better gear, worse recordings

It goes both ways. We have discussed before how CDs that area mixed to sound good on portable units and boom boxes, sound worse as the gear gets better.

The opposite is true. Some of my favorite older CDs today are ones that I thought sounded thin and lifeless, years back in my late 20s, when all I had was a receiver, budget CD player and turntable, and bookshelf speakers.

Now today, the old CDs I liked back then, sound bloated with the echo added to make them sound fuller, not to mention the resulting electronic haze that causes listener fatigue.

What bothers me today, is a lot of recording reviewers are evidentially not audiophiles.

For classical music those "DG Originals" reissues of analog recordings sound worse IMHO than the earlier CD reissues. However, every review I have ever read sais the new remixes are a big big improvement over the older CDs. For example: if it is a concerto recording they are boosting the solo instrument and the violins that play the main melody, so they are very audible. Sounds good in the car, but the rest of the orchestra sounds like they are in another room when played at home. The orchestra balance is wiped out.

We should lobby for record reviewers to disclose what their system is composed of.

Hmmmmm... So we think a system should play back exactly what is on the recording. Tell me; how do we know when we have reached that point?? Unless we were present at the recording session, and we have a perfect memory of what we heard at that session, there is no way for us to tell what we are hearing now is exactly what was recorded then.

There have been cases where instruments were a little out of tune at recording sessions. If we choose one of these recordings as our reference, and we tweek our systems so it now sounds in tune, because we assume it was in tune then, we are in trouble.

I guess I did a poor job making my comments. I agree, we cannot re-tune instruments on a recording. I am not assuming that we know some (not all) instruments are out of tune. I am saying this recording is being used as our reference and we don't know some instruments are out of tune. If an orchestra is fine except the string basses are out of tune, it will just drive us nuts and we won't know why. The problem is hidden among the other instruments. Not everyone has good hearing for pitch; most of us don't, unless we are professional musicians, and then the off pitch is masked. The sound is not going to sound quite right, and we will try to tweek the system to make it sound better, not perfect. We'll never get there because of a few out of tune instruments.

I think some have asked what we use as a reference. I wonder how much time we all spend tweeking this and that, and the problem is not our systems, but the source material, whether some things out of tune, or just bright, dull, or poorly mixed. Garbage in, garbage out.

Excellent point Samg. The goal is a music system, not a sound system.