Does Every Track Sound Great on Your System?

Hi emergingsoul ...

Yes, sadly, the BACCH DSP is indeed daunting, especially for old hands.  My journey includes keeping up with the audio industry, ever mindful of ways to improve my system, on a budget.  I've had the good fortune of cultivating audio friendships to help, often engineers grounded in science with an open mind to refinements in sound not yet aided by measurements.  Other Pinthrift Audiogon discussions address my experiences with the BACCH, plus Marigo micro dots, cabling, room-tuning and other ancillary roads to great sound.  

Best, Pin    

Do we

1: Optimize to bring the very best out of the very best recordings, or

2: Optimize to bring the best out of the broadest range of recordings.

Some will argue that these are not mutually exclusive, my experience over the last 40 years or so is that they are. Choose #1 when you’re system building and you’ll have something that impresses the heck out of your friends when they come over for a listening session, but you might start to run out of tracks to play after a couple hours or they’ll get sick of the insipid tripe that you’re serving up and just leave anyway.

Choose option #2 and you’ll be stuck with the listening group until 2am and they’ll only leave once Jethro Tull’s ‘Benefit’ has been played through for the third time or they run your liquor cabinet dry.

I’ve picked #2 now, after many years of foolishly trying to achieve #1 on a real world budget.

Just my two penny worth, I know many will have a different experience.

Do we

1: Optimize to bring the very best out of the very best recordings, or

2: Optimize to bring the best out of the broadest range of recordings.

i quite literally do both all the time. Easily. 

For the most part most music sounds good on my system depending what amp and speaker combo I’m using. My B&W sub is fully adjustable from an app. I also have a schitt Loki max eq that has a remote. I can adjust the whole system on the fly which I rarely do. 

A few nights ago I put on the Sony SBM (red book) remaster of Born To Run and it sounded like nails on a chalkboard. Then I put on the MFSL (red book) Goodbye Yellow Brick Road and it was somewhat better, but not super crazy better. Then I put on Sprinsteen’s Ghost Of Tom Joad and it was a whole lot better and then I put on MFSL (SACD) Cowboy Junkies/Whites Off Earth Now and all brightness and compression disappeared and the sound stage blossomed laterally, vertically and to the fore and aft. All tracks are not re-created equally on my system.