was never the same. Now I'm back to tower speakers which is the middle ground between the two. Different systems do different things well. It's a tradeoff. None that I have heard does everything perfectly. Of course, I have not listened to everything out there, and a lot of the newer designs. |
alexberger- Hi @millercarbon ,Thanks. But I’m at 11k. Could you narrow it down a little? ;) blue-magoo- Led Zeppelin sounded best on my 8 track player in my car when I was 20. I recently bought a new vinyl version and it sounds terrible.8 track is the worst format ever. Even so, if you "recently bought a new vinyl version and it sounds terrible" don’t blame the recording. Don’t blame the vinyl. Blame the recent version pressing. Vinyl records are incredibly individual items. No two ever exactly the same. Even among the first original pressing run there are better and worse examples. There even is a whole business devoted to finding the very best sounding copies and selling them at seemingly insanely jacked up prices. They would never be able to do this if the records didn’t sound equally insanely good. So there is that much difference copy to copy. But you didn’t buy one of those original vintage pressings. You bought a "recent version". Nobody even knows what that means! It could be you got something remastered. More likely you got one of the crap junk pressings knocked off to fill the growing demand of newbies seeking vinyl. Being new they think they are all the same, because you know CD are all the same. Nothing could be further from the truth. So it is entirely possible you got something where they grabbed whatever generation worn out tape they could find cheap, knocked off a few plates and pressed some dreck. Don’t feel bad, I bought one like this myself one time years ago. Entirely possible what you got really does sound worse than 8 track. |
Update and Thank you everyone!!! |
I am a "music first" audiophile. The music comes before the gear. I listen to plenty of mediocre recordings, because the music is so good. But, lucky for me, a lot of my musical tastes seem to coincide with relatively good recordings. Also, jut because the music comes first for me, does not mean there are times every so often, that I can't enjoy just listening to a bunch of "audiophile approved" recordings, and just listen to the gear. The 2 modes of listening do not have to be mutually exclusive. |
I believe I’m becoming cured of my audiophile tendencies. Recently I’ve been enjoying a couple of very rough Elvis demos from the Vic Anesini remasters. It is a real shame he didn’t cut them for real, and a few years ago I would have dismissed them out of hand for the poor sonics. Not now.
https://youtu.be/w2qln6O0GKk
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No reason to be ’cured’, remission is good enough for me. The vast majority of my listening is done with very little regard to the gear, other than it is bringing me the music I love. But every so often, it is still loads of fun to do nothing but tweak my system, or make a change, and just pay attention to how good it sounds. |